Criterion and Showtime have provided me opportunities to re-see a number of films directed by Louis Malle (including one, "Black Moon," that is not on DVD or in the epinions database). I thought that Lacombe, Lucien remained impressive, if a bit drawn-out. I found Viva Maria! still very entertaining. And I liked and admired "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud" ("Elevator to the gallows" is a literal translation) more than I remembered—or it has improved with greater age (its and/or mine).

Malle's alter ego in "Le souffle de couer" (Murmur of the Heart) is a young jazz aficionado, and it must have been exhilarating in 1958 for the young director to have Miles Davis doing the musical score for his first feature film. The late-1950s were a period of Miles Davis (post be-bop, pre-electrified) I especially like. Much of the music for "Elevator" is his solo trumpet. Some has some backup musicians, but none has the heavy orchestral backup of "Kind of Blue," etc.

I start with the music, because I never had any doubt that "Elevator to the Gallows" had one of the greatest jazz musical scores of any movie. (If there's a better one, it's escaped my memory or I haven't heard it.)

Although lacking jumpcuts and voiceover narration, the movie seems "nouvelle vogues," perhaps après la lettre,* (two years before "À bout de souffle"). It is also arguably cinéma noir with two pairs of unmarried lovers involved in three murders—two ad hoc, one very carefully planned—and obviously doomed (from fairly early on, though not by the Hayes-Breen office's censors, as many lawbreakers in American noirs were).

The film begins with the older pair of lovers, former paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) in a café. She says that in half an hour she will be free and they will be together. If nothing else, the film's title would suggest that that ain't gonna be.

Tavernier ensures his alibi and goes up to kill his lover's husband, rich arms merchant Simone Carala (Jean Wall). They have enough words to establish that the Carala enterprises (in which Tavernier works) are dubious, so that the audience is not completely out of sympathy with how his wife plans to stop being adulterous.

Tavernier and his alibi (secretary) leave, the last employees in the building. Tavernier puts down the roof on his convertible, starts the engine, and then notices a rope he left behind. He goes back, takes the elevator up, and—between floors, the maintenance man switches off the power and leaves.

The best-laid plans... He is trapped—and his attempts to get out of the trap are as meticulously observed as were those of the man condemned to die in Robert Bresson's great A Man Escapes.

His car with its motor running is taken by a petty thief, Louis (Georges Poujouly) and reluctant girlfriend, who works in a flower-shop near the Carala building. It is difficult to decide which of these two is stupider. She sometimes talks sense, but veers into egging him on. Their joyride leads to murders, which the police are certain were committed by Tavernier.

Tavernier was back cursing that elevator. He had an alibi for the murder he committed, but not for the one that he not only did not do but did not know had occurred. Ironically, Florence recognizing his car and the florist assistant (and also not knowing of the two murders she had not planned) tells the police she saw Tavernier drive by. The fates seem to be playing with both couples who think they have gotten away with murder.

The ways in which the two couples seal their own and the other couple's fates is carefully planned and brilliantly shot by the great Henri Decaë (who also shot "Les Amants, "Vie privée," "Viva Maria!" and "Le voleur" for Malle, "Les quatre cents coups" for Truffaut, "Le silence de mer," "Les enfants terribles," "Bob le flambeur," "Le samouraï," and "Le cercle rouge" for Melville, "Plein soleil" for Clément, "Les bonnes femmes" for Chabrol—in short, many of the noirish French masterpieces of the 1950s and early 1960s—plus some lesser-known Belmondo movies and "The Boys from Brazil." The "City of Light" looks quite dark in this movie—but, like the rain-soaked Moreau still looked more than fetching.

The young pair are so obnoxiously stupid that it is difficult for me to applaud their enacting. Lino Ventura (whose career was launched in jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi and who starred in Melville's "Le deuxième souffle") has little to do as the homicide inspector. The evidence he needs pretty much falls into his lap.

The leads are excellent. I have had to reconsider my fairly low estimation of Jeanne Moreau in light of watching her mixture of sullenness, wounded vanity, sensuality, and imperiousness in this movie and the wise mentors she played "Viva Maria!" and "La femme Nikita," and in her very impressive performance as the aged Marguerite Duras in "Cet amour-là." I have to watch "Jules et Jim," Diary of a Chambermaid," and "La notte" again, and maybe "La Mariée était en noir" too (though I always liked her in that). I have almost managed to overcome memories of her singing "Every man kills the thing he loves" from Fassbinder's hideously bad adaptation of Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest!.

In 1958 it was a shock to have her shot unglamorously and (allegedly) without makeup, though I have to say she still looks a movie star to me, and remarkably unbedraggled after walking in a daze through a thunderstorm. She is particularly impressive pulling herself together and setting out to save Tavernier from being charged with the murders he did not commit.

My memories of the first Philippe Greenleaf in "Plein Soleil" are eclipsed by the second (that is the killer and later impersonator, Tom Ripley, played by Alain Delon) and by Jude Law in the Anthony Minghella adaptation, and I haven't seen Chabrol's "Le scandale" or "La femme infidèle" or Jules Dassin's "He Who Must Die," or the various movies with Brigitte Bardot in which Maurice Ronet appeared. (I've seen, but don't remember Malle's "Le feu follet," in which he starred.) He seems a trifle affectless in "Elevator," but starts as something of a puppet of Mme. Carala and is a fatalistic victim of circumstances through the rest of the movie.

It is a director's movie more than an actor's movie. OK, a director with a great cinematographer and a justly legendary musical collaborator (and an actress who was going to become a superstar directed by him the next year). Except for one too ironic touch (involving a little girl who pesters Mme. Carala when she is at the locked door of her husband's building), I think the movie is perfect. (But, pending watching it again, "Le souffle de couer" is still my favorite of the 14 Malle films I've seen, though I am especially grateful for "Atlantic City" for personal reasons.)

The restoration is stellar, even by the high standards of Criterion. I haven't seen the second disc, which includes a feature on the score, footage of Davis blowing the score, a new interview with Moreau, archival ones with Malle, Ronet, and pianist René Urtreger; nor the booklet. Criterion has gone all out with this release and its new set that includes Lacombe Lucien, Au revoir les enfants, Le souffle de couer, and a disc of bonus features.

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*The more I've seen of French films of the 1950s (none of which I'd seen when I was studying the "nouvelle vogue" movies of the 1960s during the early 1970s), and the more I've read of how many of the great earlier French directors the Cahiers writers-turned-directed admired (Renoir, Cocteau, Becker, Melville, the last two considerably influenced by the American gangster/noir tradition), the less a break ("rupture" in French) the New Wave seems to me. Similarly, an earlier Frenchman who has been much admired in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in L'ancien régime et le révolution, writing about the revolutionary social changes made it seem that most of the most radical changes preceded 1789 and " la révolution." (I love that definite article! and that the gender of the noun is feminine...)

Along with my review of Lacombe, Lucienand Viva Maria!, this and some other reviews of French books, movies, and music is a contribution to Ifif1938's French find writeoff.. Check it out, and Happy Bastille Day (demaine)!

©2006, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age