Elevator to the Gallows

Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, 1958) is Louis Malle's French noir thriller you can watch online on iFILM. It was the director's feature debut and an early spark of the coming French New Wave.

Julien (Maurice Ronet) and his lover Florence (Jeanne Moreau) plot the perfect crime: kill her industrialist husband and stage it as a suicide. The first part goes off cleanly. Then Julien spots a piece of evidence he left behind and slips back for it — just as the building's power dies and traps him in the elevator between floors. While he's pinned in that steel box, a reckless young couple steals his car, and a single night unravels into a chain of fatal coincidences.

Malle handed the score to Miles Davis, who improvised his trumpet straight to the picture, and that cold, sleepless jazz became as legendary as the film itself. Jeanne Moreau drifts through nighttime Paris with a face that tells the whole story. This one's for viewers who love slow, stylish crime where the tension comes from time running out rather than from bloodshed. Stream Elevator to the Gallows (1958) online on iFILM.