Great Film overall

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Everyone talks about how much of an homage this is to Hollywood film noir, but to me it seems much more like a light version of a Hollywood gangster film. Sure, there are some scenes at night and the film is black and white, but the plot is straightforward, there's not a lot of gritty drama, and the 'bad guys' are not all that menacing. That doesn't make the film bad, just miscategorized. What I found most interesting was the running theme of the nature of the relationship between men and women, the 'new wave' cinematography Truffaut includes (including cool scenes shot out of a car window at night in the winter towards the end), and the humanism of the timid piano player, sucked up into clashes with criminals as well as a love affair, and whose past is gradually revealed. It's enjoyable but relative to the gangster story there are several moments which don't seem honest or real, and the shootout scene is cheesy. On the other hand, the relationship aspects are fascinating, the film is enjoyable from start to finish, and it's cool to watch a Truffaut film from 1960 – watch it for that.

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.

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!

After the great 'The 400 Blows', Monsieur Truffaut made this cool film with a peculiar title - a title which, by the way, I like. Curiously, the pianist is portrayed by a real-life musician: the great Charles Aznavour. However, the rest of the cast is about as great when it comes to acting abilities.Despite the title, there is really very little of action. But hey, you can't expect a movie this old to have "exciting" levels of action like the modern movies. This is "old-school" action, when action was limited but authentic and even the noises were realistic, nothing to do with the almost deafening sounds of nowadays. Who needs those excesses? Deep down, this classic isn't limited to just one genre, being a successful but modest combination of different genres which works. Besides, few movies transform tense scenes into humorous scenes the way this does.I really like the beating of the piano melody by Georges Delerue. Cinematography is quite decent and permits us to appreciate french streets and other places, a Truffaut specialty. I consider this one of Truffaut's best films, after 'The 400 Blows' and 'The Wild Child', and better than the interesting but flawed 'Jules et Jim'.This should definitely be on Top 250.