Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

Sainted French director François Truffaut’s second feature film, Shoot the Piano Player (1960), is a study in the intransigence of betrayal. Does anybody ever recover fully from being cheated? A man has been a concert pianist, but his adulteress wife’s imperfect deceptions have rendered him insecure, bitter, listless. From the great symphony halls he has fallen to tinkling background fill in a bawdy, trashy bar. So removed is he from any urge to believe again in the healing of love that even the advances of a kind, caring and hot like Pernod waitress fail to crack his shell of misery. He can’t hide in there forever, though, especially not after he is tracked down by gangsters who want him to account for a betrayal of his own.