Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle made this impressive, tightly-coiled 1958 thriller at the tender age of 24. To say the least, it's a precocious directorial debut, gracefully mixing Hitchcockian suspense with some of the more experimental, intimate flourishes that would become the hallmarks of the French New Wave a few years later. The story of twin murders gone wrong on a single Parisian night, the movie lacks some of the emotional insight of later Malle films (or those by his mentor, Bresson, whom he claims directly influenced Gallows) and struggles for resonance in the final few moments that never quite arrives. But overall, it's hard to fault such a great-looking and well-plotted noir. Oh, and did I mention that the soundtrack features original music by Miles Davis, recorded in an improvisational session two years before Kind of Blue?



That's Jeanne Moreau, one of the great all-time French actresses, as the murderous Florence. Along with her boyfriend Julien (Maurice Ronet) plots to perfect crime - he will secretly murder her husband, his co-worker, secretly at the office, right before end of the work day, then leave the building with plenty of other people around as alibis.

It's a fascinating role, in that the plot pivots around her character but provides her with nothing to actually do until the very end. Julien stupidly forgets some crucial evidence back at the crime scene, and on the way to retrieve it, becomes stuck in the elevator. He'll spend much of the remainder of the film in this elevator, while two rebellious kids (Yuri Bertin and Georges Poujoulin) make off with his car and commit a nefarious homicide of their own.

While all this action goes on (including an amazing sequence in which Julien attempts to escape his stories-high prison cell), Florence wanders the streets of Paris looking for her beloved, wondering if her husband has been killed and what's to become of her. These are, quite simply, phenomenal sequences of filmmaking. Malle's cinematographer, Henri Decae, had already shot one of my all-time favorite crime films, Bob le Flambeur, with Jean-Pierre Melville 3 years before, and would go on to collaborate on Truffaut's 400 Blows and several Chabrol films. His black and white compositions in these street scenes, isolating nightscapes with harsh, esxtreme and occasionally unflattering light on Moreau's face, are stunning and expressive.

And I'm not the kind of guy to throw on free jazz and groove out for several hours, but the Miles Davis tracks perfectly compliment Moreau's panicked, half-crazed energy. (The film's original title, Frantic, refers to her mental state throughout.) The entire film's well-made and intense, but it's these moments that will likely stick in my memory.

As I said, the only real fault I can find in the film comes at the very end. Without giving anything away, allow me to say that certain films end on a perfect little moment, the ideal coming-together of everything that has come before. Has everyone seen The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, where Martin Balsam sneezes at the very end at it gives the whole game away, and Walter Matthau opens the door and gives him that look. Like he just figured out the entire movie in that one second?

Elevator of the Gallows sets up a scene just like that. It's the moment when the jig is up, essentially, and ironically it's also the first time we'll ever see the film's main couple together. And yet, the moment just doesn't come together. It's a sensible conclusion, in that it naturally follows all that has come before, but it's not a great closing, one of those dazzling cappers that sticks with you months later. Perhaps this is asking too much, but when a movie builds to a moment like that, how else are you to judge it but the parameters it has set for itself?



Anyway, I still thought this was a pretty tremendous little movie, clearly influential to the New Wave (particularly in helping to launch the career of the iconic Moreau) and even to contemporary filmmakers. (Woody Allen's Match Point, in fact, treads on similar territory in spots, and shares a similarly pessimistic take on the nature of love).