No 12-inch pianist jokes, please

Another movie that I had on the DVR and only recently got around to watching is Shoot the Piano Player.

A French film written and directed by François Truffaut relatively early in his career, the movie stars Charles Aznavour at the pianist, Charlie Koller. He's working in a Parisian bar, playing a honky-tonk mistuned upright piano along with other members of a jazz-type combo for the patrons. Coming into the bar one night is Chico Saroyan (Albert Rémy), who is quite the jerk. Chico is being trailed by two guys, Ernest and Momo, and needs help escaping. So why did he walk into this bar?

No jokes about walking into a bar, either. Chico is the brother of Charlie; Charlie not being his real name, but a stage name for Édouard Saroyan. As Édouard, he was a concert pianist, but he wound up here for reasons that will be explained later in the movie. Chico is a lifelong low-level crook. This time, he's stolen some money that other crooks want, and they're going to stop at nothing to get it back. Chico wants Charlie to help him escape, and Chico is enough of a boor that he's willing to get very loud and disrupt the other patrons in the bar telling them that their Charlie was a former concert pianist and why the hell is he reduced to playing honky-tonk? If I were in Charlie's shoes, I'd be mighty pissed. But Charlie is one of those people for whom blood is thicker than water.

So Charlie helps Chico escape, before getting out of the bar for the night along with waitress Léna (Marie Dubois). Charlie has the feeling that he's being followed by the two guys who were following Chico, and he's quite right about that. So Charle and Léna walk down the street together, Charlie having philosophical thoughts in his own head but that we hear about whether he should try to pursue a relationship with Léna in a situation like this. That's the first indication something isn't quite right with the movie.

When Charlie gets home, he finds that his kid brother Fido is asleep. For reasons not quite clear since it's mentioned later that the Saroyan parents are still alive, Charlie is a sort of foster father to Fido. Fido is also much too young to be a kid brother to Charlie, Chico, and the other brother Richard who only shows up for the finale. Fido and Charlier have a neighbor in Clarisse (Michèle Mercier) who looks after Fido, and who also sleeps with Charlie at night, but making certain to get up early in the morning so that Fido doesn't find out about the relationship.

The two bad guys bribe Charlie's boss to get the addresses of Charlie and Léna, and pick both of them up to try to get information about where Chico might be, not that Charlie seems to know. But Charlie and Léna are able to escape when the car get stopped by the police, at which point Charlie opens up about his past as Édouard -- although Léna already knows that he was a concert pianist; she doesn't know the rest of the story. Charlie's wife Thérèse (Nicole Berger) was able to get Charlie an appointment with a well-known impresario, although she had to sleep with him to get the appointment. It led to Charlie becoming a star, but also destroyed Thérèse, who eventually jumped out a window to her death. This is why Charlie abandoned being a concert pianist.

The bad guys then kidnap Fido, while Charlie gets in a fight with his boss that results in Charlie and Léna running for their lives, going to where Charlie's parents live and where Chico and Richard presumably are. The bad guys follow, leading to the finale.

Shoot the Piano Player is a movie that has an interesting premise, and some really nice black-and-white cinematography both of Paris as it was in 1960, and in the Alps where the Saroyan family hideout is. But like a lot of the French New Wave, the movie gets bogged down in all of the talky philosophizing that marks both Charlie's inner thoughts as well as his flashback relating his career as a concert pianist. The action parts of the movie dealing with Chico's crime and its aftermath work much better.

But, because it's Truffaut and the French New Wave, other people give Shoot the Piano Player much higher praise than I'm willing to give to what to me was an uneven movie. So watch and judge for yourself.