Celebrating the 60th anniversary of Louis Malle’s masterpiece of suspense and style.
Dipping his toes into romance, coming-of-age, and thriller, Louis Malle covered a lot of ground during his reign in French cinema. He is one director who was not afraid to embrace the limitations of a specific genre, using them to test himself as a filmmaker. Whatever story he told, he poured himself into and didn’t merely deliver an experiment in genre filmmaking. As his pivotal thriller Elevator to the Gallows turns 60, let’s take a look at the noir style it embraces while taking on a French narrative.
Elevator to the Gallows follows Julien (Maurice Ronet), war veteran and businessman, as he kills his boss, Mr. Carala (Jean Wall), and runs away with the man’s wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau). The plan goes awry when he goes back to retrieve evidence he left behind and gets trapped in the elevator. As Julien tries to escape, a couple of young teens steal his getaway car and leave another trail under his name to another vicious murder he didn’t even commit. The police are dumbfounded and so is Florence, but she is determined to find the truth and hopefully get her lover out of trouble.
The best of noir
Malle chose the very best noir elements when constructing the style for Elevator to the Gallows. Many American films noir could only have wished to have a score as well-rounded as the one Miles David created here. The number that plays as Moreau walks down the streets of Paris is what everyone imagines when they think of the genre: dark, smooth, and sexy, the brassy sound of a trumpet cuts through the dreamy, soft light that illuminates the actress in one of her most famous scenes.
In that moment, we’d expect a typical noir voiceover, but no need for one with the score that gives us a lonely monologue without ever uttering a word. Not every number in the score is slow. Davis picks up the pace with the scenes that follow the young French couple during their adventure. As spontaneous as their plot, the jazz that scores their moments is quick and jumpy.
The article Noir Style Meets French Storytelling in ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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