LOUIS MALLE’S “ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS,” AND ITS HISTORIC MILES DAVIS

SOUNDTRACK
By Richard Brody , AUGUST 3, 2016
There are two main reasons to restore and revive a film: one is
artistic merit; the other is historical significance. The French
director Louis Malle’s 1958 film “Elevator to the Gallows,” opening
at Film Forum today, in a new restoration, meets the second
standard but not the first. The direction isn’t particularly
inventive, the script isn’t very substantial, and even the excellent
cast, headed by Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet, isn’t given much
to do. Its historical significance, however, is that it looked, for a
moment, like what a New Wave film might be—and even offered
crucial elements that burst into full flower when the real thing
came along.

Written by Malle and Roger Nimier (based on a novel by Noël Calef),

“Elevator” is a melancholy melodrama that’s centered on the
office of an arms dealer, Simon Carala (Jean Wall). His wife, Florence
(Moreau), and his right-hand man, Julien Tavernier (Ronet), are in
love, and they plot a crime that goes ludicrously awry when
Julien gets stuck in an elevator. A second crime story, involving a
young tough guy named Louis (Georges Poujouly) and a shopgirl
(Yori Bertin) who are incidentally connected to Julien, soon
follows. The elevator mishap, the center of the movie, is absurd and
turns the film into an instant and derisive comedy. Yet Malle
directs it, and the whole film, unrelievedly earnestly, adding a
sneer of world-weary indifference that plays like a pose—but that
pose has an intellectual foundation. Malle stuffs the movie with
sociopolitical markers, starting with war talk. Julien is well
known as a former paratrooper in France’s wars in Vietnam and
Algeria (the latter, ongoing when the film was made) and as a
former member of the Foreign Legion. Talk of recent wars and
their fallout crops up throughout the film. When Louis, the petty
hoodlum, meets a fatuous middle-aged German who complains
about the lack of champagne during the Occupation—the
postwar occupation of Germany by the Allies—Louis even talks like
a case study, responding that he himself doesn’t at all care about
champagne: “My generation has other things on its mind: four
years of Occupation, Indochina, Algeria.”
The story’s facile connections between France’s sordid politics and
its sordid crimes, however, are less convincing than its other,
nondramatic documentary elements. What Malle does with the
creaky story is far better than the story itself: he films it on
location in and around Paris. His cinematographer, Henri Decaë—
who had already done striking work with Jean-Pierre Melville and
would go on to shoot the first features of Claude Chabrol
(including “À Double Tour”) and François Truffaut (“The 400
Blows”)—lends the streets and buildings of Paris and its suburbs a
hard, gray cinematic life. The best performance, by far, is that of
Moreau, because Malle includes extended scenes of her essentially
doing nothing—wandering the streets of Paris at night and
contemplating her troubles—and he had the inspiration to notice
that Moreau doing almost nothing is an absorbing spectacle in
itself.

“Elevator to the Gallows” isn’t a New Wave film, but it is significant

for its proto-New-Wavishness, its efforts toward originality and
modernity. More specifically, such incidental elements as a big
American car and the theft of that big American car, the
accidental discovery of a handgun in the glove compartment of
that car, the thief of that car committing a murder with that
gun and going on the run in Paris with his young and innocent
girlfriend, the young woman’s cramped one-room apartment, the
record player and art poster in the apartment, the classical music
playing on the record player as she and her boyfriend go to bed,
the fugitive who sees his picture on the front page of a
newspaper—all of these details should seem familiar, because they
all turn up in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” which came out two
years later.

Although “Breathless,” shot in 1959, is based on a widely reported

true-crime story that took place in France in 1952—and on a story
that he and François Truffaut developed in 1956, long before
Malle’s film was made—it was made in the light of a local cinematic
renewal of which Malle (who was only twenty-six when he
completed the film) was a crucial agent. Godard was working as a
critic at the time of its release, but he never reviewed “Elevator to
the Gallows,” and didn’t speak of it in interviews at the time of his
first film’s release. But he had to have seen it.

Even the jazz-based soundtrack of “Breathless,” composed by the

notable pianist Martial Solal, flows from the same stream. If there
is a third reason to restore a film, it’s for the artistic merit of its
ancillary elements, and that’s where “Elevator to the Gallows”
stands out. Its score, composed by Miles Davis and performed (in
Paris) by Davis and his local pickup quintet (featuring three good
French musicians and the great American expatriate drummer
Kenny Clarke), is worth hearing entirely on its own. It’s better
than the film itself, by far, and there are better ways to hear it
than in the movie—namely, by listening to a CD that features the
entire studio sessions from which the score was edited.

Solal’s score for “Breathless” is memorable for its catchy themes

and distinctive tone, but Solal noted that Godard took his half
hour of music and reduced it mainly to two recurring five-note
leitmotifs. Malle did no such thing with Davis’s music, featuring
eight of the trumpeter’s extended improvisations, which run on
the soundtrack for two or three minutes at a stretch. In
“Milestones,” a magisterial two-volume biography of Davis, Jack
Chambers puts the “Elevator to the Gallows” soundtrack
recording into historical perspective, citing the use of jazz scores
as a trend in the mid-to-late nineteen-fifties. “The use of jazz and
jazz-derived soundtracks became so predominant,” he wrote, “that
jazz came to seem like the natural backdrop for high-speed chases,
mass mayhem, and cold-blooded murder, because the films for
which jazz players were enlisted were uniformly violent.” Given
that jazz is essentially an African-American art form and the
movies were made by white producers, the association is both all
the more unpleasant and all the more unfortunately explicable.

There’s nothing violent or sinister in Davis’s music for “Elevator to

the Gallows,” which, despite its occasional origins, is both an
enduringly mighty set of performances and a document of a
hinge moment in Davis’s career, as the French release of the
soundtrack sessions—featuring the entire batch of recordings in
their original order and form—makes clear. For that matter, the
texts in its booklet are themselves more deeply evocative of the
spirit of Davis’s music than is the entire movie. They include a 1988
interview with the impresario Marcel Romano, who had arranged
Davis’s European tour:

I had plans to produce a short film on jazz with Miles himself as

the star. My idea was to film a recording session with musicians
who were meeting for the first time, rehearsing and talking
together. I wanted to show some of the atmosphere of a session
to a wide audience, and also promote Miles, who was then far from
being as famous as he is today.

Just imagining Romano’s unrealized film is a jazzical experience of

cinematic value. The intended director was Jean-Paul Rappeneau
(best known for his 1990 film “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring Gérard
Depardieu), who was working as an assistant to Malle on
“Elevator” and “suggested that we ask him if he’d like Miles to
record the music.”

Romano goes into detail on Davis’s process—Davis watched the

film and took notes, and, soon thereafter, Romano heard Davis
play “bits of themes” on his hotel-room piano that later turned up
in the film. For the recording session, two weeks later, Davis
brought the musicians into the studio with no preparation, and
they played while watching the scenes. In the same interview, also
included in the booklet, the bassist Pierre Michelot says that “what
characterized the session is the absence of a defined theme.” Davis
gave the band two chords, and “there was a semblance of
structures, but they were a little fragmented compared to what
we usually played.”

The recording session, and the European jaunt, caught Davis at a

moment of musical transition. He had disbanded his first great
quintet of 1955-56 because its other four members had become
unreliable due to heroin addiction—and that included the tenor
saxophonist John Coltrane, for whom the job was his first
prominent one. Just before the trip, Davis assembled a new group, a
quintet featuring the altoist Cannonball Adderley. Coltrane
kicked his habit and joined Thelonious Monk’s quartet; that band
had an instantly famous six-month run at the Five Spot, and
Coltrane’s playing, under Monk’s influence, rapidly rose to heroic
stature. When Davis returned to New York, at the end of 1957, he
asked Coltrane to rejoin the group, making it a sextet; that group
held together for two years and made musical history (Its most
famous creation is the album “Kind of Blue.”) Chambers quotes a 1960
interview with Coltrane about the experience of rejoining Davis:

I found Miles in the midst of another stage of his musical

development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to
multichorded structures. He was interested in chords for their
own sake. But now it seemed he was moving in the opposite
direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs.
He used tunes with free-flowing lines and chordal direction.

The harmonic simplicity and thematic fragmentation of the

“Elevator” music was neither a caprice nor a stopgap; it was a
theory in motion, the very core of Davis’s great new idea and the
idea of his great new style, and his powerfully expressive, highly
concentrated, freely inspired performances for the movie are life
sketches of a bold and innovative musical mind, a self-portrait of
innovation on the wing.

Malle couldn’t know this, of course, but he did seek to be of the

moment, and deployed documentary-style techniques that both
aimed to catch what he thought was its essence and that
signified it. He caught it, above all, in Davis’s music. Even though
Malle’s dramatic sense was familiar and his visual sense was merely
sincere, his impulses and yearnings and unfulfilled desires were
fruitfully artistic; he pointed toward a modernity in which he
couldn’t fully share, toward a boldness that he didn’t quite have,
toward an originality that he only aspired to. He sought to
refresh the French cinema, and he did so; those who came next—
and did so very soon—took advantage of the invigorating new
atmosphere and revolutionized the cinema itself.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has
contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-
Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog
for newyorker.com.