(ASCENSEUR POUR L’ECHAFAUD, Louis Malle, France 1958, 92 min., French/subtitles)
The scheme to carry out the perfect murder by a duplicitous pair of lovers (Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet) is thwarted when one of the adulterers is trapped in an elevator just after committing the crime. Miles Davis’ spare jazz score complements Malle’s somber noir piece. Preceded by JAMMIN’ THE BLUES (Gjon Mili, US 1944, 10 min.), featuring Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet, Jo Jones, and other jazz greats.
Program Notes
Louis Malle was born in 1932 to a wealthy family in northern France. His mother had inherited France’s largest sugar refinery and his father worked as its director. His family moved to Paris during World War II, where Malle attended a Jesuit day school. Later, during the German occupation, his family relocated to the south until France was liberated. After the war, Malle earned a degree in political science at the University of Paris to please his parents. Soon thereafter, he began studies in film at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographique. Believing that “you don’t learn film in school,” he soon dropped out to accept a two-month internship with diver Jacques Cousteau, who had just started to shoot his first underwater documentary, The Silent World (1956). Malle ended-up staying with Cousteau for nearly three years and was quickly named co-director in charge of filming and editing the expeditions. The Silent World was a success, earning Cousteau and Malle the Palm d’Or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957. This early career achievement enabled the twenty-five year old Malle to easily finance his first feature film, Elevator to the Gallows.
Malle bought the Noël Calef paperback on which the film is based casually at a train station. He believed the book provided a straight forward “perfect murder gone wrong” plot he could refashion and sell to the B-movie industry. Despite his low expectations, Malle had great ambitions for his first project. He viewed the film as a genre exercise that would allow him to emulate his two heroes, Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock. He worked with Roger Nimier, a respected author, to help develop the novel into a screenplay. While both men disliked the book, they used the plot as a skeleton for a thriller set in a modernized Paris against the recent wars in Indochina and Algeria. Significantly, they added a character for Jeanne Moreau, who had been a B-movie star. Malle later admitted that while Moreau’s character was not central to the plot, the sequences of her wandering aimlessly on the Paris streets provide some of the most striking imagery in the movie.
Central to these scenes is the breakthrough cinematography of Henri Decaë. Decaë had previously worked with Jean-Pierre Melville and would later help launch the careers of Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut. Decaë experimented with newly developed high-speed film by shooting Moreau at night on location without artificial lighting or makeup. Furthermore, Malle, a jazz aficionado, surprisingly convinced Miles Davis to contribute a score to the film.
Malle was able to organize a meeting with Davis, who had just started touring France without a band. Davis agreed to recording a score after seeing the film just twice. While sipping champagne with Malle and Monreau, Davis recorded an entirely improvised score with three French musicians and bop drummer, Kenny Clarke, in a single night session. The recording became an early example of Davis’ modal approach to jazz, which would conclude two years later with Kind of Blue.
Louis Malle was awarded the Louis Delluc Prize in 1957 for Elevator to the Gallows, an unusual honor for such a young director. The film, with its hip music, rebellious youth, and modern Paris, predated the Nouvelle Vague by several years. Malle would never return to the thriller genre again, instead continuing his long career with an eclectic set of documentaries, adolescence stories, and melancholy narratives. Malle died in 1995 of lymphoma in Beverly Hills, California.
~ John Klacsmann, Student, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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