Paris Pick-Up

12/26/2014

Christmas comes once a year and I don’t want to spoil it. For some time now those film lovers who have a kink for film noir have debated about years – the beginning and ending of this most wonderful style of film making. Rarely is French film noir taken into consideration, daft really since some quite superb French noir can be found in the 1960s, as America tailed off towards the back end of the 50s with their fascination for noir, some French film makers picked up the torch and kept it alight. Le monte-charge (1962) (The Lift/The Hoist/The Elevator…) is a fine exponent of Frenchie noir. Directed by Marcel Bluwal and co-written by Bluwal with Frederic Dard, story pitches Robert Herbin (Robert Hossein) into a murky Hitchcockian labyrinth among the back streets of Argenteuil. Herbin h