Ascending Art: Elevator to the Gallows and Miles Davis

A shadow washes over her eyes like a receding tide. Her face drapes across the frame, her lips hovering on the edge. “I’m the one who can’t take anymore…I love you.” Her lover at the other end of the phone grips the receiver like a lifeline: “I love you. Without your voice, I’d be lost in a land of silence.” Their quiet fervor is interrupted by a lingering bass line, splashing cymbals, and sensual keys. A trumpet boldly carves its melody across the scene.

 Melodrama. The word carries disdain, but – when handled with sincerity – melodrama can be beautiful. And what could be more sincerely melodramatic than French New Wave cinema and late-era bebop, à la Elevator to the Gallows? This artistic junction is deliciously erudite and even in talking about it, I feel pretentious. But maybe admitting it out loud gives me a pass.

 The classical period of American Film Noir, then referred to as “Melodrama,” was already fizzling by 1958, while French New Wave cinema was only just emerging. Modern film buffs hold little consensus about the definition of classic Noir, but the crime thriller style is not exactly an enigma: hard-boiled detectives, dark city streets, suspicious characters, convoluted plots, murder, affairs, and deception. Elevator to the Gallows has these in spades and even though it is soaked in the cliches of the era, the film remains paramount because of its artistic experimentation. It was unprecedented cinematography that in part defined the French New Wave movement that exploded soon after, and other contemporary directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard revolutionized the art of cinema with their innovations. Elevator to Gallows dips its toes into both the worlds of Film Noir and New Wave. 

 Sexy, mysterious, and dripping with style, director Louis Malle and cinematographer Henri Decae brought alluring proto-New Wave direction to the cinematography and editing that make Elevator to the Gallows a noteworthy crime thriller. The film's innovations in cinematography are often referred to as “documentary-style” because of the on-site, hand-held aspect of many experimental shots. Malle had developed some impressive documentarian chops prior to filming Elevator. He accompanied Jacques Cousteau's seafaring crew to co-direct his Palm d'Or and Academy Award-winning documentary The Silent World. That film was also a pioneer in its own right, being the first to film in color underwater. 

 However innovative the visual style of Elevators turned out, it is Miles Davis’ breathtaking trumpet score that elevates the film to a mid-century classic. Davis’ presence in French society happened to coincide with the height of his artistic genius, catalyzing the evolution of jazz, film, and the boundaries of artistic expression. Jazz had been part of cinema since the late 1920s but Davis’ work on Elevators enshrined a moment of musical evolution in film. His method of scoring, use of modal improvisation, and unique tone would be referenced and emulated repeatedly as the French New Wave emerged, including in pianist Martial Solal’s score for Jon-Luc Godard’s paramount work Breathless.

 My interest in Miles Davis is what led me to the elevator doors. I often revisit his immense body of work for inspiration when composing music for my trumpet-featuring post-punk band, or on long walks to ruminate. His records span decades and capture a myriad of eras and emotions. He is undoubtedly one of the most compelling musical artists to have ever lived, with a distinctly vulnerable and brazen voice charged by his compulsion to redefine the boundaries of his canvas. Davis could express complex emotions through melody and composition. What makes the Elevator to the Gallows soundtrack particularly intriguing, beyond its obvious beauty, is that it became a petri dish for Davis’ innovations in musical improvisation and modality, which reached their zenith on his landmark album, Kind of Blue, released in 1959. 

 George Russel’s 1953 jazz theory book, A Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization –  inspired by a comment from Davis years prior – later provided the framework for Davis to approach improvisation in new and radical ways. He was possessed by this new theory and felt creatively liberated to experiment at the time he was asked to compose the soundtrack for Elevators to the Gallows. 

Davis had been touring France in the late ‘50s with an unfamiliar French band, and they recorded the soundtrack spontaneously in one night while projecting the film in the recording studio. He gave the band minimal direction and unprecedented improvisational freedom that would go on to influence his musical direction for the rest of his career. Notably, he focused these arrangements on fewer chords, limiting harmonies, and paving the way for an emphasis on melodic freedom.

After a charged musical introduction ushers in a dramatic opening of the film, a surprising amount of extended silence follows. The film's tone is established with wafting cigarette smoke, romantic swooning, and what we now think of as an overtly French mood. The cinematography is voyeuristic, with angles perched in the backseat of a car, slinking like a pedestrian across a street, seated at a table in a cafe, or just under a window looking in on a scene. The initial protagonist, Julien (Maurice Ronet), is immediately presented as a man of espionage. And as interesting as geopolitically charged workplace assassinations can be, the pacing here can feel a bit slow, but not enough to halt before suddenly establishing a new theme of convoluted chaos. We find Julien stuck in an elevator after successfully murdering his boss and framing it as a suicide, and then two angsty teenage lovers, Louis and Vernonique (Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin), spontaneously take his running getaway convertible on a joyride. 

 From here, Elevator to the Gallows jumps rapidly between different flavors of tension and melodrama. Multiple protagonists weave across multiple interconnected storylines, and Florence (Jeanne Moreau), our unnamed amorous woman from the opening scene, returns on screen as Julien's lover. We watch her pine for Julien and monologue internally about his failed completion of the rendezvous after the assassination, which we also learn she participated in. It’s at this moment that Miles Davis’ soundtrack returns, and frames the most beautiful scene in the film. Florence saunters through the midnight city streets in a malaise, casually indulging her heartbreak on the eve of a storm. The cinematography is poetic, and Miles captures the emotion of the scene extravagantly – sad, angry, and contemplative. There is an air of vulnerability that in itself justifies enduring some of the film's less masterful unraveling. For this moment, the mood is perfectly layered between Florence and the shadows of the Parisian streets. Moreau wears hopelessness and is boldly indifferent in her stride; her acting is striking and artful. Davis can see and feel the world crafted before him; he captures a sincerity that he surely felt walking those very streets in Paris. 

 In the documentary Birth of the Cool, Davis says his first experience in France many years prior to the film significantly impacted his self-image and relationship with America. People in France showed respect for his art and offered him status as an artist and an individual that was absent in the racism of America. He fell in love with singer Juliette Greco, who introduced him to the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Picasso. He was able to exist openly in love as a Black man in an interracial couple without receiving the hate and vitriol he would have expected in America. I can’t help but wonder if Davis imagined his love with Greco from those earlier years when he played to Moreau walking through the very same Parisian streets in the rain, years removed and a lifetime in between. 

 Elevator the Gallows ricochets between the perspectives of Florence, Julien, and the teenage joyriding couple. The young lover's joy ride ends at a hotel where they encounter a rich older German couple with whom they share drinks and lies, while Julien attempts to escape his imprisonment in the elevator. Miles Davis and the band feed on this excitement with a score that elicits energy and dread, accompanied by fantastic dramatic shots that peer down the elevator shaft at a frantic Julien and separately encircle the teenagers in their lascivious revelry.

 The last acts of the film flash around all of our protagonists with increasing airs of ennui, anxiety, and devastation. As the plot spirals into resolution, one of the teenage lovers murders the German tourists, they botch a desperate suicide pact in their attempted escape and are eventually found out. Julien and Florence in parallel are desperate to stick the landing of their assassination with a myriad of their own close calls to being found out. The film concludes with justice being dolled out to the appropriate parties, revealing in a delicate fashion that Florence is the wife of the murdered boss and her fate is sealed through a darkroom film development of her in Julien's embrace.

 Elevator to the Gallows maintains its cinema legacy largely because of Miles Davis’ score and notably serves as a transitional fossil for defining eras of film and music, but it does offer undeniable style and beauty independent of historical context. Davis would go on to change the landscape of jazz in several more ways while also attempting to keep up with the relentless evolution of popular music. Director Louis Malle would go on to have a lengthy career (you might be familiar with My Dinner with Andre,) and Jeanne Moreau became a celebrated actor after her role as Florence and starred in other films in the French New Wave.