In the film, a professional pianist learns that he owes his entire career to his wife's affair with a talent agent. Following his wife's suicide, the widower starts using a pseudonym and finds work in a bar. When his brothers steal the loot of gangsters, the pianist and his new love interest are targeted for kidnapping.
Shoot the Piano Player in the context of Francois Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut (UK: /ˈtruːfoʊ,ˈtrʊ-/TROO-foh, TRUU-, US: /truːˈfoʊ/troo-FOH; French:[fʁɑ̃swaʁɔlɑ̃tʁyfo]; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author. The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter-ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. Truffaut supplied the story for another milestone of the movement, Breathless (1960), directed by his Cahiers colleague Jean-Luc Godard.