Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows] (1958)

(On Cable TV, March 2020) French critics may have named the genre, but film noir is, in my mind, a clearly American art form. Still, writer-director Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud shows how close French cinema ever got to the heart of noir in several decades of affectionate homages. We can see here the bridge from noir to Nouvelle Vague, strong narrative links to Godard’s À bout de souffle, and playful stylishness. The plot is roman de gare stuff, with the protagonist murdering his boss (who’s also his lover’s husband) and seeing everyone’s lives spinning out of control in the best fatalistic tradition of the genre, leading all the way to an implacable conclusion. What the plot won’t tell you, however, is Malle’s sense of cool in directing this picture (his first!), the impressive performance offered by Jeanne Moreau, Miles Davis’ score, and the great black-and-white cinematography used to depict those crucial few days of the narrative. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud is not a perfect film, and its striking elements were later perfected by similar movies by French directors (all of whom, apparently, did a noir homage at some point or another), but it’s still reasonably entertaining to watch and emblematic of where French cinema was headed by the late 1950s.