L'Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (Lift To The Scaffold)

Louis Malle, France 1958, 90 minutes

The debut from Louis Malle, Lift to the Scaffold is a stylish noir-ish crime drama boasting, amongst other things, an improvised Miles Davis soundtrack.

A ex-paratrooper and his mistress (Jeanne Moreau) hatch a seemingly foolproof plan to murder her businessman husband, who is also the man's boss; when the office is about to close, the man will climb up to his boss' office and shoot him with his own gun. The body won't be found for some time, it'll look like a suicide, and the two conspirators have alibis planned just in case. Everything goes fine until the exparatrooper realises he has left a grappling hook dangling from the balcony. Leaving the engine of his sports car running, he races up to the office to retrieve it. Then `fate' intervenes: The night watchman shuts up the office for the night, turning off the power, leaving our murderer stuck in the lift between floors. Meanwhile, one of the office girls and her boyfriend decide, on a whim, to `borrow' his sports car...

Director Malle's relationship with the concurrent nouvelle vague movement was always a tangential one. His career began before the movement really got going, with this film and the notorious Les Amants (1959); he had already moved away from it by Zazie Dans Le Metro (1961). However, the jazz soundtrack; the car-thief young lovers who seem to lurch from one impulsive act to another and the very presence of Jeanne Moreau all seem very nouvelle vague; even if Malle's film is more conventional and conservative than the indisputably new wave A Bout De Souffle. Since we're screening the two films together, why not compare and contrast for yourself?

Review by Keith H Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1997-98