Directed by Louis Malle
Review by Shannon Scott Stebbins
Kill for Love
Gina Marie was different. She was qui languit d’amour. She made my soul bleed.
If she had asked me to kill her husband–if she had had one–I would have thought about it for a moment. How could I pull off murdering her husband, get away with it, and embrace this angelic woman eternally? Thankfully, she didn’t ask me to kill for her. She just married me.
I have never had to kill for love. I have sung Nat King Cole in public, driven 2,000 miles, even conspired and wooed a woman away from her fiancé of four years. But I have never had to murder for love.
“Elevator to the Gallows”, the 1958 film directed by Louis Malle, chronicles a woman who asks her lover to kill her husband. He obliges. Julien Tavernier, played by Maurice Ronet, has more than love on his mind. His lover Florence Carala, played by Jeanne Moreau, is married to a man who has handsomely profited off of war as an arms dealer. Tavernier, a veteran parachutist, who has served in war, feels slighted as he now works for his lover’s husband. He watches the money roll in. Love isn’t enough, apparently. Financial envy lurks within his motive, as does a sense of deep hatred for a man who defiles the very thing he once stood for: war. These themes, even in 1958, were nothing new to the revenge-love-murder drama. Malle captures this story with fresh zeal, as if this plot had never been explored before.
Sometimes I find myself saying, “Oh, another horror film…..oh, another slapstick comedy,” when it comes to genre films. With “Elevator to the Gallows,” I did not revert to preconceived judgment. Malle wouldn’t let me. In the opening frame, we see a man and a woman interchange how much they need and love each other. The camera pulls back to reveal their surroundings and, eventually, the city in which this films takes place, Paris. We shouldn’t be listening to this conversation. The camera pushes back into their faces. We want to hear more. We want to eavesdrop. The discreet nature of this love story should be kept behind close doors. They whisper. They speak to each other as if it could all end when the phone hangs up. Undying love. We get to overhear their conversation and get seductively invited into their world. Their goal is to eliminate the roadblock to the their love.
Artistic films
What distinguishes this film is style and imagery. The scenes reveal themselves so mellifluously. Miles Davis achingly blows his horn throughout this film and it serves the story well. His music is inveigling beauty, raw and painful. Like our lovers. This film is art. Artistic directors care more about the art of filmmaking than the payoff of filmmaking. Antonioni. Godard. Malick. With the latter, you may ask, “Why the hell is this director focusing on a bird on a tree for several minutes in the middle of a war movie?” as he did in “The Thin Red Line.” A director who cares more about subtle imagery and beautiful pictures over poppycock may ask, “How do you think nature feels, in the moment, surrounded by explosions?”
Malle is one of these directors. He introduces a young couple that will heighten the plot with greater suspenseful intrigue. He does it in an unconventional way. As Travenier is headed to his car after the murder disguised as a suicide, we see him walking through a two-shot of a young man trying on a coat with his doting girlfriend looking on. They are in the background. Are they just extras? As our main character leaves the frame, we overhear the young couple discussing the leather jacket. We want to hear more. Malle pushes the camera in for us. I was reminded of Robert Altman’s legendary skill in movies like “Nashville” and “The Player” where there is often a close up on someone but someone off frame or in the background is talking. We are witnessing or eavesdropping on his scene, not watching it.
There are two other beautiful moments that have imprinted themselves into the annals of film genius. Upon trying to get back the rope he used to get to the man he murdered, our parachutist gets stuck in the elevator shaft. He finally escapes by exiting the elevator and scaling down the shaft. The black and white image of him cascading downward with the elevator chasing him, a light softly blinking from below, is a shot that directors have used many times. Malle tops them all. Within brilliant films are even better shots. In the Oscar wining film “Traffic”, there is a long shot of a helicopter landing. How many times have we seen a helicopter land in a film? The director, Steven Soderbergh, makes it look spellbinding and operatic.
In another scene in “Elevator to the Gallows”, investigators are interrogating our killer: three men, a light bulb, and black and white. This scene looks like it leaped out of a powerful Broadway play onto the screen.
That isn’t stock, formulaic filmmaking.
Taking a dart, I could hit any mega-Hollywood blockbuster currently playing at the Cineplex and get the rush of explosive grandeur. Iron Man. Indiana Jones. Hulk (the second one if five years). They all have their place. However, some of the subtle, hidden films in movie theatres or neatly filed on store shelves are less about “what works” and more about a natural, unique view of life. Great films, to me, make me feel like I am walking through an art museum on the screen. New, breathtaking images affixed on the screen. They make you rewind to revisit an amazing shot.
“Elevator to the Gallows” isn’t even an art film. It is just a unique, brilliant film. At one point, the camera follows Ms. Carala as she achingly searches for her lover agonizing that he has left her. Miles Davis again croons her along in misery and despair. Malle’s cinematographer Henri Decaë uses a baby carriage as a dolly to capture her stride through the city night. These are the type of scenes that are left on the cutting room floor at the direction of modern day studios that need explosions and hot sex and fart humor to keep their audiences paying $10, again and again.
Left Behind
A sure bet winning plot device in a suspense film is to have a character, shortly after a heist or murder or important task, leave something of value behind. In “Pulp Fiction”, the girlfriend of Bruce Willis’ character, in collecting their belongings prior to leaving town, forgets his watch. The priceless watch his father gave him when he was a boy. He had to go back and get it. Audiences cringed at the danger of what would happen if he returned, but wanted him to do it.
In “Elevator to the Gallows”, the determined lover leaves behind a rope he used to get to his victim. That is a dimwit move for a war veteran of Indochina and Algeria. How could someone with such credentials do something so haphazard? He even calls himself an idiot. His lover feels left behind. The rope was left behind. The viewer is left behind and we are trying to catch up for the remainder of the film. That is the seduction here. His return to retrieve the rope sets the story running before the full sprint. He gets stuck in the elevator. His car is stolen. His lover wanders the streets looking for him, feeling betrayed and abandoned.
Classic.
French.
Fin.
