Aaron Jones
3 months
ago
The opening phone call is so melodramatic and love-torn, I love it.
Austin
over 4 years
ago
An awesome Hitchcock-esque thriller that helped launched Moreau's career.
Michael Morris
almost 5 years
ago
Fine film noir. Jeanne Moreau is excellent. Great jazz score. Louis Malle at his best.
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is a 1958 French film directed by Louis Malle. It was released as Elevator to the Gallows in the USA (aka Frantic) and as Lift to the Scaffold in the UK. It stars Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as criminal lovers whose perfect crime begins to unravel when Ronet is trapped in an elevator. The film is often associated by critics with the film noir style. According to recent studies, it also introduces very peculiar narrative and editing techniques so that it can be considered a very important experience at the base of the Nouvelle Vague and the so-called New Modern Cinema.
The movie presents also unique and completely new solutions in the history of cinema in the relationship between music and image.
The score by Miles Davis has been described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as "the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since. Hear it and weep."
Florence Carala and Julien Tavernier (Moreau and Ronet) are illicit lovers...