Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold in the UK and here, Elevator to the Gallows)

This was Louis Malle's first feature film, black and white, 1958 a crime drama, a film policier, the most popular genre in French cinema of the 1950's.

Details: the screenplay is by Louis Malle and Roger Nimier from a pulp crime novel by Noël Calef, the cinematography by Henri Decaë, the music by Miles Davis and the cast is this: Jeanne Moreau (Florence Carala), Maurice Ronet (Julien Tavernier), Georges Poujouly (Louis), Yori Bertin (Veronique), Lino Ventura (Inspector Cherier)

The plot: Julien Tavernier kills his lover's husband but is trapped in the elevator to his offices.  Meanwhile, his car is stolen by a young man who signs into a hotel, with his girlfriend, under Julien's name.  During the stay at the hotel, the young man shoots a German couple with a gun he found earlier in Tavernier's car, and goes on the run.  When Tavernier finally manages to escape from the elevator in which he was forced to spend the weekend, he is arrested by the police and charged with the murder of the German couple.  His lover, Florence, manages to track down the real murders and obtains the evidence needed to clear Julien.  But in so doing, she unwittingly incriminates him in the murder of her husband.

Okay, got that?

Why this film, now, other than the merits of long film noir shots of rainy streets in Paris, and a good mystery?   Louis Malle: "I was split between my tremendous admiration for Bresson and the temptation to make a Hitchcock-like film."

I guess what strikes me now is an odd undercurrent here.  The guy caught in the elevator, who shot the husband of the woman he loves, is an ex-paratrooper, a war hero, reduced to working for a wealthy, fat war profiteer who may or may not have collaborated with the Germans in the big war, and who now is rich from what he made in arms sales during the French wars in Indo-China (Vietnam) and now in Algeria.  He loves the guy's wife and seem to think the fat cat doesn't deserve her.  She agrees.  And he shoots the fat cat with the guy's own gun. 

The dialog?  "What is this, a joke?  What do you want?  Money?  I'm not frightened of you, Tavernier.  I'm too used to being unpopular to be frightened.  Anyhow, you're not so foolish as to shoot.  In war, yes, but not in more important things."   So the arms merchant is a bad guy - "Don't laugh at wars.  You live off wars... Indo-China; now Algeria.  Respect wars; they're your family heirlooms."  

My goodness.

So the subtext here is the good soldier and hero, trained by the powers that be to kill, gets fed up with the war profiteers.  He wants to take back his honor. 

It's as if one of our guys from the Third Infantry now in Iraq comes back, after doing the best he can, and finds himself working a low-level assistant manager position for Halliburton, Fluor or Bechtel.  These guys made all the money while he took the risks and did the killing for them.  They stayed home with the mountains of cash, and got the pretty women, the trophy wives.  He's now just a flunky for the real power guys.  Not fair.  So he tries to get what he wants.

But of course on the way out the elevator quits on him, trapping him (see New York last week) and everything goes wrong.  Two punk kids steal his car and kill some German tourists with the gun he had in the glove compartment. 

Well, the hypothetical remake, to maintain the irony, would in today's film, be two punk kids finding the gun and thoughtlessly killing an honest Iraqi-American couple who run a 7-11 or whatever.  It seems the young punks love assuming the identity of the war hero and killing the "bad guys."  Just like kids these days who harass Arab-Americans and spray-paint mosques, and, in Dallas, spray-painted a woman's garage door with the words, "Go Home - Your Kind Aren't Wanted Here, Bitch."  The woman was an American citizen but had been born in France. 

So this film is pretty much of the times.  Just change the nationalities.  The war had a different name.  The punk kids were, back then, the face of "the New France."  The ultra-patriotic vandals in Dallas and Phoenix are the face of "the New America" you see around you.

Well, the lesson is that rich arms merchants and war profiteers are what they are, and one should not trust elevators powered by large corporations, and life isn't fair.

I'm not sure if the film is available - it is not listed on Amazon or sites like that.  It's not showing anywhere I've seen.  But were I running a film distribution company, I'd re-release it.

Miles Davis Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold in the UK and here, Elevator to the Gallows) Original Soundtrack, Complete Recordings - Miles Davis, trumpet, Kenny Clarke, drums, Barney Wilen, tenor saxophone, René Urteger, piano, Pierre Michelot, bass.  Fontana UCCM-9065 distributed by Polygram Records.

This was Louis Malle's first feature film, black and white, 1958, with Jeanne Moreau , Maurice Ronet and Lino Ventura - see the second column.

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Thursday night was dinner with a friend at the best Thai restaurant in city, Chan Dara, smack in the middle of Hollywood on Cahuenga Boulevard between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.  It's a little hole in the wall place, often with "celebrities" at a few tables.  None on Thursday.  And after dinner a walk across the intersection to Amoeba Music on Sunset to see what's new.  And I found this Miles Davis album I've been looking for in last year or two.  It was in the giant back room with all the used jazz albums. 

Miles Davis recorded this in the first week of December in 1957, at the end of a three week tour of Europe - two Paris concerts, the Olympia and the Salle Gaveau, then Brussels, Amsterdam and Stuttgart, then a week at Club St-Germain (one of the many jazz basements on rue St-Benoit back then - many still there).  Marcel Romano had booked the tour, and his friend Jean-Claude Rappeneau, who was working on the film with Louis Malle, suggested the idea of Davis doing the soundtrack.  Malle liked the idea.  Davis saw a private screening of the film, got Malle's explanation of who was who and the plot and conflicts, and agreed to do it.

A few weeks later, December 5th, Davis gathered his notes - and worked for four hours with his group watching loops of the scenes to be scored and improvising all this from the changes and themes he'd come up with.  Malle kept and used what seemed right.  The whole thing was over by early evening.

This recording has all the takes of all the pieces used in the film, so it's sort of long - on vinyl it was two LP's worth of stuff.  Malle couldn't use all of it. 

The album is rather fine.  Moody, "cool" and spare late fifties jazz.  It holds up well.  It's a lot freer and less mannered than the stuff on the Kind of Blue album that is so famous.  It's better, and sounds just fine now.  Odd that when I hear it I know this is what is known as the "West Coast Sound," born here in Los Angeles with The Birth of the Cool album.  Recorded in Paris for a French film, this might just as well have been recorded at the old Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach.

It's good evening music.  I listen to it watching the moon rise over the city lights.  Or you can close you eyes and think of Davis and Julliette Greco at the Flore sipping cognac well after midnight and being in the moment, watching the few cars slip by on Boulevard St-Germain in the December rain long ago.