Despite its fatalistic title, Louis Malle’s splendid 1958 Parisian noir Elevator to the Gallows still marks an ascent to immortality six decades later, especially for a then-24-year-old French auteur ...

Although closely associated with the freewheeling spirit of the French New Wave, Louis Malle had already established himself before his first narrative feature, 1958’s “Elevator to the Gallows.” Maybe ...

Louis Malle's 1957 first feature, "Elevator to the Gallows," is a delicious Hitchcockian thriller about a man (Maurice Ronet) who seems to have just pulled off the perfect crime: the murder of his ...

Normally, you'd be in pretty good shape if you planned the perfect murder based on the principle that what goes up must come down; isn't that a no-brainer? But if you were in the film noir universe, ...

Cahiers du Cinéma once summarily dismissed Louis Malle, a fellow traveler of the nouvelle vague but never officially one of its members, as a director “still in search of a ‘subject.’ ” But it’s ...