Murder and fatal mix-ups to the tune of an improvised Miles Davis score. Director Louis Malle’s debut feature (he was only 24 years old) is so noir, you might cough from the secondhand smoke. Each principle character here is doomed and you can feel it right away. It all starts with one tiny mistake made by Maurice Ronet when he otherwise perfectly executes a plan to kill his lover Jeanne Moreau’s husband and make it look like a suicide. As a result, he winds up stuck in a stalled elevator all night, a couple of teenagers steal his car and have their own fateful misadventure, and Jeanne Moreau wanders the Parisian streets feeling low because she thinks Ronet has left her.
Like much notable noir, it’s a simple story told with great style that fills the screen like clouds from a dozen freshly lit Gitanes. Malle takes some basic pulp plots about sympathetic rogues and peripheral police and wraps it in a gauze of breezy on-location Paris scenery and starkly romantic jazz. In true French fashion, Jeanne Moreau’s heartbreak is given equal weight to the other life-and-death storylines. Malle is certainly fascinated with her face, at least—and rightfully so. She’s beautiful and naturally expressive. A slight movement of one of her eyebrows is worth two minutes of dialogue.
The only reason why this isn’t an official part of the French New Wave is because Truffaut and Godard didn’t get films finished until a year or two later and Malle never wrote for Cahiers du cinéma. Otherwise, it’s a perfect fit. Check it out one late night sometime.