"Actor: Richard Kanayan"

• Shoot The Pianist | DVD | (25/09/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Charlie is a piano player in a rundown jazz bar he used to be Edouard Saroyan a gifted classical pianist but after suffering his wife's suicide gave up his rising fame. He's miserable and lonely and so self-absorbed that he can't see that Lena the bars waitress is in love with him. When Chico Charlie's crooked brother uses the bar as a refuge from two gangsters he's double-crossed Charlie becomes embroiled in the mayhem. Will the resulting events awaken Charlie's emotions again?

• 400 Blows | DVD | (16/12/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Praised by film-makers (Akira Kurosawa called it One of the most beautiful films that I have ever seen) and critics the world over Truffaut's 400 Blows launched the Nouvelle Vague and paved the way for some of cinema's most important and influential directors. Twelve-year-old Antoine Doinel has troubles at home and at school. Ignored and neglected by his parents his relationship with his mother is further strained when he discovers that she has taken a secret lover. Added to this his school teachers have written him off as a troublemaker and with luck seemingly never on his side it is Antoine who ends up getting the blame for bad behaviour. Finding refuge only in his love of cinema Antoine soon finds it necessary to break free and discover what the world can offer outside of the confines of his everyday life. This remarkable film features the extraordinary talent of Jean-Pierre Leaud as the rebellious Antoine a character based on Truffaut himself. Antoine Doinel was to make appearances in a number of Truffaut's films (including 'Stolen Kisses' 'Bed and Board' and 'Love on the Run') all of which chart his further adventures into adulthood.

• Tirez Sur Le Pianiste | DVD | (03/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The opening of Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut's second feature film, is one of the signal moments of the French New Wave--an inspired intersection of grim fatality and happy accident, location shooting and lurid melodrama, movie convention and frowzy, uncontainable life. A man runs through deserted night streets, stalked by the lights of a car. It's a definitive film noir situation, promptly sidetracked--yet curiously not undercut--by real-life slapstick: watching over his shoulder for pursuers, the running man charges smack into a lamppost. The figure that helps him to his feet is not one of the pursuers (they've oddly disappeared) but an anonymous passer-by, who proceeds to escort him for a block or two, genially schmoozing about the mundane, slow-blooming glories of marriage. The Good Samaritan departs at the next turning, never to be identified and never to be seen again. And the first man--who, despite this evocative introduction, is not even destined to be the main character of the movie--immediately resumes his helter-skelter flight from an as-yet-unspecified and unseen menace. At this point in his career--right after The 400 Blows, just before his great Jules and Jim--the world seemed wide for Truffaut, as wide as the Dyaliscope screen that he and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deployed with unprecedented spontaneity and lyricism. Anything might wander into frame and become part of the flow: an oddball digression, an unexpected change of mood, a small miracle of poetic insight. The official agenda of the movie is adapting a noir-ish story by American writer David Goodis, about a celebrated concert musician (Charles Aznavour) hiding out as a piano player in a saloon. He's on the run as much as the guy--his older brother--in the first scene. But whereas the brother is worried about a couple of buffoonish gangsters, Charlie Koller is ducking out on life, love and the possibility that he might be hurt, or cause hurt, again. Decades after its original release, Shoot the Piano Player remains as fresh, exhilarating, and heartbreaking--as open to the magic of movies and life--as ever. --Richard T Jameson