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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...

Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...

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.

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...

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...

Director Louis Malle is typically remembered by the average American for his English language films. Specifically, Atlantic City (1980), starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, earned Malle an Oscar nomination for best director and My Dinner with Andre (1981) recently served as the intertextual inspiration for an episode "Community" (2009-). Yet, his first feature film, the French noir Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, 1958), is a beautiful juxtaposition of American and French culture: a film noir starring the beautiful Jeanne Moreau and haunted by an improvised Miles Davis score. I've spent the past two summers at Pajiba providing retrospectives of film noir. In 2009, I counted down five of my favorite noirs of the classical period. Last summer, I re-visited noir from the perspective in its most self-reflexive stage, neo-noir. This summer, beginning with this review, I'll be looking at the international side of film noir.

Noir is often thought of as a profoundly American cultural product,...