Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Shoot the Pianist

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tirez sur le pianiste 

    François Truffaut (1960)

    The way it looks and moves is fresh and inventive without ever seeming flashy.  There’s a lovely score by Georges Delerue:  its lilting melancholy complements the two kinds of piano music in evidence – the tunes played by the eponymous pianist Charlie Koller in the bar where he now works, and the classical pieces performed by the man he used be, the renowned concert pianist Edouard Saroyan.  (The bar’s proprietor also sings an extraordinary, rapid comedy piece – ‘Framboises et mamelles’ – and there are love songs heard on a car radio.   In their different ways, these seem to anticipate ‘Le Tourbillon’ in Jules et Jim.)   There’s a brilliant opening sequence, in which one of Charlie’s brothers, escaping from a bunch of other criminals, gets into conversation with a man who talks about his married life.  We never see that man again but his relative contentment reverberates.  Truffaut’s naturally generous humanism is palpable:  none of the characters – even the stupid hoods in pursuit of Charlie and his family – seems negligible.   The emotional variety and unpredictability of the story is unforced but at the same time resonates with the visual style.  (Raoul Coutard photographed the film.  One particular moment also brings to mind Jules et Jim.  When Charlie’s girl is shot and she tumbles down a snowy incline, it evokes the moment in the later film when Henri Serre as Jim rolls down a hillside with the little daughter of Jules and Catherine.  The contrast between the two sequences – tragic here, idyllic in Jules et Jim – makes the connection between them all the stronger.)    The actresses playing the three women in the pianist’s life – Nicole Berger, Marie Dubois and Michèle Mercier – are delicately individuated.  At the same time they seem to have an indefinable kinship which convinces you that he would be drawn to each one of them, and they to him.

    But I struggled to engage with the film – perhaps because I’d seen Diary of a Country Priest and Breathless on the two previous evenings and Shoot the Pianist seems a minor work in comparison.    Charles Aznavour certainly holds the screen but I found his Edouard/Charlie a compelling presence rather than an interesting character.  Until I read Pauline Kael’s brilliantly persuasive piece when we got home, I didn’t even really get that the pianist was hiding from life because it was proving to be so unkind.  Shoot the Pianist is based on an American novel Down There by David Goodis (Truffaut did the adaptation with Marcel Moussy) and it’s recognised as one of the nouvelle vague pictures that reflect most strongly the influence of, and an affection for, the tropes and themes of American crime films.  (The split between the pianistic lives of Edouard and Charlie, and the latter’s involvement in a crime plot, have to be seen now as inspirations for Fingers and, therefore, for The Beat That My Heart Skipped.)   The humour is of a kind that enables you to perceive the wit without feeling the urge to laugh.   That’s how I experienced the whole picture:  I could see that it was good but I felt removed from it.

    29 April 2009

  • Passport to Pimlico

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Henry Cornelius (1949)

    Whether or not the filmmakers intended to create a social-historical record of London in the late 1940s, they succeed in doing so in the opening scenes of this famous Ealing comedy.  What’s more, these scenes – and some of the people in them – are truly and easily eccentric.  The story starts in a heatwave and Henry Cornelius creates an interesting atmosphere:  the locals seem almost stupefied by the heat but there’s an ominous edge to the torpor – something’s going to happen.  Some kids roll a tractor tyre down a big hole in the streets of Pimlico and it sets off the unexploded bomb we’ve already been told is lying there (the shot of the tyre rolling on its inexorable way is very good).  The wizard idea of the writer T E B Clarke is the discovery in the bomb crater of an ancient document.  It transpires that Edward IV ceded the house that stood on the site, and its environs, to the last Duke of Burgundy, when he sought refuge in London after being presumed dead at the Battle of Nancy in 1477.  The charter has never been revoked.  So Pimlico is legally part of Burgundy and the British government has no jurisdiction over the area.   The Pimlico-Burgundians aren’t bound by rationing or the other bureaucratic constraints of British life in the immediate post-war years.

    It’s easy to understand why the film was such a success at the time – when austerity Britain was able to look back with prideful relief and good humour at what the country had achieved in the war just ended.  In Passport to Pimlico, the canny pluck and self-interested resourcefulness of the locals – which became almost a leitmotif of Ealing comedies – resonates with Britain’s underdog fightback against Hitler.  When the rest of London thwarts Whitehall by throwing food parcels over the barbed wire to the hungry, sequestered Burgundians, it’s a reminder of how the country pulled together between 1939 and 1945 to defeat a common enemy.  (These sequences echo too the even more contemporary Berlin blockade, which audiences in 1949 would have seen on newsreel in other recent visits to the pictures.)  The montages of newspaper front pages (on which the progress of the story increasingly and, in the final minutes, excessively depends), the cinema newsreels, the black marketeers – all contribute to a texture that must have been deeply familiar but they’re used to tell an amusingly tall story.  The opening dedicates the film, in ironically ‘loving memory’, to the ration book – which, of course, wasn’t yet a memory.   The Pimlico folks tear up their ration books on euphoric impulse when they discover they’re no longer British citizens.

    As I write this note, I can almost convince myself this is a classic national comedy.  Yet it took me three sittings to get through what is a very short (84-minute) picture and I was nearly desperate for it to be over.  It’s from the moment the film’s central comic premise takes over that it begins to annoy, and the eccentricity starts to curdle into knowingness.  A classic is just what Passport to Pimlico isn’t.  It’s of its time:  in its contentment with the gradings of social hierarchy; in the smug, mild xenophobia (we’re English so we’ll stand up for the right to be Burgundians but we don’t think much of foreign grub); and, especially, in the styles of acting.  There are people who are bound to be a problem – like Stanley Holloway as a shopkeeper, always letting us know what a card (he thinks) he is, and the Basil Radford-Naunton Wayne combo, reunited here as men from the ministry and as unfunny as they were in Dead of Night.  But I got just as depressed by performers whom I’ve nothing against – because of the Ealing-ish types they were playing:  Barbara Murray, as Holloway’s glam, inexplicably posh daughter; John Slater as a bashful fishmonger; Hermione Baddeley as a no-nonsense dressmaker; and a lot of Cockney (with a capital C) street urchins.  Even Margaret Rutherford, as the excited bluestocking historian who authenticates the buried charter, is a little too anxious to please (in one of her most celebrated roles).  Raymond Huntley is all right, although his work here isn’t a patch on his performance in When We Are Married.  As the eighteenth Duke of Burgundy, Paul Dupuis is probably not much of an actor but his relaxed style is rather welcome with all the busy character work going on around him.  The large cast also includes Jane Hylton, Sydney Tafler, Philip Stainton, Michael Hordern and Charles Hawtrey.

    30 January 2012

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