Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Elevator to the Gallows has a menacing central image that the rest of the picture struggles to equal. Julien (Maurice Ronet), a man of dubious reputation, murders his boss, flees, forgets something, and gets himself stuck in the damn titular elevator trying to go back for it. Julien waits and waits, trapped, a bug in a particularly precarious jar. This sight, of a killer cramped and crowded by his own guilt, at the mercy of a larger justice disguised as perverse bad luck, is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Louis Malle, in his directorial debut, isn’t satisfied with this simple, ingenious scenario. The story splinters into another scenario, and then yet another, these latter plot strands only distracting from the sensuality and power of the original story.

Elevator to the Gallows is an example of two otherwise perfectly suitable thriller ideas being forced into competition with one another and nearly canceling each other out in the process. As Julien finds himself imprisoned in the faulty elevator, a callow young couple decides on impulse to steal his car and, well, they haven’t quite gotten that far yet. They eventually end up inadvertently framing Julien for a murder he had nothing to do with. The police close in on Julien for this second murder, all as Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the wife of Julien’s former employer as well as (of course) Julien’s lover, searches the streets for Julien, thinking he’s discarded her and their plan, running out with another woman.

Elevator isn’t as frantic as all the above would lead you to believe, Malle allows the picture a deliberate, dreamy, existential pace that distracts us from the sheer busy-ness (and ludicrousness) of what we’re watching. And we should be careful with the term ludicrous, as to apply logic to a picture that’s clearly striving for (and obtaining) the poetic is to miss the point. The sensuality of the images and the one thing after another tumbling dominoes nature of the scenario aren’t totally of a piece though. We’ve seen many noirs or crime pictures in which events shatter in many different directions, but the best of those pictures (let’s recruit Rififi as Exhibit A, as it’s in front of me as I write this) achieve a true willy-nilly chaos. We feel swept up with the characters as their existences slip out from underneath them. Elevator to the Gallows is a slower, narrower picture, and the excess of events is an intrusion. The frequent cross-cutting to updates of the other wronged parties breaks the “all alone as the world folds in” spell. (Let’s recruit, as Exhibit B, a picture that nurtures this sort of wounded mood, carefully, without a bunch of extraneous hugger-mugger, Le Samourai).

I wouldn’t dare advise you skip the picture though. I go back to the haunting image of Julien in the elevator, awaiting judgment, a regret or common decency still beyond him (he would appear to think in more animal, instinctual terms) smoking cigarettes to pass the time. There’s also the image of the beautiful Moreau in close-up, whispering words of love and concern to her doomed partner in a pay-phone, moments before the murder is to go down. There’s the near Expressionism of the interrogation room sequences toward the end: the room bathed in darkness, only the speaking parties allowed the slightest of vision by a sliver of light above. Elevator to the Gallows has a hazy, soft, but somehow sharp at the same time cinematography that conjures hallucinatory, naughty, sexy thoughts as corrupted by a greater moral decay and outrage (pointed references to Algeria abound). This picture would make an ideal double bill with either Godard’s Le Petit soldat or Allen’s Match Point. (The former also explores Algeria in thriller terms; while the latter also addresses the notion of chance as ultimate judge, jury and executioner.)

In the end, I still very much value Elevator to the Gallows, allowing the good and great scenes to count for more than the scenes that tend to verge on the tedious. The film is obviously the work of a major filmmaker (though that’s easy to say fifty years after the fact) and I imagine Elevator is a picture that will grow in estimation as it fades in immediate viewing memory, possibly reshaping itself in the mind as the slimmer, less tangible picture it was always meant to be. That possibility is one of the many facets of the magic of the movies.

Posted on May 20th, 2008 in Reviews, Classics, 1958 |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.