Julien Tavernier, a war veteran played by Maurice Ronet (
The Fire Within), is having an affair with his employer's wife, Florence, played by Jeanne Moreau (
Jules and Jim,
La Femme Nikita), and the two of them have devised a foolproof scheme to kill her husband. While working late on a Saturday evening, Julien uses a rope to climb up to the husband's office, commits the murder, places the gun in the corpse's hand to make the death seem like a suicide, and then makes a discreet getaway so that he can leave town with Florence in a half hour. Just as he emerges onto the street and prepares to drive away in his fancy convertible, however, he realizes that he has accidentally left incriminating evidence at the scene of the crime. He quietly reenters the building to retrieve the evidence, only to be stuck in the elevator between floors when the power is shut off for the weekend. At the same time, Julien's car is stolen by a young couple who takes to the highway with reckless abandon on a countryside getaway that leads to another tragic chain of events. As night falls, the abandoned Florence wanders the streets of the city in search of her lover, oblivious to the uncanny twists of fate that have befallen both of them.
The 1958 French film noir,
Elevator to the Gallows, which was directed with an adventurous, yet tautly meticulous aesthetic by Louis Malle, who would go on to helm subsequent movies of wildly disparate genres, is one of the most ecstatically suspenseful cinematic depictions of flawed characters whose agendas are derailed by bad luck. This offbeat bridge between Hitchcockian precision and French New Wave vibrancy is laced with electrifying coolness, thanks to the improvised jazz score by the one and only Miles Davis and his accompanying musicians.
The centerpiece of this movie, a luxuriously-paced sequence where Moreau's character walks around Paris at night, illuminated by street lamps and bright storefronts, while the lonely trumpet instrumentation by Davis swirls around a sparse rhythm section, is masterfully melancholic, yet undeniably seductive. During an age of filmmaking when actors and actresses were brought to the screen with utmost attention paid to the photography for a glamorous effect, the producers of this movie were alarmed at the idea of Moreau's face displayed by inherent street surroundings and wind instead of on a professionally lit sound stage, but the end result marked a pivotal evolution point for both the leading woman's career and the future of French cinema. A later scene, with a delinquent pretty crook and his girlfriend lounging inside her cramped apartment, anticipated Jean-Luc Godard's iconic 1960 masterpiece,
Breathless.
I have seen
Elevator to the Gallows close to a dozen times, but it continues to envelope me in its kinetic thrall, because, like Quentin Tarantino's 1994 blockbuster,
Pulp Fiction, it is the type of movie that one can revisit multiple times and still have no idea what will happen from one scene to the next. This is brilliant filmmaking through and through, thanks to its riveting comedy of haphazard errors, where viewers delight at watching the absurd predicaments that the characters get themselves into, and to its jazz-infused visions of evening cafes and bustling night traffic in glorious black-and-white, showcasing 1950s cityscapes that were sometimes crowded, sometimes lonely, sometimes erotic, sometimes dangerous, and always cool.
The
Criterion Blu-ray of
Elevator to the Gallows brings a 2K restoration of the movie to high definition in a marvelously filmic fashion that is beyond reproach to my eyes. Miles Davis's score has also never sounded better than on this lossless audio presentation. A 25-minute documentary on the music score and its place in the history of modal jazz is the most prominent supplement, and it's wonderfully entertaining in its own right.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Ordered today:
Linear Mode
