Louis Malle
1958
93 minutes
You are spoiled on this one. There is so much to fall in love with for this film. Even the name is cool. Elevator to the Gallows sounds cool. Just a glance at a summary or trailer and some mild spoilers tells you that you're going to be facing a suspenseful movie where someone gets trapped in an elevator and their life and freedom could depend on whether they're able to get out. This is really the coolest fucking plot device.
What in fact happens is that a woman is cheating on her husband with one of his employees, who happens to be a badass ex-Foreign Legion paratrooper. The two of them scheme to kill her husband to make it look like a suicide. He climbs up the side of the building to his office and kills the man with his own gun, then engineers a locked-room obvious suicide to make it look convincing. He then leaves the building out the front doors with witnesses just to drive home his alibi. However, once he gets outside he realizes he left a rope dangling from the balcony, which makes it a significantly less perfect crime. Oops. So the poor schmuck has to go fetch the rope. He leaves his sexy car outside with the engine running and goes back for it, jumping into the elevator just in time to get trapped when the security guard cuts the power and leaves for the weekend. So he's stuck in the elevator with his dead boss upstairs just waiting to get blamed on it when the building re-opens for business.
Meanwhile two other key plot elements are playing out. While he's in the elevator, an idiot couple manage to steal his cool car--and his identity, essentially. They go on a clumsy crime spree that ends with them killing some German tourists in a motel. So he's stuck in the elevator and they are out committing blazingly obvious crimes in his name and poorly covering them up. By the time he gets out of the elevator (barely sneaking out unseen), he's already wanted for a different murder he didn't even commit, and his alibi is basically that he was trapped in an elevator all weekend after killing his boss and trying to clean up the crime scene.
And just to make things interesting, Mrs. Boss has spent the entire weekend looking for him in every dive in Paris after not hearing from him and seeing another dude who looks like him driving off in his car with another woman. She at first assumes he chickened out on his plan and she's hurt and angry. How the whole thing unfolds will hinge on who figures out what happened first and can prove it.
Oh yeah. Plus Mrs. Boss is played by Jeanne Moreau. And the soundtrack is by Miles Davis. An embarrassment of riches. The story is complicated without being so messy that you'll get lost. And much of the literal gallows-humor is in trying to figure out who is going to end up blamed for what and who might get away from what they did depending on the next tragically ironic turn the plot takes. And it's all packed into a very compact 91 minutes. This is one of the best noir films you will ever watch, and everything about it exudes "cool".
Time to choose something different: