Word: aznavour
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Shoot the Piano Player. Charles Aznavour is the male Edith Piaf of France. Like Piaf, he is slight, darkly sad-eyed, and sings and looks as if he were in mourning for his life. In this movie, Aznavour sings nary a note. He plays Charlie Koller, a shy honky-tonk piano tinkler in a demimonde bistro, who has a great deal to be mournful about...
Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover...
...crucial and most difficult role is Roger, the inarticulate pastry-chef who by the movie's end attains almost saint-like dignity. Charles Aznavour's characterization completely succeeds in making Roger believable without being either irritatingly simple or unworldly...
...Turn (Show Corporation), the work of France's André Cayatte (Justice Is Done, We Are All Murderers), illustrates in skillful melodrama some subtle reflections on apparent and actual freedom and bondage. The subject is discussed in terms of two Frenchmen, one an uneducated baker (Charles Aznavour), the other a sophisticated journalist (Georges Riviere), who go off to fight the Germans in 1939. The baker, lacking any desire to fight, goes because he is told to-his decision seems to be forced. The journalist, declining a deferment, goes because he chooses to ("I want...
Cayatte suffers some confusions in his script, but he is fortunate in his principals -Aznavour, Rivière and Trantow all play with clarity, sensitivity, restraint. As is customary in a conte moral, the film simplifies life to teach a lesson, but in this case the lesson is profound: True freedom is the freedom to do good...