With their bold technical style and themes, Touch of Evil, Elevator to the Gallows, and other late-noirs discussed below opened the door for many later masters….
Thinking about Touch of Evil (1958), Orson Welles’s film noir classic about murder and corruption in a U.S.-Mexico border town, I recall the scene in Get Shorty (1995) when John Travolta tells Rene Russo “You know Welles didn’t even want to do this movie, he had a contract he couldn’t get out of. But sometimes you do your best work when you have a gun to your head.”
It was Welles’s last chance to direct a studio film in Hollywood. The turmoil surrounding the production of Touch of Evil is legendary, essentially involving Universal Studio’s wresting control of the movie from its writer/director and star Welles, adding their own footage and edits, and releasing it on the bottom half of a double-bill in theaters in 1958. In his dismay, Welles famously wrote a 58-page memo with creative changes he wished to see re-instated after viewing the studio’s rough cut. Decades later, a team re-constructed the film based on that memo into what is now the generally favored “Restored Version” to get closer to Welles’s original vision.
Regardless of the version, it’s a whirling dervish of a film, that also puts perhaps the climactic mark on the late run of what is considered the “classic” era of the film noir movement. It is the most entertaining and artistically ambitious of Welles’s own noir-colored works, with its memorable characters, compelling themes (including bold examinations of racism and fascistic use of police power), and bravura visual style. This period saw a variety of noir entries, particularly lower budget, B-movies that grew increasingly gritty, violent, and even baroque in their stylings and storytelling. Directors like Robert Aldrich, Irving Lerner, and Samuel Fuller were making movies that took on politics, crime, sexuality, and even perversion in entertaining and boundary pushing ways.
For my purposes here, Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) can be viewed as a turning point in film noir, with its self-styled take on Mickey Spillane’s fictional detective Mike Hammer in a story that starts as a murder mystery but morphs into a cold-war paranoia fever dream. From its in-your-face opening of a blonde-haired woman clad in only a trench coat waving down a car on a dark highway road, to the literally explosive finale involving a radioactive mystery box [which might’ve inspired Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction’s (1994) mystery briefcase], Kiss Me Deadly employs highly dramatic lighting, corny performances, and upfront commentary about the insane dangers of the nuclear arms race within the framework of a pulp detective yarn.
Director Irving Lerner made a pair of low-budget thrillers in the late fifties demonstrating his mastery of lean and mean noir filmmaking. Murder by Contract (1958) and City of Fear (1959) both star Vincent Edwards as unsavory protagonists in hard-boiled stories set in California. The first is about a lone hit-man who, for all his vain self-admiration, is not as competent as his reflection in the mirror would have it. Director Martin Scorsese has cited the influence of mid-century European filmmaking on Lerner’s directorial style here. With its improvised feel, the gritty on-location photography, and rock & roll inspired soundtrack, Murder by Contract bears some of the hallmarks of nineteen-fifties French policiers. City of Fear similarly employs this aesthetic approach, this time in a darker story about a convict (Edwards again) who flees San Quentin prison and comes in the possession of what he believes is a drug score, but is actually radio-active material that threatens Southern California. This race-against-the-clock tale packs a punch with its tight pacing and nervous tension, and Edwards plays another compelling ruffian we’re stuck with.
Now that I’ve mentioned European movies, it’s worth noting a particular standout from France in this period: the sexy, atmospheric thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [U.S. title: Elevator to the Gallows (1957)], directed by Louis Malle. If I may draw a musical analogy, much of noir’s roots were in 1930s gangster films, a genre and time that overlaps with jazz’s big band and swing eras in the 1920s/1930s, with both developing against the backdrop of prohibition and the Great Depression. As the brassy music of that period would transform into the improvised variations of bebop jazz in the 1940s, the screen stories of bootleggers and urban criminals would transfer themselves to the domestic criminality of World War two-era “film noir”. By 1957, the evolution of these two art forms can be seen to merge in Elevator to the Gallows, a story about ill-fated Parisian lovers (played by Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet) who plot to kill off the woman’s businessman husband. The film is magnificently scored by Miles Davis, one of the pioneers of the “cool jazz” movement which found such a draw in French society (as American jazz often did). Davis’s languorous, rich soundtrack underscores the doomed melancholy of the film’s characters. Watch Jeanne Moreau as she walks in the rain, hopelessly searching for her “Julien”, as Davis’s trumpet whispers to us.
I highlight the musical element in Elevator to the Gallows not only because it’s so key to establishing its mood and tone, but because it is one of many qualities it shares with the beforementioned Touch of Evil. Released only a year apart, Welles’s film also boasts a distinctive soundtrack, courtesy of the multi-talented composer Henry Mancini [perhaps best known for his Pink Panther (1963) theme]. Mancini’s varied score includes elements of Latin, jazz, and rock & roll music, and strongly underscores the heady atmosphere that pervades Touch of Evil. You might say Elevator to the Gallows is a “Jazz Noir”, given how strongly the music figures into the film’s aesthetic approach. In general, French and American films of the late 1950s and early 1960s started to utilize popular music more and more in their soundtracks. But in terms of noir-stained films, one can identify “Jazz Noirs” in movies as diverse as the tabloid drama Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the heist film Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), or even The Hustler (1961) about the world of pool hall gamblers.
Elevator to the Gallows was based on a novel by Noel Calef, with the screenplay credited to Malle and Roger Nimier. The film’s storyline features parallel narratives. While the core of the story follows the scheming lovers Florence Carala (Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Ronet), a second thread follows a younger couple (Yori Bertin and Georges Poujouly) who steal a car—and a gun—and by doing so inadvertently screw up the plans of the “grown-ups”, if you will. Ronet ends up stuck in an elevator, unknown to Moreau, while the kids wind up spending an evening with a much older couple some ways off from the central events unfolding in Paris.
Jeanne Moreau, one of the grande dames of French film history, is marvelous as the dissatisfied Ms. Carala. The scenes of her wandering through cafes and shops by day, then down the Champs-Elysee into the rainy night are hypnotic. She seems as if in a trance—an inner voice desperately wondering about Julien’s whereabouts. Did he do the deed? Did he leave? Where is he, “mon Julien”? A policeman, played by an early-career Lino Ventura (legendary onscreen tough-guy of numerous French crime flicks), is onto her and Julien. As Julien, Maurice Ronet portrayed another one of his memorable noir scoundrels, though he’s more grim-faced here than he was before getting the cold end of it from Alain Delon’s Tom Ripley a few years later in Purple Noon (1960).
Historically, Elevator to the Gallows occupies an interesting spot in French cinema. Although Louis Malle, born in 1932, is age and career-wise a contemporary of fellow directors like Jean Luc-Godard and Francois Truffaut, he is not as strongly associated with the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) as the other two. With its highly developed visual design, editing, and use of music (as discussed earlier), Malle’s direction in Elevator to the Gallows is more self-conscious than earlier French noir classics such as Touchez pas Au Grisbi (1954) and Bob Le Flambeur (1955), but not quite as freewheeling as that of Godard’s Breathless (1959) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Those later films announced the French New Wave, and are widely acknowledged to have revolutionized the language of filmmaking—much as a younger Orson Welles had done earlier with Citizen Kane (1941). In that sense, Elevator to the Gallows is a bridge of sorts, between classic French cinema and the New Wave that soon followed. Moreover, the beautiful black-and-white photography of Gallows was by Henri Decae, who also served as the director of photography on Bob Le Flambeur and The 400 Blows, both just referred to earlier. This further cements Elevator to the Gallows as a link between the “classic” and “new” eras of French filmmaking.
It’s not just the sophisticated stylings of Elevator to the Gallows that intrigues. Political themes sneak into the narrative as well. The Moreau character’s husband (played by Jean Wall) is a wealthy industrialist involved in the arms trade, at a time when France was still carrying out its colonial war in Algeria (1954-1962). Ronet’s Julien is actually an employee of the man (and an ex-serviceman in the war), and there’s a suggestion that he and Ms. Carala’s plan to kill Mr. Carala is justified—as a war profiteer, he had it coming. In the parallel storyline, there’s also the resentment that arises between the younger companions and the bourgeois couple they spend the evening with at the hotel. The hot-headed boy, who seems to come from a working-class background, doesn’t really take to the well-off visitors, polite as they are (they’re not quite fooled by the youthful pair either).
Elevator to the Gallows packs quite a bit into its modest 91-minute runtime. Ultimately, it’s the passion between Moreau and Ronet, the plot’s twists and turns, and Davis’s seductive music that make it such a riveting watch. Under Malle’s confident direction, Elevator to the Gallows is as cool and sensuously pleasurable a noir as one is to find from this era.
If we can return to America for a bit, two delirious films from writer-director Samuel Fuller cap off the era. Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) feature moments unlikely to be found in anything before or since. Think of the scene in Shock Corridor, a noir mystery about a journalist going undercover in a mental hospital, where an African-American patient declares membership with the Ku Klux Klan, dons a white sheet, jumps on a table and starts spouting racial and ethnic slurs against Jews, Catholics, and indeed, black people (he points at a petrified black janitor, “THERE’S ONE! GET HIM BEFORE HE MARRIES MY DAUGHTER!”, setting a crowd of jeering patients after the poor man.) The Naked Kiss hits us right from the opening scene, as a prostitute played by Constance Towers attacks a man with such ferocity that her blonde wig falls off–resulting in a startling reveal–in a chaotic shot from the man’s POV (pitting the viewer face to face with her).
Many film histories date the “classic film noir” period from roughly 1940-1958. The 1961 film Blast of Silence, about a hitman who goes to New York for a job during the holidays, may push that date further out (See film historian Jeremy Arnold’s curious article about Blast of Silence and “Christmas Noir” in Issue 39 of NOIR CITY magazine). However, Fuller’s work can stretch it further to 1964, shortly after the Kennedy assassination, and a few years before Bonnie and Clyde would blow the doors right off “proper” cinema in 1967. The movies, and America, would never be the same.
Which brings us back to Touch of Evil, which many film scholars use to cite as the last of the classic era film noirs. Welles’s movie combines many of the narrative, stylistic, and thematic elements we’ve examined in other works. In the film, a car-bomb explosion near the U.S.-Mexico border sets off a battle of wills between an upright Mexican drug enforcement official, Mike Vargas (Charleton Heston), and the hulking, corrupt local police captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles). Vargas wants to avoid the situation escalating into an international crisis, while keeping his new bride Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) safe from the hoodlums of the local “Grandi” crime family, who have ties to another case he’s investigating. He doesn’t like the tactics of Quinlan, who favors “hunches” over due process, and doesn’t mind planting evidence on a Mexican suspect.
The film’s opening shot is one of the most famous in cinema history, following a car weaving through the town’s streets as the bomb ticks away in its trunk. In that one shot, we get introduced to the setting, many of the main characters, and set the plot in motion. Another memorable sequence involves Quinlan and Vargas questioning a suspect in his apartment, playing out in one long, unbroken shot as characters move in and out of frame. The film was shot largely in Venice, California. Welles and director of photography Russell Metty fill Touch of Evil with breathtaking imagery, jarring camera angles, and shadowy lighting against the backdrop of worn-out oil drill bits. The border town “brings out the worst in people”, and supplies a potent atmosphere, much as the Parisian streets did in Elevator to the Gallows, or bombed out post-war Vienna did in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) nearly a decade earlier, also starring Welles.
Touch of Evil is about crime and corruption, but also compellingly examines themes of racism, misogyny, police abuse and even drug use. A harrowing scene in a hotel features Susan being harassed by the Grandi boys and a butch, leather clad drug dealer played suggestively by Mercedes McCambridge. Welles’s bigoted Hank Quinlan offers a case study of police brutality and the abuse of power (At one point, Vargas tells him: “Being a cop is supposed to be difficult. It’s only easy in a police state.”). Other aspects of Quinlan led some to read it as Welles’s reflection of himself, as his characters often did. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
“Much of Welles’ work was autobiographical, and the characters he chose to play (Kane, Macbeth, Othello) were giants destroyed by hubris. Now consider Quinlan, who nurses old hurts and tries to orchestrate this scenario like a director, assigning dialogue and roles. There is a sense in which Quinlan wants final cut in the plot of this movie, and doesn’t get it. He’s running down after years of indulgence and self-abuse, and his ego leads him into trouble…Is there a resonance between the Welles character here and the man he became?”
As a fortune-telling madame played by Marlene Dietrich says late in Touch of Evil, “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”
However one reads it, Welles gives a towering performance, and Touch of Evil is a masterwork of visual style and entertaining drama. Along with Welles’s other films such as The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), and Mr. Arkadin, a.k.a. The Confidential Report (1955), Touch of Evil demonstrates that he was not just a master filmmaker, but a great noir innovator. It puts a definitive stamp on perhaps the most compelling movement in cinema, “film noir”, and—as Elevator to the Gallows did in France– serves as a bridge between the classical storytelling of old Hollywood and the liberating experiments of the international New Waves not just of Europe, but beyond (look at Seijun Suzuki’s wild Japanese gangster films of the late 1950s and 1960s). With their bold technical style and themes, Touch of Evil, Elevator to the Gallows, and some of the other late-noir era films discussed here opened the door for many later masters of neo-noir and crime cinema, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and many others in the United States and around the world. Film noir is a form that continues to endure and evolve, perhaps because it seems to most truthfully reflect who we are. Or is that too much of a noir ending?
Anees Aref is a writer on film, history, and politics based in the Los Angeles area who has published abroad as well as in the United States. His work has appeared in Film International and Noir City Magazine.
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