Daily Movie Rec 5/17/24

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Directed by: Louis Malle

Cinematography by: Henri Decaë

Country: France

Genre: Crime/Drama/Thriller

Plot:

Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) wanders the nighttime streets of Paris in despair, feeling abandoned by her lover, Julien (Maurice Ronet), after seeing his car leave the city with a young woman in the passenger seat. Unbeknownst to Florence, however, an angry youth named Louis (Georges Poujouly) and his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin) jacked the stylish vehicle while Julien was trapped in an elevator after going to retrieve the forgotten evidence he left behind when he assassinated his wealthy industrialist boss - a war profiteering arms dealer as well as Florence's husband - earlier in the day. Fate has its own plans for the four dissatisfied Parisians looking for escape. [Based on the 1956 novel Ascenseur pour l'échafaud by Noël Calef.]

First Images:

An extreme close-up of a woman's face - all but her eyes shrouded in darkness. The shadows peel back to reveal her full face as she whispers, "I'm the one who can't take anymore. I love you." The camera slowly zooms out to reveal her speaking on the phone.

Last Images:

A photograph floating in development fluid showing a happy couple in embrace. As a woman speaks to no one in particular, saying, "they can't keep us apart," the picture fades from view like memories of a future erased. The life in the photo is the only life the couple will have together.

Thoughts:

Louis Malle helped set the stage for the French New Wave with his solo debut feature, Elevator to the Gallows, a groundbreakingly modern and deeply artful film noir that's closer to a tone poem than a crime thriller. Though Malle and cinematographer Henri Decaë deserve much credit for the film's pervasive atmosphere, Jazz legend Miles Davis's iconic score - which he recorded in one four-hour session before trimming it down - undeniably provides the bulk of the film's unforgettable sexy-sadness. Jeanne Moureau, one of cinema's all-time great sadgirls, is also perfectly cast, emanating her unrivaled brand of elegant melancholy - aching, yet poised, chin held high as tears stream down.

Elevator to the Gallows exists on more than just vibes though. Malle's skillful cinematic language and twisting narrative prevent the film from sliding into style-over-substance territory. Like many of the New Wave films that would follow, Elevator to the Gallows displays a preoccupation with the post-modern fluidity of truth, reality, and history. When young malcontent car thief Louis - pretending to be ex-special forces soldier Julien, a veteran of the Indochina war - converses with an older German man (whose sports car is an even more alluring prize), the German man tells Louis that Germans hate war, and have never been anything more than respectable traveling businessmen. Though Louis had just been openly critical of France's wars, he does not question this claim, even though the story's time period is only 13 years removed from the end of WWII - a war that the German man would have been well of age during. The German man also sees right through Louis's facade of pretending to be Julien (a veteran of a war Louis is far too young to have served during) but accepts his lies as truth anyway. Both men are satisfied to rewrite the past to suit their own needs. One to clean his country's - and possibly his own - slate clean of the atrocities committed during WWII; one to escape his malaise and go on an adrenaline-pumping crime spree under the identity of another.

Malle's shrewdness for ideas extends to his film grammar as well. In the assassination sequence, the director cuts to an office woman sharpening pencils right as the gun goes off, the whirring of the mechanical device covering the sound of the gunshot. The woman pulls the pencil out and, upon examination, sees no lead in the tip of the pencil. Malle then cuts back after the deed has been done to the smoking gun, another tool that just lost some lead, creating a sly visual rhyme between the two leadless objects. Later on, when Julien returns to the office building to retrieve the grapple hook he unwittingly left behind and gets stuck in a powerless elevator, Malle films a security guard closing the iron gate to the entrance of the building: a metaphor for the prison bars that Julien is likely to find himself behind after his careless mistake. Fate returns him to the scene of the crime, trapping him like a snared animal as the car he's imprisoned in hangs helplessly in the plunging elevator shaft.

Favorite Shot:

Jeanne Moureau, shot in deep space, forlornly roaming the lit city streets of Paris at night accompanied by the smooth, sorrowful jazz of Miles Davis's score. As Moreau gets closer to the camera, the lens shifts from deep to shallow focus, flattening the image like a canvas as the lights and reflections behind the actress morph into radiant dots like impressionist pointilism, changing her backdrop into something resembling abstract art.

Where to watch:

The Criterion Channel