Louis Malle's film Elevator to the Gallows was shown recently on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Mueller. It's not clear why he chose this film, made after film noir ended in America in 1955 with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly; perhaps because it showed the influence of American films on French films of this period, with a veteran of the wars in Algeria and Indochina instead of WWII and the Korean War. It's beautifully shot in black-and-white by Henri Decae, who worked for most of the important French directors during this period: Truffaut, Melville, Chabrol, et al. It also has an extraordinary score by Miles Davis, who was perhaps better appreciated in France than America.
The film consists of three stories; Julian Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), who kills his boss and then gets stuck for the night in the office elevator when he returns to retrieve a piece of important evidence, Florence Carala (Jean Moreau), the wife of Tavernier's boss who wanders the streets of Paris all night after Tavernier fails to meet her after shooting her husband, and Louis and Veronique (Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin) who steal Tavernier's car and end up shooting two German tourists in a motel outside of Paris. Malle and Decae film with mostly natural light on a rainy night. The film effectively captures the mood of France after the defeat in Indochina and during the continued war in Algeria.
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