Elevator to the Gallows (Acenseur pour l’échafaud)

Jean-Pierre Melville meets Eric Rohmer.

Black and white beauty. This film is a must see and is released today widely in North America.

Moreau plots with her lover Maurice Ronet for the death of her oil magnate husband who is Ronet’s boss. Ronet ends up leaving his coat and revolver in his automobile and running back up to take care of a rope he has left hanging from the dead man’s window. A young florist who has noticed Ronet ends up praising him to her boyfriend who decides they should steal Ronet’s car for the weekend. Ronet meanwhile is caught in the elevator of his building as the power supply is turned off for the night.

We watch the young florist and her boyfriend play out their fears and dreams as they run wild with Ronet’s convertible. Ronet exhausts himself trying to pry his way out of the elevator while Moreau searches high and low for her lover ending up eventually at La Madeleine at 5 in the morning and hauled to the police station mistaken for a woman of questionable character.

Ronet is a precursor to the quintessential Alain Delon role in later Melville films. He speaks little, dresses dapper, and has a hazy past. The dialogs of the young florist Véronique and Moreau pre-figure what we see years later in the dialogs of Rohmer’s films; both women have an exaggerated sense of love for the men in their lives and for love itself.

Moreau plays an evolved variant of this role of unfaithful wife in the Malle film Les Amants made a year after Elevator and later in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Funny and dark. Great performances, a suspenseful plot, and a key of sorts to so much that was to come later in French cinema.