Shoot the Piano Player

Director: François Truffaut

1960 / 92min / 35mm

Following up his breakthrough semi-autobiographical feature debut, The 400 Blows, critic-cum-director Truffaut produced this radically reimagined cinematic adaptation of Philadelphian David Goodis’s pulp thriller Down There, starring popular chanteur Charles Aznavour as a barroom pianist who gets in over his head with the mob, and adding a distinct air of brisk, jaunty invention and wistful nostalgia to Goodis’s gloomy hardboiled source material. “The film is comedy, pathos, tragedy all scrambled up—much I think as most of us really experience them (surely all our lives are filled with comic horrors) but not as we have been led to expect them in films.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker