Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Directed by Louis Malle
A self-assured businessman murders his employer, husband of his mistress, which unintentionally provokes an ill-fated chain of events.
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What critics compared Elevator to the Gallows to
When Ben confides to Jongsu one night that he burns down greenhouses as a hobby (while Haemi dances naked in the sunset before them, a kind of embodiment of the fantasy the two men have constructed between them, sublimely and portentously scored to Miles Davis jazzy improvisations from Elevator to the Gallows), it isn't clear if he's speaking literally or metaphorically.
The dance is accompanied by Miles Davis’s score for “ Elevator to the Gallows ” (1958), and deepened still further by the light—or, rather, by the failing of the light, which turns Hae-mi into a semi-silhouette.
The film’s standout scene sees Jongsu and Ben share a joint as Haemi strips to the waist and dances to Miles Davis’ jazzy score for Elevator To The Gallows , not for the men’s pleasure but lost in her own reverie.
And after the film’s most remarkable sequence, at Jong-su’s farm—with Hae-mi doing a seminude sunset dance to Miles Davis’s crepuscular music from Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows —the rich but gainfully unemployed Ben confesses that he occasionally burns down abandoned greenhouses for fun.
Iconoclastic director-writer Louis Malle's ("Au Revoir Les Enfants"/"Black Moon"/"Elevator to the Gallows") semiautobiographical sexual coming-of-age film is a lighthearted look at sexual awakening any way you can get it.
Uncertain or not, Malle did such powerful work here he won the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc for best French film of the year and went on to direct such diverse efforts as "Murmur of the Heart," "Atlantic City" and "Au Revoir Les Enfants."