One Of The Best And Most Influential Crime Dramas Is Finally Getting An Upgrade

Shoot the Piano Player’s status as a classic endures, close to five decades after its release. Based on the hardboiled David Goodis novel, Down There, it’s also a culmination of filmmaker François Truffaut’s own observations of French gangsters, his love of Hollywood movies, and his preoccupation with doomed romances.

The first of Truffaut’s five adaptations of American pulp fiction transports the Philadelphia setting of its source material to a Parisian dive bar, enlivening the fatalism of noir with French New Wave flashbacks, extended voice-overs, and bursts of tragic violence. Mirroring the film’s shifting tones is a protagonist who has himself switched identities; following his wife’s suicide, a tragedy for which he blames himself, this introverted classical concert pianist (Charles Aznavour) adopts a pseudonym and gets a job at a small-time dance-hall. His newfound peace is fragile, and he finds himself dragged into the underworld’s crosshairs after an encounter with his criminal brother.

The deep melancholy at the heart of Shoot the Piano Player is offset with moments of playfulness even as it unspools ideas of guilt, loss, and the dream of a better life that’s cruelly punctured. Long before Charlie Kohler (Aznavour) finds himself trapped at his family’s hideout by the end, he’s painfully imprisoned by his regrets.

With a new Criterion 4K UHD + Blu-ray out now, there’s never been a better time to get caught up in the collision of Charlie’s past and present.

How Was Shoot the Piano Player Received?

In an interview with Héléne Laroche Davis, Truffaut said the American pop culture references in Shoot The Piano Player — his protagonist was named after comic Charlie Chaplin — reflected his decision to make the film in reaction to The 400 Blows (1959), which he considered “so French.” The idea was to “lead astray” the audiences that had loved his debut feature by following it up with one that would “please the real film nuts and them alone,” he said during a discussion with members of the French Federation of Ciné-Clubs.

His thoughts were echoed by film critic Martin Marcel, who wrote that while The 400 Blows “had everything necessary to attract a vast public,” Shoot the Piano Player would only please “the true lover of movies.”

Though regarded as masterful now, the film’s mix of dramatic tones, from mystery to slapstick comedy to melodrama, also confounded critics at the time of its release. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called Shoot the Piano Player “frequently amusing,” but concluded that it “simply did not hang together.” Though praising Truffaut’s “unusual visual flair,” Variety critic Mosk also criticized the film’s plot for “going off in too many directions and moods.”

Why Is Shoot the Piano Player Worth Watching Now?

Since Truffaut’s main motivation in making this film was his need to prove he’d “been influenced by American cinema,” as he told Davis, it’s movingly apt that Shoot the Piano Player itself would go on to have an indelible impact on Hollywood. Describing Charlie as a man who “who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late,” filmmaker Martin Scorsese told Time Magazine that the character had had a “profound effect” on him. Elaborating in his foreword to Anne Gillain’s Totally Truffaut: 23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker, the director wrote that Charlie’s characterization had “opened his eyes to a kind of ambivalence that he hadn’t previously seen in movies.”

While writer-director Aaron Schimberg credits Shoot the Piano Player’s structure with having shaped his psychological dark comedy A Different Man (2024), the films also share thematic connections. Both follow cripplingly shy artists — a pianist formerly named Édouard, an actor once known as Edward — who adopt new identities and reinvent themselves professionally. Ultimately, however, neither can escape the baggage of their past.

Such is the film’s legacy that its influence has seeped into the work of Truffaut’s detractors too — despite filmmaker Quentin Tarantino dubbing the French auteur a “bumbling amateur,” it’s easy to see the hitmen of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) as the spiritual successors of Shoot the Piano Player’s chatty thugs Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger). Subverting the stoic, menacing hitmen figures of traditional noir, Truffaut depicted his gangsters as ordinary men who engage in amusing, if mundane chitchat about scarf fabrics and the latest fountain pen. More than three decades later, Tarantino would similarly begin his feature directorial debut with a sequence of eight thieves debating the meanings of old songs and the ethics of tipping.

What Special Features Does The Shoot the Piano Player 4K Blu-Ray Have?

Criterion’s new two-disc digital restoration is oddly one of its lighter releases, its only new features comprising an interview with Truffaut, his reflections on Aznavour and actress Marie Dubois and an essay by critic Kent Jones. Here’s what else you can expect:

• Audio commentary by film scholars Peter Brunette and Annette Insdorf
• An introduction by filmmaker Noah Baumbach
• Interviews with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Aznavour, Dubois and Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman
• Archival interviews with Truffaut on the film and the source novel
• The Music of Georges Delerue, an illustrated audio essay
• An episode of the Criterion Channel series Observations on Film Art featuring scholar Jeff Smith
• Dubois’s screen test
• The trailer