The brilliant debut feature of Louis Malle, Lift to the Scaffold catapulted Jeanne Moreau to international stardom and ushered in the French New Wave. A dazzling thriller, both nail-bitingly suspenseful and moodily atmospheric, it returns to the big screen on 7 February, released by the BFI in selected cinemas nationwide.
Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a veteran of the Indo-China and Algerian wars, plans the perfect murder of his boss, an arms manufacturer who is also his lover’s husband. Having emerged successfully from the scene of the crime, he returns to retrieve a vital piece of evidence but finds himself trapped in a lift – increasingly desperate to escape before the police discover the victim’s body. Meanwhile, his lover Florence (Jeanne Moreau) is left to pace the streets of Paris, anxiously waiting and searching for him with no way of knowing what has happened. And Julien’s car – which he had left parked in the street with the key in the ignition – is stolen by Louis and Véronique, a couple of teenage joyriders whose gleeful escapade rapidly takes a nightmarish turn.
The screenplay for Lift to the Scaffold, loosely based on a novel of the same title by Noel Calef, was co-written by Malle and Roger Nimier, a young novelist whom the director admired. Henri Decaë, who had already worked with Melville and would go on to shoot the first films of Chabrol and Truffaut, contributed the superb black and white cinematography. Furthermore, the jazz-crazy Malle managed to persuade Miles Davis – who happened to be playing for a few weeks in Paris club – to provide a marvellous improvised score. Davis watched the film just twice and worked through one long night in a Paris studio to record what is now acknowledged to be one of the most important jazz film scores ever.
