Elevator to the Gallows and jazz in movies: What a little soundtrack can do

"Elevator to the Gallows" poster, photo by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders

Louis Malle's first feature film, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud), released in 1958, has to be one of the better mixes of noir substance and stylish noir trappings ever.

In the realm of style, there are night scenes, rain, Jeanne Moreau walking the streets of Paris on a fruitless quest, and a roadside motel (charmingly explained and defined by one character for another, presumably for the benefit of mid-century French audiences unfamiliar with the phenomenon of motels), and a score by Miles Davis.

In the realm of gut-clenching noir substance, there are misunderstandings that push people over the edge, doomed runaway lovers, low-life thieves, and characters whose alibis for crimes of which they are falsely accused put them squarely in the fame for crimes they committed.  (Bits of the movie may remind Dashiell Hammett fans of "The Golden Horseshoe.") Elevator to the Gallows is one of the rare films noirs I have seen that I thought would make a good book. (It is in fact based on a novel by Noël Calef, otherwise unknown to me.)

In re stylish noir trappings, the score and Malle's use of it especially impressive. Miles Davis wrote the music, played by a five-piece band that included Davis and drummer Kenny Clarke, so you know the soundtrack was bound to be good. Cool jazz, just because it is cool and understated, makes a nice, ironic counterpoint to moments of high tension on the screen.    The long stretches without music, in which the only sounds are dialogue and ambient noise, compel attention to the action. And when the music comes in, it trusts the viewer to experience the story without any sonic nonsense such as furious pounding on the cymbals to let the viewer know he or she is supposed to feel tension.

(Hear Miles Davis play and Louis Malle discuss (in French) the soundtrack to Elevator to the Gallows.  And here's a list of the twenty best jazz soundtracks in movie history. The list ranks Elevator to the Gallows fourth.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Kansas City Confidential: Good, evil, and Donald Westlake

Kansas City Confidential (1952), a movie about an innocent man caught up in a heist who must then fight to clear his name, has to be an interesting case study in the conflicting pressures American movie makers faced in the 1950s.

On the one hand, its plot is as noir as noir gets: Innocent man with a blot on his past gets caught up in a heist, is arrested, is brutalized by police, loses his job, and must fight to restore his reputation. John Payne does decent work as the innocent man, fairly believable when he has to get tough. (And the movie's punch-up scenes are more convincingly tough than corresponding scenes in other movies of the time.)

On the other, the movie's love interest and redemption-soaked ending are so thoroughly unconvincing, so obviously at odds with everything else, that it's easy to disregard them and to enjoy the good stuff.   The gulf between the redemption and the evil got me thinking about, and appreciating, the balance that moviemakers of the time must have had to strike between getting their dark visions on the screen, and making them morally acceptable in a conservative age.

Neville Brand

Maybe the era's social pressure to clearly delineate good and bad is responsible for the movie's splendid trio of heisters, played by Neville Brand, Jack Elam, and a young Lee Van Cleef. These guys are like crowd figures in a Northern Renaissance Crucifixion painting. You know they're evil just by looking at them.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about Kansas City Confidential for crime fiction readers is spotting the bits that Donald Westlake had to have picked up from the movie: The discord among criminals. The getaway car that drives up inside a tractor-trailer after a heist.  The caper masterminded by a disgraced former high-ranking police officer, a device Westlake used to great effect in The Score.   The movie's narrative arc is also similar to those of many of the Parker novels Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark name: We see a robbery being planned, but the real action happens after the heist. I wouldn't call Kansas City Confidential a heist film, though, because the pre-heist planning part of the story is given little attention.

(Westlake was a sharp observer of and commentator on popular culture. I don't know if he wrote about Kansas City Confidential, but I do know that the first place I'd look is The Getaway Car,  that recent collection of Westlake's nonfiction from the University of Chicago Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Tony Judt, film noir, and American movies in Europe

(A Czech edition of Tony Judt's
"Postwar." As suggestive as it is
that the book should have been
translated into Czech, I included
this cover only because the English
edition I was going to use carries
a cover blurb that calls the book
"awesome." Such a word has
no place here.)

Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 offers observations that might interest fans of crime movies and novels. Here are a few from the final chapter of Judt's section on the immediate postwar years, when American cultural influence was at a peak in Europe:

"Only intellectuals were likely to be sufficiently moved by Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of Odessa in the Battleship Potemkin to translate their aesthetic appreciation into political affinity, but everyone--intellectuals included--could appreciate Humphrey Bogart."

I'm not sure how historically valid it is to compare a silent film from 1925 (Potemkin) with a talkie-era star who made his first well-known film only in 1934 (The Petrified Forest) and whose real stardom came in the 1940s. Still, the suggestion that intellectuals could appreciate Bogart provokes thought, if only because its perspective is unusual in discussions of American popular culture.

The very next page offers this, on the American.film industry's business practices after World War II:

"(W)hen European governments after 1949 took to taxing cinema receipts in order to subsidize domestic film producers, American producers began investing directly in, foreign productions, their choice of European Venue for the making of a film or group of films often depending on the level of `domestic' subsidy then available."

Among other things, Judt suggests, American domination of European movie markets meant that U.S. movies of the time can be better guides to European viewers' experience than domestic movies are. In addition, he writes, it was Europeans who were likelier to make escapist movies in this period while American directors and producers were turning out the melodramas the French would later call film noir.  I suspect most of us would say American movies took over the world merely because they were more glamorous or better made  (Judt recognizes the latter possibility). But the idea that American movie makers were better judges of European taste that were European movie makers is a good deal more exciting and opens the door to all sorts of interesting questions.

Your thoughts, please.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Kevin Starr, film noir, crime fiction, and (California) history

Kevin Starr's California will make my books-of-the-year list if I prepare one, and I can hardly wait to finish this one-volume history so I can start on his seven-volume version, each book of which has the word dream in its title.

Starr is a passionate, engaging writer and a great lover of California, which he served as state librarian. Yet he is fair-minded in dealing with the violence that has attended the on-going birth of this strange piece of the planet. He is the sort who can give history a good name.

He's also savvy enough to tie the state's raucous, dream-filled history to the crime writing that arose there. (It's no accident that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler lived in California and set some of their most celebrated work there.) Starr makes the connection during a discussion of a period perhaps surprisingly early: the 1870's and 1880s, when promoters touted California as an El Dorado of health. After citing examples of recovery from consumption and other complaints, Starr notes that:

"Many. however, lost their struggle for health and succumbed, and this drama of hope and defeat conferred upon Southern California a certain interplay of healthfulness and morbidity that in various forms, including the hard-boiled detective story and film noir, would persist into the mid-twentieth century."

Elsewhere California history is filled with colorful episodes and characters: the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. The settlement during California's American period of land claims dating from its Spanish and Mexican eras ("That meant that lawyers got rich.") Great engineering feats, but also environmental depredations. (Starr mentions Chinatown in a discussion of the mammoth problems that attended getting water to San Francisco and Los Angeles.) And that's just a few decades.   Some of California's prospectors and health seekers were doomed disappointment, but crime writers looking for material struck it rich.

What can match California as a location for crime stories, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Men without hats: James Ellroy and Eddie Muller on "Crime Wave"

I rented this movie for the extras.

Eddie Muller and James Ellroy, who provide the commentary on the DVD release of Crime Wave, know and love their subjects (noir, movies, Los Angeles), enjoy one another's company, and plainly enjoyed watching the movie together. More to the point, they enhance the movie, not always the case with DVD commentary tracks.

Ellroy is a wild man, announcing himself as, among other things, "the White Knight of the Far Right." Over the movie's opening sequence, shot at a gas station, he says: "This is a righteous gas station."

Muller is the most engaging of commentators, bringing a fan's love and an expert's knowledge to the job. (He calls himself a writer and a cultural archaeologist. Among other credits, he's written non-fiction books about noir, and he founded the Film Noir Foundation.)

The two love the movie's look, Muller highlighting its extensive use of location shots, rare for the time (the movie was shot in thirteen days in 1952, and released in 1954) and Ellroy, that man who sometimes seems not to know the meaning of restraint, panted not just at Phyllis Kirk's beauty, but also at gorgeously composed shots and quiet camera work. (That's Ellroy's word, quiet.)

Watch this movie, and you'll learn which actresses of the time Muller and Ellroy would have dated. But you'll also get a nostalgic tour of 1950s L.A., and some astute comments about the choices directors make.

Curtis Hanson was right to have the male characters go hatless in his film of Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, Ellroy said. Real detectives would all have worn hats in the 1950s, but hats would have created too much distance from a 1990s audience.

And wait till you hear what Ellroy says about Chinatown.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

West Coast Blues: A classic crime novel goes graphic

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was one of the great crime writers, and his novel Le petit bleu de la côte ouest (translated previously as Three to Kill) may be the essential European crime novel of the last forty years.

Now the book has made its way into graphic-novel form, as West Coast Blues, adapted and illustrated by Jacques Tardi and published by Fantagraphic Books. The story follows with hallucinogenic clarity a young businessman named Georges Gerfaut (anglicized here as "George") through an accidental encounter that leads to: beating, killing, hit men, privation, wandering then salvation in the woods, sex, revenge, voluntary uprooting from his family, clashes with a Latin American torturer on the run — and then back to the same ring road in Paris where he began, wondering, perhaps, whether it was all real and whether it will happen again. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. There is no sad ending, either. The story simply runs out.

The book is slyly funny without being jokey; thrilling without ever seeming manipulative; cool, distant and ironic in its narrative voice; immediate in its depiction of violence.

What do Tardi's illustrations add? Mostly a crowded sense of daily life, an ironic, sense-sharpening departure from the dark, shadowy atmospherics that sometimes nudge noir toward mere style. Tardi's scenes of Gerfaut and his family at a holiday resort are notable here, full of packed beaches, spilled ice cream, traffic jams, and an attempt on George's life.

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(The new title presumably refers to Gerfaut's perferred music, the cool West Coast jazz that Gerfaut listens to as he unwinds and the tension builds.

Here's what I wrote about Manchette last year in a post called "Who is the most influential crime writer?" Here's a roundup of the year's mystery and crime comics from Brian Lindenmuth. And here's what one current crime writer, a admirer of Manchette's who has paid tribute to him in his own work, has to say.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009