Part of Music City Mondays
Mon, Mar 24 at 8:00pm: Introduction from William Levine, professor and director of graduate English at MTSU | BUY TICKETS
For his feature debut, 24-year-old Louis Malle brought together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis. Taking place over the course of one restless Paris night, Malle’s richly atmospheric crime thriller stars Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers whose plan to murder her husband (his boss) goes awry, setting off a chain of events that seals their fate. A career touchstone for its director and female star, ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS was an astonishing beginning to Malle’s eclectic body of work, and it established Moreau as one of the most captivating actors ever to grace the screen.
“ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS married a new kind of jazz to a new kind of cinema, and created something altogether sublime.” —Tina Hassannia, Village Voice “This is a movie built around a missed connection, and Moreau’s nocturnal wanderings are made unbearably poignant by an exquisite Miles Davis jazz score that became famous in its own right…. The street scenes, the bizarre, anomalous adventures that Moreau has on her nighttime quest, the anarchic kids who just pick up and go — all this looks forward to the New Wave.” —David Denby, New Yorker “While the sad trumpet that travels alongside its main characters is genuinely one of the best scores of all time, it’s just one of the many virtues of this masterpiece. The film starts contemplative and almost Bressonian…then it turns into a Hitchcock-style scenario.” —Jaime Grijalba, Brooklyn Magazine
