Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Elevator to the Scaffold (Ascensceur de l'Échafaud) (Nouvelle Éditions de Film [NEF], Lux Compagnie Cinemathéque de France, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, September 19) I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of a film I’d originally watched with my husband Charles on a VHS videotape I’d recorded from a previous TCM showing: Louis Malle’s first film, Elevator to the Gallows (1958) – though the official title of the film in French, Ascensceur pour l’Échafaud, literally means “Elevator to the Scaffold.” (The Google French-to-English translation app gives only “scaffold” as a translation of “échafaud.”) It’s an oddball thriller based on a novel by French writer Noël Calef, with Roger Nimier and Malle himself doing the screenplay. Elevator to the Gallows has been called both an early example of the French “New Wave” (nouvelle vague) and a film noir. Its nouvelle vague credentials are stronger than its noir ones; though it’s a story about a bored woman, Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau, later an international star and a nouvelle vague icon), who plots with her lover, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), to murder her sugar-daddy husband, industrialist and war profiteer Simon Carala (Jean Wall), it’s treated very differently from the film noir norms for such situations. Malle and his cinematographer, Henri Decaë (though his last name loses its umlaut in the actual credits), shoot it in a matter-of-fact visual style; yes, there are shadows, but no more than you’d expect from a film that largely takes place at night. Malle and Decaë grabbed shots on the streets of Paris, at one point following Moreau around with a camera concealed inside a baby carriage. The filmmakers got complaints from their producer, Jean Thuillier, that Moreau didn’t look glamorous enough because they had her play these long night scenes without makeup and mostly using available light (though they followed her around with a hand-held battery-powered lamp), but given that she’s supposed to be wandering around Paris at night at her wit’s end because she thinks Julien has abandoned her for another woman and copped out on his promise to kill her husband, she looks appropriately worn and haggard, though still beautiful.

One of Malle’s directorial decisions that helped make this film really special was his use of a jazz score. While American filmmakers were starting to use highly elaborate, through-composed “jazz” scores by people like Elmer Bernstein, André Previn and Henry Mancini, Malle hired Miles Davis. Malle booked a recording session for Miles and a band he assembled for the gig consisting of three French musicians (Barney Wilen, tenor sax; René Urtreger, piano; and Pierre Michelot, bass) plus an expatriate American drummer, Kenny Clarke, whom Miles had also worked with in the U.S. Instead of leaving Miles to his own devices, Malle explained carefully where in the film he wanted music and what emotions he wanted it to convey, then left Miles and his band to improvise cues that would fit the film and supply what Malle wanted. The result was a hauntingly played musical score that became the basis for one of Miles’s best-selling albums, Jazz Track (released on Fontana Records in Europe and Columbia in the U.S.; Miles was under contract to Columbia but at the time Philips, Fontana’s parent company, was Columbia’s European distributor), and showed him playing far more adventurously and with more authority and power than he had a half-decade earlier in the records for Blue Note I had just got on CD (in a Spanish reissue that at least grouped the songs together in chronological order instead of helter-skelter the way Blue Note’s own releases had).

Elevator to the Gallows starts with Julien using a rope and a grappling hook to climb up at least one floor on the Carala company’s headquarters so he can sneak into Simon Carala’s office and shoot him with Carala’s own gun (which Florence previously stole from him), so he can kill him and make it look like a suicide. Julien does the dirty deed – the bemused you-can’t-be-serious reaction Simon has towards his previously trusted executive when he holds a gun on him and the shock when Simon realizes it’s his own gun are treasurable moments in their own right – and locks all the doors to Simon’s office as he gets away (making Elevator to the Gallows in effect a locked-room mystery). Only he forgets to retrieve the rope and grappling hook from the balcony, and worried that his carefully plotted murder plan will be undone when those items are discovered, he sneaks back into the building to retrieve them. Unfortunately for Julien, just as he’s got into the elevator to take him to Carala’s floor, the security guard on duty leaves for the night and turns off the master switch that controls the building’s electricity. So Julien winds up stuck inside the elevator with no way to leave the building. Since he expected to be done with his errand and leave quickly, he left his car (a 1952 Chevrolet convertible with an automatic top) parked outside with its motor running. A local lout named Louis (Georges Poujouly, of whom we get some nice topless shots later on) finds the temptation irresistible; he gets in the car to take it for a joy ride and beckons his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin), who works at a florist’s shop down the street from the Carala building, to join him. She does, and just as the two of them drive off for the countryside Florence spots them. She recognizes Julien’s car and sees that the woman in the passenger seat is Véronique, but she doesn’t see who is driving. So she assumes the driver is Julien and he’s cheating on her with the flower girl, and probably he copped out on the job of killing her husband too.

Meanwhile Louis and Véronique literally run into a couple of German tourists, Horst and Frieda Bencker (Iván Petrovich and Elga Andersen), who are touring France in one of the most spectacular and iconic cars ever made, a gull-wing Mercedes 300 SL sports car. (It was called a “gull-wing” because its doors opened up instead of out, creating a bird-like effect.) Rather than get upset that these crazy French kids have damaged his incredibly expensive car (which has got more expensive over the years, by the way; an example of one particularly rare model made of aluminum instead of steel recently sold at auction for more than $4 million), Horst and Frieda invite them to spend the night with them and register at the same motel. Because Louis doesn’t want the cops to trace him – he already has a criminal record and he’s worried about being arrested for stealing Julien’s car – he and Véronique identify themselves to the motel clerk as “Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier.” Only Horst Bencker leaves the keys to the Mercedes in the car, and Louis and Véronique decide to steal it and ditch the already hot car they were in before – but Horst catches them in the act of stealing his car (or trying to). Louis shoots Horst and also Frieda, and though we don’t actually see them die it’s no surprise when later in the film a group of rather haggard and grim police officers inform them and us that the Benckers are dead. The police discover the bodies of the Benckers the next morning – just as Julien has finally extricated himself from the elevator – and because “Julien Tavernier” was the name on Louis’s motel registration, the police arrest the real Julien for the Bencker murders. Julien protests that he was literally stuck in an elevator all night, but the cops fail to believe him.

Just then a deus ex machina turns up in the form of a roll of film from a Minox camera – an ultra-small article of photographic equipment which, as an imdb.com “Trivia” poster explained, “was originally developed as a luxury item, but it gained notoriety from its use as a spy camera.” The real Julien had left it behind in his car and Véronique had found it and realized there were still three available photos left on its roll of film. She had turned it in for developing at the motel’s photo lab after shooting pictures of Louis and the Benckers together, and the next morning the police intercept the photos and find pictures of the Benckers with Louis. But they also see previously shot photos of Julien and Florence being intimate, so the cops are able to figure out who killed whom and arrest all four principals for the crimes they actually committed. (It doesn’t turn out like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which the male lead gets away with the murder he actually committed but gets popped for the death of his adulterous lover, which was really just an accident.) Elevator to the Gallows is a nicely done thriller, even though the adulterous-lovers plot is treated very differently from the way it would have been a decade earlier in the U.S. (for one thing, Jeanne Moreau’s character would have been a more openly villainous femme fatale instead of just a bored woman seeking to get rid of her well-to-do husband while holding on both to his money and her boy-toy), and the “New Wave” aspects (including Henri Decaë’s guerrilla-style cinematography and Miles Davis’s exciting score) predominate. This was the film that launched Jeanne Moreau’s career and made her an international star even though she’d done 21 films in the nine years since her debut in 1949 and was established as an icon in France.

It’s worth noting that the title is a misnomer. By the time the film was made hanging was already obsolete as a form of capital punishment in France; since 1792 just about all executions in France had been by guillotine, and that would remain the case until France abolished the death penalty in 1981. (The only exceptions were for “crimes against the safety of the State” – i.e., acts of terrorism – for which the prescribed death sentence was by firing squad.) The last victim of a guillotine execution in France was a murderer named Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977, four years before newly elected French president François Mitterand pushed through an amendment to the French constitution abolishing capital punishment once and for all (though recent polls show a narrow majority of French voters actually want to bring back the death penalty).