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.
The Left Handed Gun (1958)
It’s impossible to see Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun nowadays and not consider Bonnie and Clyde, the ironically, morally gray outlaw picture that Penn would direct nine years later. The films are startling in their similarities, particularly in their ahead of their time insistence that violence amount to something more than men merrily, mindlessly blowing one other away in the service of some self-justifying, hypocritical, appease the manly man coda. The Left Handed Gun isn’t nearly as violent as Bonnie and Clyde, there’s no way it could have been in the U.S. in 1958, but you may find it, in its own way, even more uncomfortable than Clyde. There’s a disconnection of style and artistic temperament in Gun that’s unexpected and frightening.
Younger viewers can slip Bonnie and Clyde into their DVD players and prepare themselves for one of the first of the new wave of violent, rebellious American pictures of the 1960s-1970s: Bonnie and Clyde undeniably belongs in that era. The Left Handed Gun, on the other hand, shot in stunning, stately, black and white, looks just like another breezy, authority reaffirming American western of the 1950s, perhaps directed by Howard Hawks in the second or third act of his career, and that expectation comes to bite you in the ass. The Left Handed Gun behaves according to the standards of the day, at first, complete with instantly dated opening song, but it gradually becomes something darker and more ambitious. Bonnie and Clyde, like Psycho or any other classic that’s at least partially legendary for its bloodshed and anarchic sensibilities, unavoidably braces you through cultural osmosis. The Left Handed Gun has the benefit of relative obscurity; it’s a vicious little animal that doesn’t announce itself with a BEWARE sign.
I tend to forget how dangerous Paul Newman can be in the right role, as his wonderful elder statesman performances have a habit of coming to my mind first. Newman’s charm, at times, particularly in his youth, could trump whatever the character may have actually been about (the traditional trap of the movie star) but he was also, and would continue to be, an astute, instinctual actor; a man very much aware of his presence and charisma. Occasionally, Newman would turn that heat right back on the audience (Hud, Cool Hand Luke) and do something risky and uncomfortable, or at least more risky and uncomfortable than you expect. Billy the Kid is cut from the same cloth: good looking, commanding, likeable, but also a flake; a live-wire who reaches for his gun at the slightest provocation with no consideration as to how the gunfight will affect his friends or himself the day, or even moments, after. Armistices, apologies, secret alliances, back door hand shakes, these are the dealings of corrupt higher-ups; Billy’s gun is, in his eyes, the great equalizer.
The Left Handed Gun may have an even fuller, more complicated understanding of its troubled hero than the (still greater) Bonnie and Clyde. Billy the Kid is glamorized, revered (largely by townspeople unaware of how casually he screws people caught in the cross-fire) but the picture never dilutes his self-absorption or near insanity. That refusal comes into focus in what is possibly the best scene in the picture: Billy and his de facto gang are at a party hosted by destined pursuer Pat Garrett (John Dehner), and a gentleman, resenting Billy’s fame as well as the subsequent, by the skin of his teeth pardon afforded by an armistice, tries to start something. Billy initially resists, and Newman handles his push and pull towards and away from violence and agitation with understatement, slowly boiling to an intense, unchecked fever. It’s a testament to Penn, Newman and John Dehner’s work that the almost murders of The Left Handed Gun are more disturbing than the actual murders of most pictures. This picture, at its best, has that same liquid violence to comedy to violent comedy to slapstick volatility that marks Bonnie and Clyde as an undeniable masterpiece.
The true bloodshed of The Left Handed Gun is also a triumph, memorable in its strangeness and near abstraction. Billy and his boys, as they must, ultimately disregard the armistice and plug one of the men they’ve vowed to punish for their former boss’s murder, and the shooting is ghastly and cold-blooded: the man’s terrified, twisted face framed in a triangle as he collapses to his death. Another murder, committed out of indifference to a promise Billy made to Garrett, is a bit more justified but even more perverse in its violation: the partygoers cry and stand shocked and aghast, the weight of what’s just transpired acknowledged with remarkable (even for today) honesty.
Penn, again foreshadowing Bonnie and Clyde, doesn’t let us off the hook with a lazy, convenient ending either: the right person dies and the right person lives, but the final act is denied any riding off into the sunset closure: the final killing is as much a suicide as anything else, a loss brought about from imperceptible damage, bitterness and twisted authority. The ending is even more of a lump in the throat than Clyde’s, that picture, reminiscent of Easy Rider, at least allows us a certain self-glamorizing, self-pitying, the little guy can’t ever win fantasy. The Left Handed Gun pitilessly reveals Billy the Kid to be every bit as self-motivated as the big man he opposes, he’s just not as adept at playing the game, which is, unfortunately, our country in a nutshell.
Mon oncle (1958)
Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (the second in the Monsieur Hulot series) is one of those pictures that reaffirms how underutilized the comedy picture generally is, especially nowadays. The comedy (along with the horror film) seems to be seen as a genre to cut your teeth on before moving on to more “important” pictures, tossed off to the little guys when there should be room reserved for our masters. We should know by now that the comedy and the horror picture are two of the hardest genres to realize, as well as two of the richest and most malleable: the two genres most willing to lend themselves to subtexts that can be heavy, or maudlin or self-congratulatory in other genres.
Mon oncle is a tonal wonder, a film that appears to be light, airy and inconsequential, but slowly works its hooks into you without your knowing. The films all too often these days announce their effect from the outset, a program might as well appear in the lobby announcing the evening’s intentions; “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haggis wishes to present to you a story of racial strife and hope” or “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gondry wishes to present to you a story of incoherent whimsy and self-consciousness.” If you haven’t read or seen much of Tati’s Hulot series (I’m a novice myself), you can be forgiven for assuming you have Mon oncle figured out, particularly after the stylish/cute opening scene that follows a group of dogs from the cramped, cluttered, more rambunctiously alive city to the stylized, stiflingly chic home of the family of a higher-up in the plastics industry. One dog gets beyond the gates while the others don’t; a blunt but more succinct summation of the classes than Haggis has yet to offer.
The family is comprised of a puffy, proud wife, the puffier, prouder plastics executive, and a boy who appears to be over it all (he longs, as many people in these types of pictures have a habit of longing, for something more tangible and real, a bit of mischief to jar all that overwhelming pride in purposeless accomplishment). Left to their own devices, this family would be assured a place of tranquil suburban convenience that fosters a certain kind of new age modern lobotomy, chic ritual at the expense of anything messy or imaginative. But that is not to be, Monsieur Hulot, the uncle of the title (whom the director plays himself) occasionally drops by to shake the family out of their domestic stupor. Hulot is a stranded misfit, clad in coat and pipe, (suggesting Sherlock Holmes by way of Peter Sellers, though purposefully lacking the personality of either) that lives a life, like the Tramp, or even Boudu, totally devoid of any structure or self-consciousness. Hulot isn’t contemptuous of his surroundings as Boudu was; he, like the Tramp, projects an aura of mystification with the world around him, always one, two, a hundred steps behind.
Tati’s primary interest here would appear to be the character’s homes and how they contrast and comment on their inhabitants. Hulot’s apartment, established in a classic bit, appears to have been designed by a hyper, over-imaginative child: doors, stairs and ramps appear for their own dream sake divorced from any practical purpose. The exterior of Hulot’s home is a silent marvel, a design that (poignantly) reaffirms the beautiful, common textures and rituals of our lives. The family’s house is one of those 2001 competence at the expense of personality nightmares crossed with the board game “Mouse Trap”; the family spends as much time shifting from room to room (each of which having to be allowed to fulfill its maximum capacity for use) as Hulot does climbing his stairs, but they carry on with a joyless, sad manner of manufactured obligation that chokes the love of process away; this family’s having coffee before they’ve adequately set the dinner table for the dinner they barely remember eating.
Mon oncle has a dreamy, slow start, but the jokes accumulate like a snowball down a hill, and soon you find yourself overwhelmed with Tati’s layered, restrained, seemingly free-form framing, his world falls apart with a smirk and a sure hand. A party sequence, near the middle of the picture, is one of the most impressively sustained bits of comic dementia I’ve ever seen, managing to turn a series of ridiculously elaborate walkways (all to protect the non-existent garden) into something elusive, unshakable and distinctly menacing. Hulot is to meet the family’s neighbor, in the hope that he settle down and stay out of everyone’s way, but he quickly gets distracted with the boy and a plant, while the rest of the family and guests find themselves grappling with an already troublesome fountain (the mother only keeps it on for guests, who slip in and out with maddening frequency) that has broken. Business transactions are had, banalities are exchanged, all as tables, snacks and chairs are moved from one end of the yard to another, and all in accordance with those damn walkways. Tati ratchets the tension, and you slowly realize that he’s effectively squeezed you from laughter to an authentic discomfort: the stifling, formal hypocrisy of the upper class has become a rounded, authentic, original vision of hell.
Mon oncle is overlong, and Tati’s technique here ultimately inspires more exhaustion than elation (though one imagines this is also purposeful) but the film is justifiably revered, and ends on an unexpectedly devastating implication. We’re conditioned by Chaplin to expect this type of picture to go for the tear ducts at the end, to mourn the little guy swallowed by society, but Tati sends his Hulot on his way toward another setting to fumble (the father’s plan finally taking hold) and the film, surprisingly, views this as a positive. The father, at odds with his little boy throughout much of the picture, is finally allowed a moment of grace and mischief that’s unobstructed by the inattentive, bumbling uncle. Hulot’s dreaminess ultimately revealed to be as insidious a form of self-delusion as the house and all its baffling gadgetry.
★★★★
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