Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

melvyn-z Tragic, unconventional, non-chronological told love story in which the protagonist Charlie loses two girlfriends under fateful circumstances, partly caused by him. The occasionally funny and always entertaining film transform the American novel Down There and it's noir atmosphere into a french masterpiece that exposes the "romance and beauty between the lines" (Kael in a different context). It centers around the titular piano player who's shyness, love for women and art, as well as his final powerlessness reflect not only the writer and director Truffaut, but also our own lives. It's his second picture and maybe with the, partly failed, exception of Jules and Jim his last real attempt at the Godard-esque deconstruction of film and his genres, after which he leaned more, and sometimes too much so, to the classical approach of his great idol Hitchcock. Nevertheless do I admire Truffauts more grounded style, which fits his striving for succession of Renoirs humanistic legacy. In Shoot the Piano Player the combination between youthful experimenting with genre and form, and the not quite polished attempt at an effective emotional drama, perfectly fit the story to create a masterpiece.

JoeKulik I now understand why Shoot The Piano Player was a box office flop & a critical flop when it premiered in 1960. That this film has gotten so many positive reviews on this site can only be due to the fact that Francois Truffaut has become some sort of mythical//cult film hero lately & that the positive reviews of this film are based on his reputation & his legend, rather than on the actual quality of this film.Although this film has many of the ground breaking, fresh qualities of Truffaut's first feature 400 Blows, considered as a stand alone film, the story line in Shoot The Piano Player is just not as real & as natural as his first film. For me, there are just too many points in this film where the action is just plain phony, unreal & unnatural.In both kidnapping scenes, where Charlie & Lena are in the car with the gangsters & when Fido is in the car with the gangsters, the talkative, carefree attitude of the gangsters just doesn't ring true for me. That these guys are "bad" enough to rob a bank & do two kidnappings & have a big shootout at the end where one of the gangsters deliberately kills Lena in cold blood & yet that these two "bad guys" carry on conversations with their hostages about the most ridiculous & trivial matters just doesn't fit together for me. "Bad guys" don't engage in lighthearted, casual, friendly banter with their kidnap victims.While Charlie & Lena are in the car with the two gangsters who kidnapped them, Lena deliberately steps on the gas pedal to make the car run a red light & get pulled over by the cops. OK !! Great way to foil your kidnappers, Right? But when the kidnappers & Charlie & Lena get out of the car to talk to the cops, neither Charlie nor Lena exclaim that they're kidnap victims & tell the cops that the bad guys even have guns !!! Charlie & Lena simply walk away & catch a bus back to town !! SORRY, but that's just not the way that real kidnap victims behave when they finally come into contact with the cops. Had either Charlie or Lena exposed these other two guys in the car as kidnappers, the bad guys would've been arrested & everyone else in the story, including all of Charlie's brothers would be safe from these guys. Just doesn't make sense to me.When the hooker next door to Charlie realizes that the gangsters kidnapped Fido, why doesn't she call the cops?? And when the hooker tells Lena that the gangsters kidnapped Fido, she too fails to call the cops. SORRY, but that's just too unreal for me. When an adolescent gets kidnapped, you call the cops--That's a REAL reaction.When Fido is driving with the gangsters, he has at least three separate chances to escape, but, for reasons unknown to me, he fails to run away until he actually brings the gangsters to the farm house where his brothers are hiding out. Either this kid is a moron or the screenwriter's head is out to lunch, because no boy his age is that stupid.When Charlie & Plynne, the bar owner, are engaged in "mortal combat", Charlie finally disarms Plynne & chases him out into the alley with a knife in his hand where Charlie finally apprehends him. GREAT, but what does Charlie do next? He simply drops the knife & tells Plynne, the guy who was trying to kill him just a minute ago, that he just gives up, thereby giving Plynne the chance to strangle him. SORRY, but REAL people just don't behave as Charlie did in that fight scene when he just threw away his knife & gave up.That Charlie was supposed to be such a famous concert pianist in years past that he was having press conferences & that the ladies on the street were all ogling him, as Charlie asserts, & that then Charlie acquires perfect anonymity by simply changing his name & playing honky tonk music in a dive bar on the other side town of the same city, Paris, without ever being recognized is just BS. Even if the patrons of the dive bar were so low class that none of them followed fine concert music or read the newspaper, which is a dubious proposition at best, someone on the streets would have certainly recognized him & eventually his gig at the dive bar would've been exposed. To achieve the type of anonymity that Charlie did after being such a famous concert pianist, he would've had to move to another city, at least.In short, the behavior of the characters in Shoot The Piano Player are just too UNREAL & UNNATURAL for me to consider it a worthy example of fine Cinematic Art.

Jackson Booth-Millard From director François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, Jules et Jim), whether the title is Pianist or Piano Player, it doesn't matter, it wasn't a French film I would have heard of without the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but one I looked forward to watching. Basically Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour) plays piano in a dive bar, following his wife's suicide he has become somewhat washed up, the waitress Léna (Marie Dubois) who works in the bar as well and is in love with him, but he may not be all he appears. One evening while playing he is approached by his brother Chico Saroyan (Albert Rémy), a crook who takes refuge as he is being chased by two gangsters, Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger), Charlie is becoming inadvertently dragged into the situation and rejoin his family he no longer wanted to be a part of. Charlie confesses his past to Léna, his real name is Edouard Saroyan, he used to be a famous pianist, but quit his successful career after his wife Thérèse Saroyan (Nicole Berger) killed herself, she was also a waitress. The situation gets more complicated when Charlie's other younger brother Fido Saroyan (Richard Kanayan), who lives with him, is kidnapped by the gangsters, forcing him to take drastic actions, but consequences will comes and it ends in tragedy. Also starring Charles Aznavour as Charlie Kohler, Michèle Mercier as Clarisse, Jean-Jacques Aslanian as Richard Saroyan and Serge Davri as Plyne. I will confess having to read subtitles can be annoying so I perhaps didn't see why critics give it five out of five stars, but apparently this is a forgotten gem, it does well to pay homage to classic film noirs, the melancholic romance is relatively interesting, and there are the right thrilling moments, it is a watchable crime drama. Very good!

jotix100 Charlie Kohler, a pianist at a Parisian dive, lives in obscurity. As the story begins, he is visited by one of his brothers, Chico, who is being followed by two gangsters that want to talk to him about the money he took from them. Naturally, Charlie becomes also a target for these characters who figure they can get to Chico through his brother.A loner, Charlie lives alone with his younger brother Fido. His neighbor is an attractive prostitute, Clarissa, that hangs around in the place where Charlie plays. Lena, a shy woman that also works there, likes Charlie. The attraction is there but neither Charlie or Lena make the right move to consummate what they feel for one another. We watch them go into the empty Parisian streets late at night but nothing happens between them, until Clarissa points to her friend that Lena cares for him.As Charlie and Lena begin to get intimate, Charlie thinks about another life he had with Therese. He was an aspiring the classic concert Edoard Saroyan, an artist with a fine future. What he is not aware of is the sacrifice Therese underwent in order to get him into the spotlight. The impresario Lars Schmeel, he learns, knew Therese in more intimate ways. Her sacrifice was what took Edoard to a fame that was, in part, due not to his talent, but as someone's desire to possess something that was his. Therese pays dearly for her actions.The gangsters finally get to Charlie by kidnapping Fido after school and taking him to the place where Chico and Richard Saroyan are hiding. Knowing that Clint, the bar tender's betrayal proves fatal as Charlie wants to avenge his telling his brother's chasers about their whereabouts. Lena, borrows the landlady's car to go after the criminals; in the end, Charlie stands alone as Lena is killed during a shootout.The second film by Francois Truffaut was a memorable one. Not having seen it for quite some time, we took a chance to do so when it showed up on a classic film channel recently. The film appears to have been restored with care. We loved Raoul Coutard's brilliant black and white cinematography. Taking the camera to the streets was a trade mark of the New Wave filmmakers, Truffaut accomplishes an incredible atmosphere by the tour he gives us of those out of the way places of Paris where he sets the action. The film is based on a novel by David Goodis. A lot of French creators saw in this native American pulp writing a good source in which to base their work.Charles Aznavour plays the double role of Charlie/Edoard with an economy of gestures. Yet, both men being portrayed in the film show this man could have been a natural for the cinema, had he decided to take more roles instead of a splendid career as a singer. Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, and Michelle Mercier are seen as Lena, Therese and Clarissa, respectively. Albert Remy was excellent as Chico.