Frankly, this classic turns out to be a disappointment for this particular viewer. The cinematography is great, as expected. The famous Miles Davis improvised score is delicate and suitably melancholy. But the movie suffers from an overall listlessness: the narrative is slack, the rhythm is sporadic, and the performance is over-stylized and deliberate. When you have only cardboard characters, like mosy Noir films do, try make their lines and movement fluid and natural; deliberation only reminds one of the inherent emptiness of plot and characterization. Where is the energy? Miles Davis helps alleviate the boredom, but not even half-way enough.
Along with Godard's "Breathless" and "Band Apart", Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player", and God-knows-how-many Melvilles, this debut by Malle was part of the "American chic" before French recovered their "alt-Europa" cultural self-respect. Good thing THAT was over.
The adoring haziness of portraiture when Moreau's face came into the frame is also off-putting: after all, this is a film noir, and noir audience can handle a less cloy, high-contrast black-and-white. How old fashioned, and how patronizing!

通往绞刑架的电梯Ascenseur pour l'échafaud(1958)

又名:电梯到死刑台(港) / 死刑台与电梯(台) / 往死刑台的电梯 / 通往死刑台的电梯 / 再见断头台 / Elevator to the Gallows / Lift to the Scaffold

上映日期:1958-01-29片长:91分钟

主演:让娜·莫罗 莫里斯·罗内 乔吉斯·伯乔利 约里·贝尔坦 让· 

导演:路易·马勒 编剧:Louis Malle/Roger Nimier/Noël Calef