I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #189 - Elevator to the Gallows (1958, dir. Louis Malle)

"Anything's good for an alibi. Wives, girlfriends, bartenders, childhood friends, deceived husbands - but not an elevator. That's ridiculous. It's totally harebrained."
 - Commissaire de police

The most succinct way to express how I feel about Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle's feature length directorial debut, is to say that it exudes the essence of cool. It can often be difficult for a director, especially a new director, to innovate within a strict genre such as that of Film Noir. Often such directors will simply rest on the easy and clichéd conventions inherent to the "noir." However, Malle seems to have effortlessly skirted the traps of the genre and created one of the most brilliant and beautiful noir films of all time (I know, I know, a very bold statement, however it's true...).

Within the first 15 minutes of the film a few very specific events occur and choices are made that trigger all of the dark events to follow. Thrown into the middle of our story, the film opens on Florence Carala (stunningly portrayed by Jeanne Moreau) as she professes her love for Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet). Through reading the clues left for us we discover that the two are lovers, and they have concocted a plot to kill her husband (Simon Carala, played by Jean Wall), who also happens to be an arms dealer and Tavernier's boss. After they get off the phone Tavernier leaps into action, stealthily making his way to his boss’ office under the guise of giving him a report. He then pulls a gun (Carala's own gun) and kills him, staging the scene to look like a suicide and sneaks back into his office just in time to leave with the only other two people left in the office. In the moment that he is about to be home free and drive to meet up with his love, he notices that he's left the hook and rope that he used to scale the wall to get into his boss’ office, thus negating the carefully left suicide scene. He rushes back into the building, leaving his car running, to try and grab the evidence, only to be trapped in the elevator as the attendant shuts down the power. Just as he is being trapped, a small time thief, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend Veronique (played by Yori Bertin, who has a bit of a crush on Julien/Mr. Tavernier) hop in his car and take off, running away to their own absurd sequence of events, but not before Florence sees Julien's car driving away with a young girl in the passenger seat.

In that brief few minutes three separate yet surreally tied narratives commence; Julien Tavernier stuck in the elevator frantically working against time as it seems to stand still, Louis/Veronique as they descend madly into their criminal downward spiral, and Florence as she walks sullenly through her desolate thoughts and fears. The future of all of them is uncertain, the only certainty is the inevitable passage of time. I won't spoil the suspense for you, you'll simply have to watch to see what comes of these three intertwined stories.

Other than this fantastic and brilliantly peculiar story and Malle's masterful development of the tale, there are many other reasons that this film has made its way firmly into my personal top ten. However, in the interest of brevity I will only elaborate on a few of those things. First and most prominently, the film was shot by the French cinematographer Henri Decaë, who crafted a gritty and yet luminous aesthetic, playing with the conventions of noir while metaphorically utilizing a novel lens. Secondly Jeanne Moreau's portrayal of a reflective woman scorned, which has become one of the most lauded performances of this era of French cinema. Thirdly, though the use of music is somewhat sparing, it is certainly impactful when utilized, since it happened to be improvised by none other than Miles Davis and a few other musicians in the heat of a single night in Paris. If you look further into the story behind the soundtrack it only solidifies that this film exudes "cool." Fourth, and finally, I love the fact that I always find myself at the edge of my seat the entire time as the characters are hurled blindly through the insane narrative, the suspense in this film is killer and you can practically cut the tension with a knife!

In the end, this is a film that screams to be seen. I can't fully provide a sufficient description of why you must see Elevator to the Gallows so I will simply wrap up this edition of I'd Love To Turn You On-At The Movies. I implore you to take the time to watch this important film!

-          Edward Hill

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #183 - Odd Man Out (1947, dir. Carol Reed)

Carol Reed was a British director best known for a series of dramatic thrillers, culminating in his best-known work, 1949’s The Third Man. Prior to that, he’d worked on ‘B’ pictures in the 1930s and embarked on a run of good-to-excellent films throughout the 1940s, beginning in 1940 with the Hitchcockian wartime thriller Night Train to Munich (widely seen as a sequel of sorts to Hitchcock’s hit The Lady Vanishes). But the “good” run turned to “excellent” in 1947 with Odd Man Out.

Like Night Train to Munich, the film is a thriller that uses a political situation as a backdrop for its drama, not as its actual subject. The film opens with a prologue declaring its lack of political intent as it launches into its tale of Johnny McQueen (the superb James Mason in one of his finest roles), the regional leader of “The Organization” (a thinly-veiled IRA), who has recently escaped from prison and has been in hiding. He’s helped put together a robbery to finance the group and is venturing out for the first time since his escape, despite a weakened physical condition. During the event, things go wrong and he’s wounded, left on his own to escape, with his comrades trying to discreetly locate and help him while a very public police manhunt is underway.

The rest of the film finds Johnny dazed, barely able to move, and closing in on death, encountering different people throughout his travels across Belfast who variously decide to help him or shun him, not wanting to “get mixed up in that sort of thing.” And from the friendly dowager, to the English nurses, to the sympathetic cab driver, to the wary bar owner, to the eccentric and philosophical/artistic trio living in a ruined Victorian mansion, to the priest hoping to save his soul, each interaction with the regular populace of the city gives the characters an opportunity to display their reasons for helping him (or not) – and gives each actor in the cast (many drawn from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre) a chance to turn in superb work as well.

Despite the great acting all around, the main thrust of the film is Johnny’s relationship with Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), the young woman who loves him both for his cause and as a man, even against the advice of Grannie (Kitty Kirwan) who tells her not to waste her youth on a doomed hero. She continues to try to find and help him when others have given up and, in one of the more startling scenes, offers to take both Johnny and herself to the afterlife before she’d let the police get him.

The film opens on a city clock chiming the time and church bells and clocktowers continue to chime throughout the film, taking on an increasingly doomy overtone as the night progresses and Johnny’s condition worsens. As he loses blood and can’t find respite, the events of his life get increasingly disjointed and the film’s tone turns more grimly philosophical, with the artist trio late in the film offering up the lines: “It’s the truth about us all. He’s doomed.” “So are we all.” And Reed, along with cinematographer Robert Krasker (who also filmed The Third Man), continue to push the film’s opening realism further and further into abstract territory, with the familiar canted angles, backlit chases, and sharp divisions of darkness and light seen in the later film present here and used equally effectively.

In short, the film is a powerhouse of a dramatic crime thriller, anchored by a remarkable performance by Mason – even more remarkable perhaps because he is often a silent witness to the goings-on around him in which others decide his fate – and the continual thread of Kathleen Ryan’s righteous pursuit to save the man she loves.

-         Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #89 - Criss Cross (1949, dir. Robert Siodmak)

Surprisingly, we’ve never reviewed a single film noir for our I’d Love To Turn You On at the Movies series, so it’s high time we got started. For those unfamiliar, film noir is a hotly debated category amongst film scholars even 70 years after the fact (just ask your favorite two film snobs what the first real film noir is and when film noir ended and watch the fireworks!), so maybe that’s why we haven’t hit it yet. In a nutshell (though some are sure to disagree on the details), the genre emerged in the early/mid-1940’s in Hollywood and ran through the late 50’s. It is generally characterized by a gloomy outlook on the world, by dark, foreboding black and white visuals, by out of control passions, by a femme fatale drawing our central character into a web of danger, and by sleazy characters on either side of the law, usually with few morally redeeming characteristics. It’s doubtful that the people making these films noir were consciously deciding to follow such a set pattern, but that most were responding to the uncertainty in the air that most of America felt during WWII and its immediate aftermath. You can see the style in such great 1940’s films as Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, and Murder, My Sweet. And you can see it in spades in the 1948 classic Criss Cross.

            Criss Cross – as perfect a title for a film noir as there ever was, beaten only, perhaps by Kiss Me Deadly – is rife with paranoia, double and triple crosses, and a grim fatalism in its story of an armored truck heist and its aftermath. The film opens with a nighttime aerial shot cruising low over L.A. with a doomy Miklós Rózsa score coming in from the first frame. Eventually we focus on a non-descript parking lot by a nightclub and the action moves down to the ground, where we find a cheating wife Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) in a passionate embrace with her boyfriend Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) and them trying to find a way to get away from her husband, the dangerous gang leader Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Thompson takes a hike after she warns him how dangerous Dundee is and they enter the club separately, where Dundee has been waiting impatiently for her. A tense, jealous exchange follows between husband and wife and Thompson enters the club, getting into it immediately with Dundee. The smart, tight script sets its plot and a thicket of character motivations and relationships in motion within ten minutes, jumps immediately on to setting up the heist our main characters are engaged in, then jumps to flashback to give us the back story that lead everyone here. Turns out Steve and Anna used to be married, but now she’s married to Dundee, only Thompson doesn’t get over things so readily – he’s still head over heels for Anna, despite the warnings from his detective best friend Pete Ramirez that she’s bad news and to steer clear of her.

            The film is helmed by Robert Siodmak, known for a great batch of noirs and other crime films, and also for discovering Burt Lancaster who had his first Hollywood role in Siodmak’s earlier The Killers. In his earlier work in Europe before emigrating to the States and in Hollywood since, Siodmak had refined his technique to the point where he knew how to construct an airtight thriller. There’s an episode in the flashback part of the film when Lancaster’s character goes back to the club he and his ex-wife used to frequent and in an amazing, dialogue-free scene in that’s all smoky ambience, shadows thrown on the wall, and the intense, driving rumba of the band playing, he sets up everything we need to know about how obsessed he still is with her just from his body language and longing looks across the club, highlighted by the ever-tightening intensity of the editing in line with the music’s rhythms. And as we get back to “real time” and the heist, it’s again a masterful display of technique as the gang’s robbery is executed in a haze of smoke, and afterward as paranoia sets in deeply with more and more skewed angles and shadows making the most mundane settings feel fraught with peril. The film is also rife with references to being ruled by fate, by circumstances rather than their own wills guiding the characters, and this too is echoed in the film’s visuals, with many shots of frames within frames (doorways, windows, stairwells, etc.), suggesting that the characters are trapped in their circumstances. But it’s not as arty as all that; that’s just a film student admiring the work of a master. Despite the web of conflicting motivations and desires, there’s never a moment when the art of what Siodmak is doing overwhelms the story, which is always at the forefront.

            Fans of film noir will readily recognize this is a great one, those unfamiliar with the genre are in for a treat – and also probably about to go on a long road down the seemingly endless path of film noir. It’s a pleasurable road to travel for sure, and one that all film fans find their way to at some point. And it’s a lot safer to view from the sidelines than it is for the people in the films themselves.

            - Patrick Brown