Tirez Sur Le Pianiste [Shoot the Piano Player] is less a parody than a new mutation of the "film noir". The toughs are absurd rather than frightening, the hero lays the lovelies because he's weak, ineffectual, shy and resigned. This "Romantic" hero, cursed by his own fine sensitivity, is by recent conventions not just an anti-hero, like The Wild One, but an anti-anti-hero—a soundly paradoxical basis for the film's extraordinary charm.

The story, by Truffaut out of David (Dark Passage) Goodis, recalls James M. Cain's Serenade in its baroque juxtaposition of fine art and skullduggery….

In line with the admirable anti-psychologising trend of the French Cinema, Truffaut's film is festooned with mysterious, seemingly arbitrary details of setting and style, and its plot may seem a chain of contrived coincidences and unmotivated decisions. But the "new superficiality" in films (and novels and the theatre), the creative use of...