Elevator To The Gallows (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

If I had reviewed this film in 1958, I probably would have written, "While ´Elevator to the Gallows´ is ultimately not a successful film, it is an impressive effort for a 25 year-old director making his first fiction film. Louis Malle is definitely a talent worth keeping an eye on." Now, nearly fifty years later, I can state with complete confidence that I would have been right.

Malle had already secured the 1956 Palme d´Or as co-director (with Jacques Cousteau) of the documentary "Monde du Silence," and he parlayed his early-won fame into this debut fiction feature, the first of thirty feature films in a career that spanned five decades. "Elevator to the Gallows" is perhaps the only Malle film that can be easily categorized in a genre; it is vintage Hollywood film noir, though distinguished by a verité strain that reveals the director´s documentary roots and predicts (in a sense) the realist strain in the earlier films of the soon-to-explode French New Wave.

Like many good films noir, "Elevator to the Gallows" features an elaborately plotted crime, an illicit affair, and multiple murders. In a neat twist on genre conventions, this film noir then deals entirely with the aftermath of the crime rather than the crime itself. Julien (Maurice Ronet), by means of a nifty acrobatic display, murders his boss who is also the husband of Julien´s lover, Florence (Jeanne Moreau). Julien pulls off the murder without a hitch and arranges a perfect alibi, but when he carelessly forgets to wrap up one minor detail, the plan rapidly crumbles to pieces.

Malle splits the action into three entirely separate plot strands, the most exciting of which involves Julien´s attempts to free himself from an elevator in which he gets trapped. Julien´s dogged probing for any potential weakness in an enclosed space carries echoes of Robert Bresson´s masterpiece "A Man Escaped" (1956), no coincidence as Malle worked as assistant director on that film.

Best remembered, however, are the scenes in which Florence wanders the nighttime streets of Paris, searching in vain for Julien after he misses their rendezvous. Malle and cinematographer Henri Decaë shoot these outdoor scenes in a documentary style, and photographed Jeanne Moreau in a non-glamorous style, somewhat ironic since this is the role credited with making her a film star (Moreau was already an accomplished stage actress). These relatively sedate scenes are really brought to life, however, by a now-legendary jazz score that Miles Davis improvised in a single recording session (more on this in the Extras section).

All of this sounds good, and much of it is, but the film´s third plotline falls flat: an ill-considered story involving two addle-brained teen lovers who steal Julien´s car and cause all sorts of mayhem that far-too-neatly boomerangs on Julien and Florence, and ultimately seals their star-crossed fates. The teens are cardboard cutouts who seem to be in the film only to add a reinforcing dose of "l´amour fou", an established noir staple, to the mix. Malle creates a structure which allows him great freedom, cutting back and forth at will between his three discrete storylines, but this ultimately feels clunky and mechanical. Malle brings great passion to the movie - this is undeniably the work of an ardent film lover - and he loads the film with many wonderful ideas, but probably a few too many for an inexperienced director to juggle gracefully. As much as I admire cinephilia, it can have its drawback. "Elevator" reminds me of some of the less appealing qualities of Quentin Tarantino: one genre element is stacked on top of another simply to prove that the filmmaker knows them all, but without any concern for whether or not they work in harmony.