I have often been asked to direct great novels, like Camus' L'Etranger, Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Du cote de chez Swann. In each case my admiration for the book prevented me from making it into a film. Jules and Jim was an exception because it was so little known, and I wanted to increase its popularity by calling to it the attention of a large audience. However, despite what you say, I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis (author of Down There, the basis for Shoot the Piano Player) and William Irish (source for The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid) have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field. But because so many books appear each year in the States, these detective story writers are usually ignored. Ironically, this liberates them. Made humble by their neglect, they are free to experiment because they think no one is paying attention anyway. Not expecting to be analyzed, they put into their books anything they choose. But let me tell you something. After seeing Shoot the Piano Player and liking it, Henry Miller was asked to write an introduction for a new edition of Down There and therefore had to read the book. He then phoned me to say that he suddenly realized that whereas my film was good, the book was even better. So you see, I don't film trash. (1)
Truffaut contradicts himself here. If he wouldn’t adapt Camus or Proust because “[his] admiration for the book prevented [him] from making it into a film,” what stopped him with Goodis and Irish – especially if, as he contends, they “have special value”? Arguably, Truffaut did film trash novels. What he did with them is all that matters. I know this is the very heart of the “auteur theory,” which Truffaut was instrumental in codifying, but he would shoot holes through his famous theory with his later work.
Bizarrely, but not surprisingly, Truffaut veered sharply away from his highly personal, emotionally rich debut feature film, Les 400 Coups into a deliberately artificial exploration of a demi-monde populated by damaged men and women, dominated by criminals. Shoot the Piano Player opens with a man being chased down a dark street by a car. He is Chico Saroyan (Albert Rémy), looking for the bar in which his brother Edouard (Charles Aznavour) plays piano. Edouard now goes by the stage name Charlie Koller, and by helping his brother evade the bad guys he embroils himself and a woman who loves him in a deadly plot. Léna (Marie Dubois – a stage name created for the actress by Truffaut) plays a waitress in the bar where Charlie plays the piano. She’s in love with him, and she also knows his secret, that he is the former concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, living in obscurity since the death by suicide of his wife.
The opening scene in the film follows the novel’s but only so far. Then Truffaut’s poetry transforms Goodis's “hard boiled” writing (quite a few grades below Hemingway, who was the obvious model) into a recognizably human drama. A long conversation between two men in the film’s first scene as they walk along a street at night sets the tone for what’s to come: an artist took an initial setup from a pulp novel – a character literally on the run from an odd pair of killers – and fleshed out the stereotypes to create fully fledged characters in whose fates we take personal interest.
Simply by managing to transcend his trash literary material only once, with Shoot the Piano Player Truffaut made a film that is at once a pastiche and a highly personal statement about men and women and about love. It has moments that are undeniably clumsy, like a comically bad shootout at the film’s climax. It also introduces devices that Truffaut used to better effect in his next film, Jules and Jim. But Piano Player reminds me far less of a divertimento, one perhaps played by the celebrated concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, than of an exquisite jazz ballad, a bittersweet torch song played by Charlie Koller and his combo.
I got hold of a copy of the Goodis novel, Down There (retitled Shoot the Piano Player when the film created renewed – and utterly undeserved – interest in it). I read the first few pages and found the writing is serviceable but dead on the page. 60 years after he made it, Truffaut’s film is still as refreshingly alive as ever. I’ve said this before about certain films of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, but the fearless artistry with which Piano Player was made, comparable to recordings by jazz artists of the era like Wes Montgomery and Erroll Garner (Garner is even mentioned in a voice-over in the film), is all the more exhilarating today for being long gone. Nobody makes films the way Piano Player was made any more.
What Truffaut and Godard accomplished in their earliest works was to pay hommage to genre films by completely exploding genres. In Shoot the Piano Player, it isn’t the tough language or the sudden brutalities or a plot that somehow endows the action of the story with a meaning. Truffaut invests in tiny gestures – Charlie clumsily trying to touch Léna as they walk together, or standing outside the office door of the “impresario” trying to make up his mind to go in, fumbling with the door handle or raising a finger to push the doorbell – that cumulatively reveal his characters’ insipient humanity, presenting to the viewer a living world.
In the film’s conclusion, Charlie/Edouard returns to his perch behind his piano, confirmed in his solitude. The amount of time Truffaut commits to the film’s climax and ending is remarkably brief (a mere five minutes) and sweeps the viewer along irresistibly, only to find himself deposited, like Charlie, back where he started – with a world of difference in emotion.
(1) Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).
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