Try as he might to make Paris look cold and desolate, even Louis Malle is not as great a director as that.

Failing to sully the magical city is the only "flaw" of the magnificent 1958 noir gem "Elevator to the Gallows," showing at Starz FilmCenter for a week on a restored 35 millimeter print. The desperate drama showcases Hitchcockian standards of surprise and suspense, and a hot young director trying to break the constraints of his trade.

Malle's name is not the first usually associated with French New Wave, but his debut feature elegantly played with the innovations of the movement.

As his female star Jeanne Moreau desperately searches for her murderous lover on the Champs-Elysees, Malle famously filmed her using only the light from the shop windows rather than the usual elaborate setups. His camera was in a baby carriage; a conventional tracking-camera shot was deemed too expensive for filmmakers who considered themselves rebels against stilted classical techniques.

The opening shot illustrates another manifesto of the wave: Anti-hero Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) slumps at an office window, the camera slowly pulling back to show his as only one faceless cube in a nameless building crammed with other cubes. He is about to act forcefully, but his results are meaningless in the numbing isolation of modern life.

The technique never becomes distracting, or a New Wave message to endure. The plot crackles with energy and misdirection, while the black-and-white film sharpens angles and amplifies the shadows lurking in every hallway.

Moreau is the bored wife of an industrial magnate, an especially unsympathetic man because he profited from wartime munitions. She speaks on the phone to her lover, Tavernier, who is in the office downstairs from the unsuspecting magnate.

Tavernier slips upstairs and murders the fool, but he leaves evidence. When he rushes back to get it, he's stuck in an elevator shut down for the weekend by the building watchman.

Meanwhile, a flower shop girl and her punk boyfriend have stolen Tavernier's getaway car, and land in plenty of trouble of their own. The stories get mixed up, and the police are chasing the right people for the wrong reasons. Malle's finish, involving a photograph slowly developing in a pan of chemicals, is one of the neatest emotional tricks ever put on film. An ice-cold police detective observes, "You see, there are always several photos in a camera."

Then there's the music. "Elevator" is nearly more famous now for its Miles Davis score, expressing the cool-jazz feel of 1950s Paris. Davis watched the film twice and quickly composed music for key spots, never overpowering the story or the characters. The late Malle wrote that the total music time is only 18 minutes. "What he did was remarkable," Malle said. He's exactly right.


**** | "Elevator to the Gallows"

NOT RATED, with noir violence and adult subject matter|1 hour, 31 minutes|NOIR DRAMA|Directed by Louis Malle, in French with subtitles; written by Malle and Roger Nimier, based on the novel by Noel Calef; starring Maurice Ronet, Jeanne Moreau, Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.