Francois Truffaut called his second feature “a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B-films from which I learned so much.... I know that...the film seems to contain four or five films, but that's what I wanted. Above all I was looking for the explosion of a genre (the detective film) by mixing genres....” (in James Monaco, “The New Wave”). Shoot The Piano Player mixes the comic and the serious, ordered and loose compositions, related to the double identity of its hero, Charlie (Charles Aznavour), a pianist in a bistro, who is trying to forget his past as Edouard, a celebrated concert musician. The involved (and purposely improbable) plot includes a tentative and touching love affair made difficult by an assortment of gangsters and, finally, impossible by a shoot-out in the snow. Pierre Kast wrote: “The externally imposed framework of a thriller allows the individuality of the characters to be rendered more sensitively.... The plastic beauty of the ending in the snow and the emotion brought about...are not diminished but magnified by the grotesque counterpoint of the gangsters.” (in Georges Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”)