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The Elevator Goes to the Movies

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As early as the first part of the twentieth century, elevators were employed by filmmakers as visual props to propel a story, provide comic relief, or represent a microcosm of society.

In D.W. Griffith's 1909 film A Corner in Wheat, the elevator became a vertical corridor of death, depicting a greedy businessman's plunge down a grain elevator shaft only to be buried alive under tons of wheat. Director Fritz Lang used the elevator in a similarly sinister way in Metropolis (1927), as automatons march on and off moving platforms that transport them to underground cities.

Jack Lemmon, dressed as a bellhop, pushes Tony Curtis to safety in Some Like It Hot. Image from Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot: the Funniest Film Ever Made: the Complete Book, by Alison Castle (Köln, New York: Taschen, 2001).

By the 1950’s, however, the cinematic use of the elevator was a bit lighter. In North By Northwest (1959), Cary Grant’s character (Roger Thornhill) is hounded by a couple of killers while his mother looks on, oblivious to anything but her prime spot in an elegant elevator and her son’s possible absence at her dinner table. That same year, in Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder used the elevator in an almost slapstick way, as Joe/Josephine/Junior (Tony Curtis) and Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon), masquerading as female musicians, are propositioned in an elegant hotel elevator by a couple of mobsters. In 1960, Jack Lemmon, in The Apartment, pushes his way onto a crowded elevator, sneezes in the direction of its operator (Shirley MacLaine), then makes small talk, oblivious to the crush of people behind him.

Futuristic visions of the elevator appear again in the 1960’s, with an episode called “Where No Man Has Gone Before” from the Star Trek television show (episode 2, 1966) employing a futuristic box, called a "Turbolift," complete with sound effects of doors eerily opening and closing. More recently, a Star Trek movie (Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home; 1986) gives a prime example of a hospital elevator, which has the same sterile quality as the Turbolift, which itself found a place on all the subsequent iterations of the TV show.

Mary Bradley enjoys North by Northwest as part of the Elevator and the City's multimedia component.

Recent examples of the use of elevators in movies are legion. For example: in a grim scene from The Hours (2002; see the trailer here), Meryl Streep stands in a freight elevator which, as in the early Corner in Wheat, proves to be a symbolic death tunnel. The lighter Being John Malkovich (1999) has a glum looking John Cusack taking an elevator to floor 7 ½, in a comic turn.

During the exhibit, clips of each of these movies (taken from Mitchell Multimedia Center) were assembled into a show that patrons could view at a computer placed near the exhibit cases (left).