On Screen

...In Jules and Jim, he evoked pre-World War I Paris so well that one got nostalgic about it...

...That Francois Truffaut can function in the midst of this eclectic clubbiness is one more reason for admiring him...

...The texture changes, but the vision back of it does not...

...Though there is a fine Bogartian quality to the hero, Shoot the Piano Player is not a satire of American gangster films, as I have heard it called...

...they had great vigor and feeling...

...His appreciation for detail, his Hitchcockian ability to invest objects with personality, and his management of extraneous bits of business are superb (the drive into the country, with the sun coming in through the frosted windshield, fresh and liberating...

...The cast is excellent, especially Charles Aznavour as the pianist...

...The ineptness of the gunmen in the beginning makes you laugh, and the corpse of the waitress sliding down a frozen incline at the end makes you a little sick, but they are of a piece...

...And Truffaut's latest film to be shown here, Shoot the Piano Player, surpasses them both...

...He also gets mixed up in a killing, self-defense, which forces him to join his brothers at their country hide-out...

...But involvement comes, first with two gunmen who are after his gangster brothers, then with a waitress who loves him...

...Suicide, murder, underworld vendetta and the film's ultimate sadness notwithstanding, Shoot the Piano Player is a comedy...

...It is the rare kind of melancholy comedy that edges along just this side of tragedy, that playwrights like Ionesco and Albee strain over and never quite achieve, that disintegrates at the slightest touch of self-consciousness...

...The tone of each scene recalls, suggests or forecasts the tone of every other scene...

...With his tough, sad little face he shows how effective and moving deadpanning can be when it is handled by a real actor...

...It is about a cabaret entertainer, formerly a concert pianist, whose withdrawal has been set off by his wife's suicide...

...If The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim were flawed, at least they were not mannered to the point of deadness, not hung up in some cerebral isolation...

...The first half is as funny and anarchic as anything since Some Like It Hot, and even after you realize what's up and the film stops being funny, some of the hilarity clings...

...There is a lightness about the film which is its best quality, a lack of solemnity that generates the casually sinister current that is its point...

...The cabaret is the best place for him—no complications, no involvement...

...Here, the feeling of cabaret life is exceptionally vivid, and the flashback sequence, for all its weak melodramatics, really suggests a higher bohemia, a concert stage society...

...You laugh at the gunmen, but there is an uneasiness in your laughter, as though you have sensed that they will turn deadly effectual, which they do...

...The pianist's timidity is charming, but the coldness that drives his wife to suicide is a very real part of that same timidity...

...When the waitress is killed, insanely, by one of the gunmen, the pianist goes back to the cabaret...

...Truffaut starts a scene the way a great writer begins a story, with directness and tact, involving the viewer instantly...

...Truffaut also had something to do with the sharp, argot-riddled screenplay, one of the best from France since Marguerite Duras' poetic Hiroshima, Mon Amour...

...or the aura of the Paris streets after closing hours, realized so keenly that one can almost smell them...

...or the singing waiter with the borderline goatee pumping out a nonsense song about breastworks and venereal disease, pop-eyed and frantic, working to keep the long saloon night from lagging...

...It suggests the movies of the 1930s, but only because of Truffaut's gift for establishing atmosphere, for giving a firsthand sense of milieu...

...In spite of the movement from gags to melodrama to tragedy, the film is carefully controlled...