Shoot the Piano Player
February 2006 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Truffaut was a moviemaker’s moviemaker. He influenced other directors, but other directors influenced him, too. This entertaining movie, Truffaut’s second feature, shows the impact that American movies had on him. It is based on a novel by David Goodis called Down There. Goodis was an American writer who wrote hardboiled pulp noirs that provided grist for many film directors, including Delmar Daves (Dark Passage), Samuel Fuller (Street of No Return), and Jacques Tourneur (Nightfall). Truffaut said of his books, "At a certain point they go beyond the usual gangster story and become fairytales."

This perhaps explains his singular style for this movie, a style that bounces back and forth from the serious to the comic. In the scene where the gangsters have young Fido Saroyan captive in their car, they joke and clown like vaudeville comics, yet we know that their vehicle is speeding to the place where they can kill the piano player Charlie Koller and that if necessary they would kill Fido too.

Charlie is a complex character who was once a budding concert pianist of great promise and renown. His name then was Edouard Saroyan. After his wife commits suicide, Edouard loses heart and withdraws from the scene, emerging later as Charlie Koller, a piano player in a bar. Thanks to his crooked brother, he gets mixed up with gangsters bent on revenge. Charlie must elude these thugs just as he starts a new romance with Léna, an employee of the bar who remembers him from the past.

This movie is impeccably cast. Charles Aznavour, the famous French singer and actor, is ideally cast as Charlie. Through his long career he gave concerts all over the world and appeared in several other movies, but he is most remembered for his role as Charlie. Marie Dubois is both tender and tough as his love interest. The rest of the cast is letter perfect. The action is swift and lean. There is not a wasted moment in this movie, and there are too many memorable moments to list in a brief review. Let’s just say it is impossible to see this movie without retaining numerous images from it.

Criterion’s transfer is the best the movie has received on home video. It is in the original Dyaliscope aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and for the most part is well contrasted, crisp, and clean. Only the very darkest scenes lose detail and these occur at the beginning of the movie. The sound was taken from the magnetic tracks and has been processed and cleaned up quite well, including the music score of Georges Delarue.

The extras, though lavish by normal standards, are skimpy by Criterion’s own. These include an excellent commentary track by Truffaut historians Peter Brunette and Annette Insdorf; new video interviews with Aznavour and Dubois; as well as archival interviews with Truffaut and his collaborator Suzanne Schiffman. There is also an attractive booklet included with the set, which includes yet another interview with Truffaut and an intriguing article by Kent Jones.

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