Trailer
Plot summary
Charlie Kohler plays jazz piano in the bar run by Plyne in Paris, a job he took after abandoning a career as a concert pianist and the name that went with it. The waitress Léna has fallen in love with him, and he is shy with her. Clarisse, a prostitute, cooks meals for Fido, Charlie's youngest brother, who lives with Charlie. His older brothers, Chico and Richard, rob the gangsters Momo and Ernest of their loot, and Chico runs into the bar with the two men chasing him. Charlie gets him away, and the gangsters, unable to find the brothers, turn to Charlie and to Léna.
Cast
- Jean-Jacques Aslanianas Richard Saroyan
- Claude Heymannas Lars Schmeel
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shoot the Piano Player, Truffaut's 1960 film, is one of Bob Dylan's favorite films, and it inspired Dylan's early work.
- Producer Pierre Braunberger at first disliked Boby Lapointe's songs and said he could not understand what Lapointe was saying, which led Truffaut to add subtitles with a bouncing ball.
- Shoot the Piano Player was the first Truffaut film to include a murder, a plot point that would recur in many of his later films and that came out of his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock.
- Truffaut wanted Shoot the Piano Player to be a big-budget studio film, but he could not get enough money and shot it on the streets instead.
- Marcel Moussy, who had co-written The 400 Blows with Truffaut, left Shoot the Piano Player after a few weeks when the two disagreed over the script; Truffaut wrote it himself.
- Truffaut first noticed Marie Dubois through her headshot in pre-production and tried to arrange meetings, but she never showed up; he finally saw her on a TV show and cast her just before filming began.
- Serge Davri, cast as Plyne, was a music hall performer who for years recited poems while breaking dishes over his head; Truffaut considered him crazy but funny.
- The film was financially unsuccessful but became a cult favorite: film student Claude Miller recalled that he and his friends at IDHEC knew all its dialogue by heart, and it became a kind of "in" language.
