Francois Truffaut's second feature film is a lively dose of style. Following the massive acclaim he received for his debut, The 400 Blows, just a year earlier, Truffaut decided he wanted his next film to show his influence from American films. And to make sure of that, his project choice was to adapt David Goodis' novel Down There. It tells the story of a former concert pianist assuming a new identity who finds himself caught in the midst of his brother's criminal activities. With a unique narrative structure that doesn't reveal the tragic event that caused Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) to leave his old life and change his identity until a ways into the film. Instead it opens with his…

Although I still thoroughly enjoyed 'Shoot the Piano Player', my opinion of it has changed slightly since seeing and loving it only 6 weeks ago. I still think that the acting is very strong, and I admire and appreciate Truffaut's use of natural settings, lighting and sound, but the faults with the film - mostly due to the low budget on which the film was produced - were far more noticeable on this occasion.

These faults were all minor in the grand scheme of things but still frustrated me. There were a few poor cuts within scenes which are obviously undesirable, and some of the more lighthearted moments (a clip of one of the thief's mothers dying) seemed out of…

I'm not used to handing out these ratings, but Shoot The Piano Player absolutely deserves it for me. It's Francois Truffaut's second feature, after the stunning debut The 400 Blows, but it feels like a mix of Godard and Melville in a lot of ways. It has the melancholy noir of something like Le Doulos, with a shut-off main character who is constantly a victim of his surroundings, but the freedom and playfulness of something out of Godard's early playbook.

Truffaut experiments a lot here with narrative structure and film techniques, making up plenty of it as he went along instead of sticking to a more traditional narrative. In fact, Player feels in many ways like a natural progression from…

After seeing “The 400 Blows" and the rest of the Antoine Doinel cycle, as well as "Small Change", I’m going back and watching more of François Truffaut’s signature films in order starting with Shoot the Piano Player. This one is much more challenging in and artsy noir kind of way than the other Truffaut films I’ve seen.

It is very much a character study of the life of the title character, Charlie. I didn’t find him realistically consistent early on, which kind of distracted me the rest of the way. One minute he is too shy to try taking the hand of the women he is attracted to as they walk down the street, and in the next scene he…

Nifty, thrilling, jazzy. Truffaut's second film is purely playful nouvelle vague. I really dug it. His touch here is light and bouncy - occasionally intruded by moments of substantial deepness. One of these sequences occurs in its opening scene as the barely visible Chico runs through the Parisian darkness and crashes into a lamp post. He's helped by a passing stranger as they discuss love and marriage. Quite touchingly, the random Samaritan speaks of his wife, children, initially doubting his marriage, and then realising the decisive moment when it all rang true. It's affecting and feels real. Then the film took a surprising turn and introduced us to how this two-bit crook is being hunted by two thugs after being…