Elevator to the gallows

15 yrs 91 minutes • 1958 • 7.9

The French director Louis Malle had already won an Oscar and a Palm d’Or for the documentary The Silent World (1956) when he two years later, as a 25-year-old, made his first feature film with the film noir-inspired Elevator to the Gallows. Jeanne Moreau, who would later show up several times in the French New Wave movement and in European short films, plays the murderous wife Florence Carala who, together with her lover, plans to kill the wealthy entrepreneur she is married to. They kill her husband and make it look like a suicide. A perfect crime has been committed, it seems, but from the husband’s window, along the wall, hangs a forgotten rope.