🎬 Into the night... #3: 'Elevator to the Gallows' (1958)

Dark alleys, people coming and going. You can’t see them, but they’re there. The sun has set, streetlights are on. We’re allowed to commit crimes, to fall in our lovers’ arms, to chase temptation, to enchant one another. To roam the streets endlessly, looking for danger. The mystery of the nocturnal offers us what we can’t have during the day. These films bring you the witching hours. Nightly escapades, midnight mischief. Places you can get lost in. Elevators, for example. Or dusty hotels. Step into the night with this curated selection of films that (mostly) unfold over the course of one night.

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
Louis Malle | 1958 | France | 93’ | EN subtitles

Haunting, melancholy, and achingly cool, Louis Malle’s 1958 debut Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour L’échafaud) laid the cinematic foundations for motifs and aesthetics that are now shorthand for French New Wave. This tautly paced noir thriller, which takes place over the course of a long, nightmarish night and morning in and around Paris, weaves together murder and mistaken identity to elevate a relatively straightfoward plot into high melodrama.

Ex-French Foreign Legion paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and his mistress Florence Carala (a luminous Jeanne Moreau) connive to dispatch her husband, a high-rolling military contractor who happens to be Julien’s boss. It was never going to be the perfect crime, even if ill timing and worse luck hadn’t contrived to trap Julien in his office elevator after carrying out the deed. It’s an absurd turn of events, played with utmost gravitas by all involved. Unlike the train-in-tunnel symbolism of other films of the era, this elevator is exactly what it claims to be.