Pierre Étaix has all kinds of trouble trying to get home in time for dinner in HAPPY ANNIVERSARY
TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE (SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER) (François Truffaut, 1960) and
HEUREUX ANNIVERSAIRE (HAPPY ANNIVERSARY) (Pierre Etaix, 1962)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Celeste Bartos Theater, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
July 24-26 1:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
François Truffaut shot out of the blocks in 1959 with the classic 400 Blows, and he followed it up with Shoot the Piano Player, a magnificent noir about a virtuoso saloon piano player and his always-in-trouble brother. French crooner Charles Aznavour is super-cool as the secretive, shy pianist with a hidden past who gets caught up in his crooked brother’s dangerous predicament, against his better judgment. Comedy mixes with pathos, dance-hall jollies lead to murder and kidnapping, and lost love holds a curse in a dark, haunting film you will never forget. Loosely based on David Goodis’s pulp novel Down There, the film also stars Claudine Huzé, whom Truffaut renamed Marie Dubois, as the waitress Léna and Nicole Berger, Richard Kanayan, Albert Rémy, and Jean-Jacques Aslanian as members of Aznavour’s troubled family. Shoot the Piano Player is screening July 24-26 at 1:30 in MoMA’s ongoing “An Auteurist History of Film” series, along with another black-and-white classic, Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière’s deliriously funny short, Happy Anniversary, which won the 1963 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject. As a woman (Laurence Lignières) prepares a special anniversary dinner at home, her husband (Étaix) gets trapped in all kinds of craziness as he desperately tries to make it home in time, but the traffic and parking gods are against him. Hysterical slapstick ensues virtually without dialogue, like a classic silent film with a wacky score, melding Chaplin and Keaton with Tati and, dare we say, Jerry Lewis. And you’ll never be able to look at Mr. Bean the same way again. Truffaut called Étaix’s 1965 feature, Yoyo, “a beautiful film in which I loved every shot and every idea, and which taught me many things about movies,” forever linking the two French directors. It’s quite a treat, therefore, to see Truffaut’s slyly comic gangster picture right alongside Étaix’s wildly funny short.