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Shoot the Piano Player

Shoot the Piano Player (1962)

July. 23,1962
|
7.4
|
NR
| Drama Thriller Crime

Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.

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Stometer
1962/07/23

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

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Deanna
1962/07/24

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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Juana
1962/07/25

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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Staci Frederick
1962/07/26

Blistering performances.

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Christopher Culver
1962/07/27

Francois Truffaut's second feature, TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE ("Shoot the Piano Player") is ostensibly an adaptation of a gritty noir crime novel by David Goodis. As the film opens, we see Chico (Albert Rémy) running through the dark streets of Paris from an unseen assailant. Chico enters a bar where his brother Charlie (Charles Aznavour) works playing piano in the evenings to dancing patrons. The one brother begs the other for help, "I've got to elude two criminals I scammed out of money," says Chico. Charlie is reluctant to get involved in his brother's sordid affairs, but he ends up doing that anyway, along with the bar's waitress Lena (Marie Dubois). As romance blossoms between Charlie and Lena, we flash back to an earlier time in his life when he was an aspiring concert pianist, a career path that was ultimately abandoned after tragic circumstances.Truffaut had made a big splash with his debut LES 400 COUPS ("The 400 Blows") a year earlier in 1959, which inaugurated the French New Wave with its innovations and flaunting of rules that defied the staid French filmmaking tradition of the preceding years. Still, LES 400 COUPS doesn't seem particularly disruptive to audiences today. It is with TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE that we find truly zany and fearless storytelling. The jump cuts, voiceovers, sexual frankness, and critique of the new consumerist society make it readily comparable to the early work of Truffaut's friend Jean-Luc Godard, as does the use of a crime novel as a mere plot skeleton around which the filmmaker could introduce his own concerns.In fact, the wildly swinging tone of the film is jarring. One minute it's jovial: when Charlie and Lena are kidnapped by the two men pursuing Chico, instead of a realistically threatening scene the four of them crack jokes like old pals. And yet at other points the film is full of true pathos: death, failed relationships, shattered dreams.Charles Aznavour was a legendary French crooner. (In fact, he still is, still giving concerts as I write this as he approaches a hundred.) Singers don't always make good actors, but here Aznavour is brilliant. Diverging from the source material, Truffaut choose to make Charlie introverted and full of self-doubt, and Aznavour's expressions and gestures perfectly capture this sympathetic character.While my own tastes in the French New Wave run to Godard more than Truffaut, I enjoyed this film. A lot of the humour is still effective today. With the intertwined plots of fleeing from criminals, budding romance, and flashback to days of yore, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER seems to have a lot more than its merely 81-minute running time.

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seymourblack-1
1962/07/28

"Shoot The Piano Player" is an enormously entertaining movie that utilises a variety of different styles, moods and sudden changes of pace to tell the story of a piano player whose attempts to achieve contentment in obscurity are thwarted by the actions of his criminal brother. This was Francois Truffaut's second movie and at the time of its making, he was clearly on a creative high, as what's seen on screen looks like the delirious outpourings of a mind that was totally passionate about filmmaking and also brimming over with ideas.Truffaut's love of movies started at an early age and provided him with some respite from his very troubled childhood. As a young man he, like most of the well known New Wave directors, became a contributor to the film journal "Cahiers du Cinema" and together, they advocated a more informal approach to filmmaking with greater use being made of footage that was shot outside of the studios. The type of films that had captivated the young Truffaut were predominantly American B-movies and it was because of his great respect and affection for them that he made "Shoot The Piano Player".Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour) is a pianist in a small but lively Parisian bar who finds that his regular routine is thrown into chaos when his older brother Chico (Albert Remy) seeks his help because he's being pursued by a couple of gangsters. It transpires that Chico and another brother, Richard (Jean-Jacques Aslanian), had worked together with Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger) on a heist but had double crossed them when they took off with most of the loot.Charlie leads a quiet life looking after his youngest brother Fido (Richard Kanayan) and is helped in this by his good natured neighbour Clarisse (Michelle Mercier) who's a prostitute and also occasionally, his mistress. Helping Chico leads to trouble for Charlie when he and his girlfriend Lena (Marie Dubois) get kidnapped at gunpoint by Momo and Ernest, but fortunately, they manage to escape when Ernest's bad driving leads to him being stopped by the police.Lena is a waitress at the bar where Charlie works and tells him that she knows about his past. Charlie had been a very successful concert pianist (known by his real name, Edouard Saroyan) but had given up his career after his wife Therese (Nicole Berger) had committed suicide. Tragically, she had taken her own life because she'd confessed to Charlie that the first big break in his career had come as a result of her agreeing to sleep with his impresario. Charlie's inability to come to terms with what she'd done had been more than she could bear.After Charlie kills his boss in self-defence, trouble continues to follow him until events ultimately reach a climax during a shoot-out in a countryside location.Charlie is a tragic and sensitive character who's a victim of fate. Not only had his career, which had elevated him to a new level of success, ended suddenly with the result that he'd ended up back in the type of environment that he'd originally emerged from, but also his love affairs with Therese and Lena both ended in tragedy and heartbreak.There's a great deal that's melancholic and poignant about Charlie's story but the way in which it's told is often comical, irreverent and disconcerting because of the use of unorthodox styles of editing and pacing. This juxtaposition of humour and pathos could be regarded as a reflection of the normal balance of life which often leads to humorous things happening at times of great sadness or it could simply be what happens when someone who's so intoxicated by the possibilities of his art form gives his creativity free rein.The quality of the acting in this movie is consistently good but Charles Aznavour's performance is positively exceptional. His facial expressions and body language are perfect and convey Charlie's vulnerability and innate sadness so well that it would be hard to imagine anyone else being able to improve on what he achieved in this role.

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bts1984
1962/07/29

Truffaut introduced himself with 'The 400 Blows', a film of very good taste. His 2nd effort, 'Tirez sur le pianiste', isn't a let down, quite the contrary, it's a generally quite enjoyable film that tells the story of a piano player in trouble.This interesting french film is a clever combination of comedy, drama, crime, thriller and suspense. It approaches the policial genre, as well as the atmosphere sometimes approaches darkness, even the noir genre. Nevertheless, the levels of action are very modest. But I'm not the hungry for action type, so that fact doesn't bother me. Another thing is that there isn't one truly tense scene, even in the scenes which are supposed to be tense. Even the bad guys are not intrinsically evil enough to be much of a problem and therefore they're not really scary or intimidating.It wouldn't be far from the truth claiming that another achievement is how this displays humor in less than good circumstances. For example, there is a scene when Charlie and Léna are being kidnapped by the bad guys and Charlie says a funny line about women: «If you've seen one, you've seen them all» - and they all erupt into laughter. Even I laugh out loud with that line, even more so considering it is so true. The piano music by the talented musician Georges Delerue is relaxing to hear, it's like poetry for the soul. Cinematography is great and obeys to the principles of liberty so characteristic of Monsieur Truffaut.Frankly speaking, I think all of the actors are great in this. And I mean all. Charles Aznavour, a talented singer, is just as interesting as an actor, as his performance proves. Albert Rémy is, again, great. Richard Kanayan has a bigger role here as Fido Saroyan but still far from being a big role. Nevertheless, he is hilarious. That kid had charisma and talent. His big, floppy hair; his weird, raspy voice; his dance-walk style; his lips's movement; the fact that the actor was quirky and hyperactive... all of that made him unique and hilarious.The bad guys are funny and pretty cool for bad guys and they're well played by the actors: Claude Mansard as Momo and Daniel Boulanger as Ernest. As for the beautiful women (Marie Dubois as Léna and Michèle Mercier as Clarisse), I also like the way they play their roles.All in all, great movie. Only its ending is somewhat rushed and ambiguous, although satisfying aside the fact that the girl gets shot.Title in Portugal: 'Disparem sobre o pianista'.

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Michael Neumann
1962/07/30

One of the more notable hallmarks of French New Wave filmmakers was their willingness to try anything once, allowing for a sometimes exhilarating freedom of expression, which even in its search for new forms never failed to proclaim its affection for the old. François Truffaut's effervescent second feature is a case in point, owing its existence to the American B-movie tradition of earlier decades. Truffaut borrowed time-tested Hollywood formulas to create, in essence, little more than a quick, romantic third-person daydream of good guys and not-so-good guys, sketched with tentative charm and irreverence. The translation was (and still is) refreshing, despite (and in large part because of) its disjointed, half-mocking melancholy. The film simply shrugs its shoulders in the face of tragedy with the same Gallic fatalism as its world-weary anti-hero, pianist Charles Aznavour, hiding out from life and love in a small, smoke-filled café until the unexpected arrival of his brother, with a pair of gangsters in hot pursuit.

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