Another Criterion Bull's-Eye
Truffaut's 'Shoot the Piano Player' finally gets the DVD treatment it deserves
By Andy Klein
Among young film buffs in the U.S. in the early to mid-'60s, the excitement of the French New Wave was epitomized by Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and François Truffaut's first three features - The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), and Jules and Jim (1962). Everyone had their favorite from among the latter three, and I was (and remain) a Shoot the Piano Player man. While the film apparently wasn't a big hit with French critics, it doesn't seem necessary at this point in history to plead a case for it.
Shoot the Piano Player is an homage/reworking of American B-movie elements, based on David Goodis's excellent pulp novel Down There. In the most important ways, it's a faithful adaptation, even though the story has been transplanted from Philadelphia and rural New Jersey to Paris and the French countryside. Charles Aznavour is Charlie Koller, a shy man who plays honky-tonk piano in a cheap bar. We later learn that he is not merely shy, but closed off from romantic emotions following a marital catastrophe.
The film has the same sense of fatalism as the French crime dramas it was stylistically breaking away from. Things cannot possibly end well for Charlie, but at least he can always retreat into his music. That music is exemplified by the simple piano number Georges Delerue wrote for the movie - one of the most evocative, bittersweet pieces of film music ever written.
For years, Shoot the Piano Player has been represented on DVD by a wholly inadequate Fox/Lorber disc. But now the Criterion Collection has released a first-rate two-disc set that pleases on almost every level. I have two nitpicks, one a little bigger than your average nit, and the other the nittiest of nits.
The first disc has the original theatrical trailer and the film itself. Criterion, as usual, has found an excellent print and transferred it beautifully. The company has done such a lovely job that I feel churlish bringing up the larger of my two nits: i.e., the opening credit sequence of this very widescreen film (2.35:1) is presented in a less extreme ratio, as though the image has been cropped or squeezed. The effect is replicated during the movie's final shot, as the sides of the frame slide inward for a narrower image.
Unless my memory is tanking again, I'm reasonably sure that the theatrical prints aren't that way. It's certainly possible that Criterion is right, and the prints of my youth were transferred wrong: The credit font looks well-proportioned on the DVD, and I recall the same sequence on film looking almost ridiculously stretched. But Aznavour's face in the final sequence on the DVD does look squeezed. In any case, a note of explanation for the aspect ratio shift would have been nice.
That's the big nit. The teeny-weeny one regards the subtitles, which have been retranslated for this release. The first thing I went to check was a scene where Charlie is ruminating in voiceover about jazz pianists, mentioning Erroll Garner and Junior Mance. I always found it amusing that the subtitles got the first name right but, presumably transcribing the name of the less famous Mance phonetically, mangled it into "Junio Manse." Amazingly, the new translation mangles it even more, giving us "Juno Manse."
Valid criticism or symptom of obsessive/compulsive disorder? You decide.
The first disc also has an informative, not overly dry, commentary from film scholars Annette Insdorf and Peter Brunette.
Disc two has the rest of the extras. First, and best, are excerpts from two TV interviews with the director, one from 1965, the other from 1982, two years before his death. In the earlier one, he tells us what he doesn't like in recent French thrillers, describing namelessly, but rather exactly, Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques, currently in reissue and reviewed here last week.
Almost as good is a charming, nearly half-hour interview with Aznavour, done a few months ago especially for the DVD. It's followed by shorter interviews with leading lady Marie Dubois, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and longtime Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman. There is a 17-minute video essay about Delerue; and, finally, Dubois's screen test, in which she can't bring herself to fulfill Truffaut's order that she curse him out.
Published: 01/12/2006
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