Sunday 16 January 2011

Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud / Lift to the Scaffold (1958 Louis Malle)

Existential 1950s night-time Paris, with Miles Davis score and even Lino Ventura: does Sunday morning get any better? Malle's debut followed a stint on A Man Escaped, cueing priosony lift sequences (Bresson, with Renoir, Malle's heroes) and sort of Hitchcocky too. Henri Decae's naturalistic photography highly influential to nouvelle vague, of which Malle was not a part.