Shoot the Piano Player

Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste) is a 1960 French neo-noir comedy-drama directed by François Truffaut, his second feature film, starring the singer Charles Aznavour as a former concert pianist hiding from his past in a Paris bar.¹ Adapted from the American writer David Goodis's 1956 novel Down There, it mixes gangster thriller, slapstick comedy, and bittersweet romance, and is now regarded as one of the signal works of the French New Wave.²

Origins and production

Truffaut began the project at the end of 1959, choosing an adaptation of David Goodis's novel, published in France in the Série noire collection at Gallimard, rather than a sequel to the Antoine Doinel story of The 400 Blows.⁶ Goodis was an American pulp writer beloved by the French, and Truffaut said the novel struck him because it "passes beyond the usual gangster novel to become a fairy tale".⁸

A deliberate change of course. Truffaut said the film was made in reaction to The 400 Blows, which he deemed "so French", adding that he "needed to show that I had been influenced by American cinema".⁹ Like Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless, he wanted to make a homage to the American B-movie thrillers he had grown up watching.¹⁰ He cast Aznavour, whom he had admired in Georges Franju's Head Against the Wall, precisely because the singer was vulnerable; Truffaut said he wanted to react against "the brutality of the invulnerable tough guy" and showed gangsters who were simultaneously grotesque and sympathetic, contrary to their depiction in the novel.^{11 • 8} For the female lead he chose the unknown musician Marie Dubois.¹²

Style and genre mixing

Truffaut described his method as systematically practicing "a mélange of genres", mixing comedy, melodrama, the psychological film, the thriller, and the love film, and treating the story "in the manner of a Perrault fairy tale".^{8 • 11} The result shifts tone from moment to moment: a desperate chase down an alley is interrupted by a chance meeting that drifts into a philosophical conversation, and characters pop up and disappear seemingly at will.¹³ Truffaut preferred to call the film a "respectful pastiche", with a touch of irony.¹⁴

The film was shot in Dyaliscope, the French version of CinemaScope, by Raoul Coutard in a classically free New Wave style: on location, filming actors on the fly, with handheld camera work and playfully jagged editing.^{13 • 14 • 15} Georges Delerue's score, the first of eleven he wrote for Truffaut, complements the film's atmosphere of sadness and whimsy.^{15 • 16} The finale is a shootout at a mountain cabin recalling the Humphrey Bogart film High Sierra, but with gunmen who behave like the Keystone Kops.²

Reception and legacy

At its release in November 1960 the film was coolly received by a good part of the French press and disoriented audiences; enthusiasm for the New Wave was beginning to cool, and Goodis was not then taken seriously as a writer.⁶ The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther found it "a teasing and frequently amusing (or moving) film" that "simply does not hang together".¹⁷ It was also less liked by audiences at the time than The 400 Blows, and its weak box office led Truffaut to largely abandon the improvisational style he had shown here.^{18 • 19}

Later standing reversed this verdict. The film is now described as a quiet cornerstone of the French New Wave, a modern classic "ahead of its time", and perhaps the most quintessentially New Wave of all Truffaut's films.^{18 • 2 • 10} On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 90% Tomatometer from 30 reviews.²⁰ Martin Scorsese said the character played by Aznavour "had a profound effect on me and on many other filmmakers".¹ The film's success also outgrew its source: American publishers reissued Goodis's novel under the film's title, and by the early 1980s the movie had become better known than the book.^{12 • 21}

Restoration and home video

The film was restored in 4K/HDR in 2024 by mk2 Films with the support of the CNC, following an earlier restoration by Hiventy Transperfect.^{7 • 1} The Criterion Collection issued the film on Blu-ray and DVD (spine 315) with a commentary by film scholars Peter Brunette and Annette Insdorf, interviews with Coutard, Aznavour, and Dubois, and a new 4K digital restoration.¹⁵

References

1. Shoot the Piano Player, mk2 Films
2. David Ehrenstein, "Shoot the Piano Player", The Criterion Collection (1988)
3. DVD Savant Review: Shoot the Piano Player, DVD Talk
4. Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Pianist), Cineuropa
5. Shoot the Piano Player, Janus Films
6. "L'homme fragile: Tirez sur le pianiste", Le Monde (1982)
7. Tirez sur le pianiste press kit, Carlotta Films
8. Tirez sur le pianiste academic study, University of Southampton eprints
9. Melissa Anderson, Shoot the Piano Player review, Time Out
10. Shoot the Piano Player, New Wave Film Encyclopedia
11. François Truffaut interview, Le Monde (24 November 1960)
12. "Dark passage", The Guardian (2004)
13. Wheeler Winston Dixon, "Shoot the Piano Player: A Respectful Pastiche", Senses of Cinema (2018)
14. François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player press notes, mk2 Films
15. Shoot the Piano Player, The Criterion Collection
16. Improvisation on a noir theme, Library of America
17. Shoot the Piano Player critics' reviews, FilmAffinity
18. Shoot the Piano Player critic reviews, MUBI
19. Eternality Tan, Shoot the Piano Player (1960) review
20. Shoot the Piano Player, Rotten Tomatoes
21. Shoot the Piano Player: Take 2, Slant Magazine

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1940 to 1975

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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