more naturally. Soundtrack "Framboise" (Boby Lapointe) by Boby Lapointe "Dialogue d'Amoureux" (Félix Leclerc) by Félix Leclerc and Lucienne Vernay Reception Critical response Shoot the Piano Player was first shown at the London Film Festival on 21 October 1960. It later premiered in Paris on 22 November and in the U.K. on 8 December. It did not premiere in the U.S. until July 1962. The film was financially unsuccessful, although it was popular among cinephiles such as Claude Miller. Miller was then a film student at IDHEC and later explained that he and his friends knew all the film's dialogue by heart, stating "We cited it all the time; it became a kind of "in" language." Film critic Marcel Martin called it a disappointment after The 400 Blows and wrote that it would "only please the true lover of movies." In Variety, film critic Mosk called its script meandering and Bosley Crowther wrote that the film "did not hold together." Pauline Kael called Aznavour's performance "intensely human and sympathetic" and Andrew Sarris praised the film, stating "great art can also be great fun." Dwight Macdonald stated that the film mixes "three genres which are usually kept apart: crime melodrama, romance and slapstick...I thought the mixture didn't gel, but it was an exhilarating try." Jacques Rivette initially complained to Truffaut that Charlie was "a bastard", but later stated that he liked the film. On Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of critics' reviews for Shoot the Piano Player are positive, with an average rating of 8.9/10. In popular culture The 2002 film The Truth About Charlie was an homage to this film; references are made, a brief scene is shown, and Aznavour makes two appearances in the movie. The title has become somewhat of a joke on the club scene, usually to get a less-than-talented musician to stop performing, but occasionally breaks into the musical mainstream: In the 1966 Howard Hawks film El Dorado, when Cole Thorton (John Wayne) and Mississippi (James Caan) stop to buy a shotgun for Mississippi, they ask the gunsmith Swede Larson where the shotgun came from, they are told that the previous owner was a man who couldn't see very well but got into a fight in a saloon. However, the shotgun owner couldn't hear the other man because the piano player was making too much noise, so "he just shoot the piano player and they hung him". British singer-songwriter