Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle was just twenty-four when he directed Elevator to the Gallows (1958). The debut helped herald the French New Wave and won the Prix Louis Delluc. It is a sleek, modern thriller that announced a major talent, and it is inseparable from one of the most famous scores in film history.

Jeanne Moreau became an icon through this film, Malle's camera following her face through the rain-slicked Champs-Élysées at night, while Maurice Ronet plays the lover stranded in a stalled lift with a perfect murder just behind him. The clockwork ironies of the plot matter less than two other things: Henri Decaë's location photography, and the trumpet of Miles Davis, who improvised the score in a single night session while watching the footage, in one of the great meetings of jazz and cinema.

Cool, nocturnal and morally detached, it anticipated the restless energy of the New Wave while handling suspense with classical command. Moreau's luminous, interior performance changed the course of her career, and her nocturnal wandering, lit only by shop windows, changed how cinema photographed a woman's face. The Davis sessions have been released and re-released as a major jazz recording in their own right, quite apart from the film that occasioned them. For a debut, Elevator to the Gallows is remarkably assured: a first-rate thriller, and the place where two art forms met at their most modern.