Murder on the Champs Ellie-Zay

By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan Elevator to the Gallows (1958) Directed by

Ack, I’ve been tricked! I should know better by now; I should know that if I pick up a black-and-white French film from 1959 that it’s going to sneak some of that New Wave stuff in on me. Elevator to the Gallows is set up like : a married woman and her lover plot to kill her husband in another one of those doomed-from-the-beginning “perfect murder” scenarios, and the entire venture is sent spinning into chaos by one screw-up. That sounded great to me, plus it stars the ceaselessly sultry as the Mrs. Carala the murder-plotting wife, and watching her amazing face is never a bad thing.

Having read about this deliciously noirish plot I thought, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna watch that classic”. I was about half an hour into the film when I realized that the had just slipped in and taken a seat beside me. I tried to leave the room but I was trapped by the glazed eyes of the filmed denizens of Paris as they wondered, “Am I on film? Is this a movie? Should I do something? I’m in a state of disinterest and despair!”

Of course it’s a gorgeous film, and if we were doing a Noir Scoire on this, the categories of the location, the mood, and the crime itself would get high scores toward the total. The problem is that Elevator to the Gallows is under-populated – oh, it has plenty of people there, but they’re zombies. What we need is a personality and all we get is wandering catatonics.

Jeanne Moreau at least looks dead sexy as a wandering catatonic. Her Mrs. Florence Carala has been having an affair with Julian Tavernier, who works for her husband, a war profiteer. We begin the film far down the road in their affair, when they have made the decision and all the plans to murder Mr. Carala. Julian is supposed to – get this – climb out the window of his office, climb the side of their office tower on a rope with a grappling hook to Carala’s office, shoot the man, and then leave via same rope so that Carala’s death looks like a locked-room suicide. But Julian does this in broad daylight in the middle of Paris; I suppose they’re hoping that nobody notices a man wearing a suit climbing an office tower on a rope. Julian appears to succeed at this unlikely scenario, however, only to foil himself by returning to his office just in time to prove his alibi while forgetting to remove the stupid rope from the side of the building. D’oh!

Julian must return to get the rope, and this is when crap starts to go stupid wrong. Maybe Julian wasn’t really cut out for thinking on his feet – Lord knows he looks dazed as a deer in headlights. He leaves his convertible car running in front of the office building with all his personal possessions inside (including the gun he used to kill Mr. Carala), hurries into the building and promptly gets himself stuck in the elevator on the way up to his office floor. Outside, his car is stolen by a couple of teenage delinquents, a chattering flower- shop girl and her catatonic boyfriend, who race out of town to get into more trouble. A few blocks away, Florence Carala waits for Julian to show up to confirm that the “deed” is done, but of course he can’t show up. She immediately assumes he has chickened out and left her. She sees his car pass by with a young woman in the passenger seat and thinks, “Okay, Julian ran off with the flower shop girl.”

Now we’re that half-hour into the movie and this is when the hammer drops. We’ve established our plot pretty thoroughly and it’s an interesting one. How is Julian going to get out of that elevator, get his rope and reconnect with Florence? Also, what will happen with A face that is easy to watch for any length of time! the teens in the car?

Look out. The French New Wave has just crept in. For the next hour, the movie deals fairly extensively with what the teenagers get up to in their stolen car, and none of it’s good. Kids those days, I swear. They manage to find just about every incriminating piece of evidence possible in Julian’s car and then fling it into the middle of a really tedious interlude of sulky pouting against the establishment which will lead to more murder – senselessly, idiotically – and an equally brainless attempt at suicide as if they are Romeo and Juliet only without the poetry or the brains. God forbid these people have a conversation, after all.

Meanwhile, Julian is stuck in an elevator. Watch him putz around in there. He tries to find a way out of course. I don’t think I mentioned the actor who plays Julian. It’s . I didn’t bring him up because I find it hard to describe what he is doing as “acting.” In fact I find him difficult to remember at all. That’s really so typical of French New Wave. Actors serve as placeholders, they have the ability of movement and so can occasionally, expressionlessly interact with a set. They seem barely aware of what is happening around them. Was it the intention of the director that, at the end of things, we can hardly remember what Julian looked like, or anything he might have said? I know he forgot to take his murder-rope with him, and I know he was stuck in an elevator. Perhaps we really are only meant to know these characters based on their actions, without emotion attached.

Continuing with the confusion, Florence spends the night wandering the streets of Paris looking for Julian. She asks about him everywhere. I understand she’s upset and confused, but I’m not sure how this fits in with the master plan. She doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive – she can’t find him either – and if she and Julian were planning on convincing the cops that they were only casual acquaintances, a frenzied, stalkerish search for the man at every public place on the Champs Ellie-Zay sure doesn’t make for a great argument.

See, this is just more of the same trouble. I don’t know what these people are thinking. They’re all so detached and starey-eyed that they seem like robots functioning under bizarre commands. I play a lot of computer games, and sometimes when I’m futzing around unsure of where to take my avatar next or what potion to brew or how to respond to an overly aggressive Asari scientist who doesn’t understand what it means to “just be friends,” I wonder how my avatar must look to the other characters in the game, pretending for a moment that those entities are able to perceive her. They are thinking, “Why is she just standing there? Is she thinking about something? Did she go narcoleptic? Is she dead? Maybe she’s having a seizure?” And that’s a fairly accurate summary of how I feel about characters in French New Wave films. Who is controlling them? Do they have any power of their own?

That being said, you may notice that Elevator to the Gallows has an impressive overall rating at imdb.com (an 80%, which is damn near perfect on that imperfect site). It is considered a masterpiece by many. There is much about it that makes me want to admire it, too. In twenty years or so, if I am able (you know, not dead) I’ll maybe try watching all these French New Wave films again and see if my brain has evolved enough to understand or appreciate them. HAHAHAHA, that was a joke.