Louis Malle’s French thriller is cooler than cool — his first dramatic film is a slick suspense item with wicked twists of fate and images to die for: 1) Jeanne Moreau at the height of her beauty 2) walking through beautifully lit Parisian back streets 3) accompanied by a fantastic Miles Davis soundtrack. Murder in Paris doesn’t get any better.
Elevator to the Gallows
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 335
1957 / B&W / 1:66 anamorphic 16:9 / 88 min. / Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Frantic / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 6, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Lino Ventura, Charles Denner.
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film Editor: Léonide Azar
Original Music: Miles Davis
Written by Louis Malle, Roger Nimier, Noël Calef from his novel
Produced by Jean Thuillier
Directed by Louis Malle
French director Louis Malle’s first fiction film is an assured and artistically adventurous suspense item. Unlike...
Elevator to the Gallows
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 335
1957 / B&W / 1:66 anamorphic 16:9 / 88 min. / Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Frantic / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 6, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Lino Ventura, Charles Denner.
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film Editor: Léonide Azar
Original Music: Miles Davis
Written by Louis Malle, Roger Nimier, Noël Calef from his novel
Produced by Jean Thuillier
Directed by Louis Malle
French director Louis Malle’s first fiction film is an assured and artistically adventurous suspense item. Unlike...
- 3/3/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)
This week’s question: In honor of “The Florida Project,” which has just started its platform release across the country, what is the greatest child performance in a film?
Jordan Hoffman (@JHoffman), The Guardian, Vanity Fair
I can agonize over this question or I can go at this Malcolm Gladwell “Blink”-style. My answer is Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon.” She’s just so funny and tough, which of course makes the performance all the more heartbreaking. She won the freaking Oscar at age 10 for this and I’d really love to give a more deep cut response, but why screw around? Paper Moon is a perfect film and she is the lynchpin.
This week’s question: In honor of “The Florida Project,” which has just started its platform release across the country, what is the greatest child performance in a film?
Jordan Hoffman (@JHoffman), The Guardian, Vanity Fair
I can agonize over this question or I can go at this Malcolm Gladwell “Blink”-style. My answer is Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon.” She’s just so funny and tough, which of course makes the performance all the more heartbreaking. She won the freaking Oscar at age 10 for this and I’d really love to give a more deep cut response, but why screw around? Paper Moon is a perfect film and she is the lynchpin.
- 10/9/2017
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
It’s 1940, and the Nazi invasion of France is fully under way. A mother, father, a five-year-old girl and her tiny dog are among a throng of refugees fleeing Paris and jamming roads across the French countryside while German planes drop bombs and strafe their path with a relentless rain of machine gun fire. Soon the girl will be completely alone, her parents and that beloved dog all cut down in front of her eyes. But before she even has the chance to process what has happened (if she even can—on the most immediate level, she believes they’re only asleep), she’s given a ride by an older couple, one of whom cruelly flings the animal’s corpse, the only thing the girl has been able to save of her now-devastated familiar world, into a creek. The girl, Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), jumps off their wagon, retrieves the dog...
- 8/27/2015
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Louis Malle's brash debut, now on rerelease, about a wealthy married woman who hatches a criminal plot is a brilliant, preposterous slice of noir suspense
Two years before Breathless, before Godard was talking about needing a girl and a gun, 26-year-old Louis Malle unveiled this brash debut: a brilliant, preposterous slice of noir-suspense realism and Highsmithian mistaken identity, imbued with the poetry of romantic despair, mostly voiced directly into the camera by Jeanne Moreau – a captivating kind of choric-fatale, with dark sensuous shadows under the eyes. She is a wealthy married woman, Mme Florence Cabala, who in this era when capital punishment (the "scaffold") was very much on France's statute book, hatches the imperfect crime with her lover, ex‑paratrooper Julien (Maurice Ronet). Chaotically, their paths cross with gamine florist's assistant, Véronique (Yori Bertin), and her teen boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly). They are the younger generation, contemptuous of their...
Two years before Breathless, before Godard was talking about needing a girl and a gun, 26-year-old Louis Malle unveiled this brash debut: a brilliant, preposterous slice of noir-suspense realism and Highsmithian mistaken identity, imbued with the poetry of romantic despair, mostly voiced directly into the camera by Jeanne Moreau – a captivating kind of choric-fatale, with dark sensuous shadows under the eyes. She is a wealthy married woman, Mme Florence Cabala, who in this era when capital punishment (the "scaffold") was very much on France's statute book, hatches the imperfect crime with her lover, ex‑paratrooper Julien (Maurice Ronet). Chaotically, their paths cross with gamine florist's assistant, Véronique (Yori Bertin), and her teen boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly). They are the younger generation, contemptuous of their...
- 2/7/2014
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Rereleased this week, Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold remains an enduring example of the invigorating cinema produced in France during the late 1950’s. A sophisticated noir, punctuated by a vivacious score courtesy of jazz legend Miles Davis, Lift to the Scaffold is teeming with the type of aesthetic and narrative innovations that would contribute to the future development of French cinema.
Ex-paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) is seen leaving his office, not conventionally through the door, but instead out of the window. Dexterously clambering up the side of the building like a cat burglar, he breaks into the office of Carala (Jean Wall) his boss and the husband of his lover Florence (Jeanne Moreau). Julian kills him with little fuss and sets about making the incident look like a suicide. However, whilst clambering into his car he realizes he has left a rope dangling out of the window.
Ex-paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) is seen leaving his office, not conventionally through the door, but instead out of the window. Dexterously clambering up the side of the building like a cat burglar, he breaks into the office of Carala (Jean Wall) his boss and the husband of his lover Florence (Jeanne Moreau). Julian kills him with little fuss and sets about making the incident look like a suicide. However, whilst clambering into his car he realizes he has left a rope dangling out of the window.
- 2/4/2014
- by Patrick Gamble
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
(René Clément, 1952; StudioCanal, 12)
René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.
Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...
René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.
Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...
- 1/13/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Elevator to the Gallows
Directed by Louis Malle
Written by Louis Malle and Roger Nimier
France, 1958
As English poet John Lyly once wrote, “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war”. When it comes to the most primal of human instincts, love and survival, people tend to take an ‘any means possible’ approach to their wish fulfillment, even to a nefarious extent.
Rather than condemning this approach, we tend to embrace it, as an exception to a rule that we would otherwise accept in any other circumstance. We rationalize our moral indiscretions as simply a means to an end – an end that seduces our innermost desires for love and survival.
This expression has become a mainstay in human culture for time immemorial, but leave it to the French to disagree with an Englishman.
The legendary Jean Renoir once masterfully portrayed our habitual hypocrisy in regards to...
Directed by Louis Malle
Written by Louis Malle and Roger Nimier
France, 1958
As English poet John Lyly once wrote, “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war”. When it comes to the most primal of human instincts, love and survival, people tend to take an ‘any means possible’ approach to their wish fulfillment, even to a nefarious extent.
Rather than condemning this approach, we tend to embrace it, as an exception to a rule that we would otherwise accept in any other circumstance. We rationalize our moral indiscretions as simply a means to an end – an end that seduces our innermost desires for love and survival.
This expression has become a mainstay in human culture for time immemorial, but leave it to the French to disagree with an Englishman.
The legendary Jean Renoir once masterfully portrayed our habitual hypocrisy in regards to...
- 8/1/2012
- by Justin Li
- SoundOnSight
Elevator to the Gallows
Directed by Louis Malle
Written by Louis Malle and Roger Nimier
France, 1958
As English poet John Lyly once wrote, “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war”. When it comes to the most primal of human instincts, love and survival, people tend to take an ‘any means possible’ approach to their wish fulfillment, even to a nefarious extent.
Rather than condemning this approach, we tend to embrace it, as an exception to a rule that we would otherwise accept in any other circumstance. We rationalize our moral indiscretions as simply a means to an end – an end that seduces our innermost desires for love and survival.
This expression has become a mainstay in human culture for time immemorial, but leave it to the French to disagree with an Englishman.
The legendary Jean Renoir once masterfully portrayed our habitual hypocrisy in regards to...
Directed by Louis Malle
Written by Louis Malle and Roger Nimier
France, 1958
As English poet John Lyly once wrote, “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war”. When it comes to the most primal of human instincts, love and survival, people tend to take an ‘any means possible’ approach to their wish fulfillment, even to a nefarious extent.
Rather than condemning this approach, we tend to embrace it, as an exception to a rule that we would otherwise accept in any other circumstance. We rationalize our moral indiscretions as simply a means to an end – an end that seduces our innermost desires for love and survival.
This expression has become a mainstay in human culture for time immemorial, but leave it to the French to disagree with an Englishman.
The legendary Jean Renoir once masterfully portrayed our habitual hypocrisy in regards to...
- 7/28/2012
- by Justin Li
- SoundOnSight
Welcome to “Not In The English Language”, a new weekly column from HeyUGuys.
Each week a different film not in the English language will come under scrutiny. First up is Louis Malle’s 1958 French crime drama, Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Elevator To The Gallows), one of the key influences behind the Nouvelle Vague.
If the work of Jean-Pierre Melville laid the foundations of the Nouvelle Vague, then it might be fair to say that with Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud Louis Malle concludes with the empty building that would house the movement being fully erected. That Malle would never fully return to the stylistic tone that he helped create is proof, if proof were needed, of the versatile nature of the anti-auteur’s oeuvre.
Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud holds a fairly basic premise, yet this simple set up is contradicted by all manner of narrative flourishes throughout. What begins as the...
Each week a different film not in the English language will come under scrutiny. First up is Louis Malle’s 1958 French crime drama, Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Elevator To The Gallows), one of the key influences behind the Nouvelle Vague.
If the work of Jean-Pierre Melville laid the foundations of the Nouvelle Vague, then it might be fair to say that with Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud Louis Malle concludes with the empty building that would house the movement being fully erected. That Malle would never fully return to the stylistic tone that he helped create is proof, if proof were needed, of the versatile nature of the anti-auteur’s oeuvre.
Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud holds a fairly basic premise, yet this simple set up is contradicted by all manner of narrative flourishes throughout. What begins as the...
- 12/15/2010
- by Adam Batty
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
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