Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

Film: Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

Stars: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michele Mercier, Serge Davri

Director: Francois Truffaut

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

The "neo-noir" era largely came about because Hollywood stopped making traditional film noir pictures.  While there were noir films made in the early 1960's that one could question whether they should count as "neo-noir" or not (most frequently I see "neo-noir" as being labeled anything 1960 or later, which feels a bit arbitrary given that films like Key Witness and The Secret Ways read less like something innovative or changing and more just like low-budget noir when it was past its peak but still came from major studios), by-and-large the final years of noir with classics like Touch of Evil and Odds Against Tomorrow were the end of Hollywood taking the genre seriously until the late-1960's.  Instead, the genre was picked up by both European and Japanese cinema, and in particular the French fell in love with it.  This was when noir became a building block to the French New Wave, one of the most interesting eras in world cinema.  Most of this month we've been tackling deep cuts and largely forgotten film noirs (in many ways living up to the genre's reputation as a place for B movies), but today we're going to forgot that and go with a film revered by artists as diverse as Martin Scorsese to Bob Dylan: Shoot the Piano Player.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie in many ways borrows from Citizen Kane, giving us much of the plot in flashback.  We have Charlie (Aznavour), an invisible piano player who works nightly at a bar, who is interrupted by his brother, and then two men trying to hunt him (and his brother) down.  It turns out, as we learn while Charlie and Lena (Dubois), the waitress at the bar who is falling in love with him, that Charlie has lived a double life.  At one point he was a well-known and esteemed pianist named Edouard Saroyan, who escaped abject poverty and a likely life-in-crime with his siblings, and became the toast of Paris.  But after his wife Therese (Berger) confesses that she slept with a record producer to get Charlie his big break, and then after he initially refuses to forgive her she kills herself before he can change his mind, and he escapes into obscurity again.

The movie alternates between Charlie's inability to act and his instinct to do the right thing...too late.  The film's best attribute is that contradiction.  Charlie is presented as a good guy, but his indecisiveness is cruel.  There are multiple scenes in this movie where both Therese and Lena are seen as the sources of his inevitable happiness; all he needs to do is go after the thing he most wants, rather than reluctantly seeing if it'll come closer to him, and he would be happy.  But that's not how life works, and it's not how Shoot the Piano Player works.  We have Charlie nearly finding love twice, but in both instances his need to go back to his own masculinity, to his own sense of self-doubt, costs them their lives.  The film ends with Charlie playing piano back at that same bar, on auto-pilot, knowing that he's now lost happiness twice...and he lives with the knowledge that it wasn't him who paid the ultimate price even he caused it.

Truffaut's camerawork here is really strong.  Both Aznavour and Dubois give dynamite performances, but they're helped by Truffaut's use of long-shots, especially toward the end, to give us a sense of Paris (in some ways, you can see Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris in the way that he shoots the City of Lights).  The ending, though, far removed from the capitol, is the best part.  We see Marie Dubois being gunned down, and rather than have her collapsing in a conventional sense, we instead see her shot, and then rolling down a snowy hill, her beautiful body careening through the ice and wet, the audience not only aware she's dead, but also that she's slipping away from the happy ending she was so close to moments before.  It's this sort of specificity, this sense of irony, that Truffaut would become a legend for, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie that better captures that the final sequences of Shoot the Piano Player.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Big Knife, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, Kansas City Confidential, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps, Whirlpool

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai