Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle’s first feature is an elegant, Hitchcockian thriller made when the director was just twenty-four. Maurice Ronet and Jeanne Moreau star as an ex-paratrooper and his lover, who plot to murder her industrialist husband. Adroitly bringing in the wider issues of the Indochina War, industry, and runaway machinery, Malle creates a milieu for his frantic, frustrated lovers, while an improvised score by Miles Davis becomes an abstraction of their punctuated existence. Moreau had been known more as a stage actress before making this film; her performance here—a startling mix of girlish charm, steel, and dangerous sensuality—vaulted her to cinematic stardom.