![]() ![]() Read More at VV - Know the Cast: ‘The Bear’īefore Truffaut gets to the more empirical dilemmas of Shoot the Piano Player, and its blatant departures from the generic tried and true, he initiates the story with a scene straight out of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Here, Edouard Saroyan, alias Charlie Kohler, is perpetually surrounded - sometimes by inane strangers, sometimes by intimate associates –but he is also alone, “even when he is with someone.” In the face of it all, indeed, in order to face it all, he maintains an impenetrable front and an inscrutable expression that lasts from his introduction to Shoot the Piano Player’s final shot. In a sense, he gets it both ways with this 1960 underworld riff. Truffaut liked outsiders, those individuals on the margins of society, but he preferred them to be solitary figures, not belonging to a gang or clique. With Shoot the Piano Player, his film version of David Goodis’ 1956 novel, Down There, Truffaut took the author’s essential criminal framework and adjusted the tonal treatment of the gangster and the assessment of its unwitting protagonist. He liked Howard Hawks’ 1932 classic Scarface (who doesn’t?), but he detested gangsters in the movies and in real life, and the only way he could get through this seedy milieu was to add a dash of humor and a healthy degree of self-reference. For Truffaut, his first such foray would be into the gangster film ironically so, as it was not a genre he was especially fond of. ![]() The filmmakers who dominated the French New Wave, particularly Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, made no secret of their adoration for American genre movies, and many tried their hand at distinctive variations on these cinematic standards. ![]()
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