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Nightfall (1957)
Jul. 8th, 2010 08:28 pm
'The film opens in Los Angeles, a nocturnal strip of blinking neon, cocktail lounges and cheap rooming-houses. Carefully parceled-out flashbacks reveal why Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray), has become a hunted and haunted drifter, moving from city to city and name to name, trying to escape the aftermath of something terrible that happened in the desolate, snowy mountains of Wyoming.'
-- Imogen Smith, "Nightfall, a rare film noir by Jacques Tourneur at Film Forum"
( More stills and quotes below )
Image of the Night
Jul. 7th, 2010 09:12 pm
Nightfall (1957)
"Things that really happen are always difficult to explain."
Image of the Day
Jun. 27th, 2010 09:33 pm
The Flame and the Arrow (1950)
"The art of civilization is doing natural things in an unnatural way."
Berlin Express (1948)
Nov. 21st, 2009 10:57 am
The homogeneity of the film's effects has nothing in common with the flashy eccentricity of Carol Reed's The Third Man, another thriller set in the ruins of postwar Europe. Reed's film is more entertaining and seemingly more serious, but Tourneur's film is more deeply pessimistic and more mysterious.
-- Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall
In Tourneur's hands, the plot device of Lindley and Lucienne going randomly into cabarets to look for clues has a lunatic appropriateness. As Lucienne points out, "We are the ones who are being looked over." The world of the nightclub -- with its economy of cigarettes and its tawdry entertainment of tumblers, dancing girls, clowns, and mind readers -- is created as definitively and as unforgettably as in a Sternberg or Welles film. (Fujiwara)
Asked about the recurrence of evil clowns in his films, Tourneur said: "I must have a sort of complex about that. I don't find dwarfs amusing, I don't find hunchbacks amusing, and I don't find clowns amusing. They're characters out of a nightmare." (Fujiwara)
Image of the Day
Nov. 20th, 2009 09:13 pm
"Because we are more used to the sensation, it is easier for us to control it."
"Sensation?"
"Of fear, insecurity, suspicion of everyone and everything."
-- Berlin Express (1948)
Experiment Perilous (1944)
Nov. 8th, 2009 09:32 am
The main benefit of the decision to switch the period to 1903, suggested though not stated by Fellows's description of Allida as "a cloistered and frustrated orchid," is the ability to tap into the subtext of Victorianism. The change strengthens the sexual motifs of the story. Nick becomes the arch-Victorian bourgeios, obsessed with the constant danger of his wife's sexuality and driven to kill in an effort to control it. The Bederaux family is a classic Victorian family with a dark tragic past (the suicide of Nick's father), an aunt who must be locked away for a long period, and a neurotic child.
-- Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur - The Cinema of Nightfall
I've written before about Jacques Tourneur, who is one of my favorite Hollywood directors of the classical era, especially for I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and Night of the Demon (1957). He's relatively obscure (although with many champions, ranging from Kim Newman to Martin Scorsese), so it hasn't been easy to see a lot of his films. Now the Warner Archive, which is slowly making the entire Warner catalogue (including the RKO films they own) available as POD DVD-Rs, has put out a couple of Tourneur films I've been dying to see. Experiment Perilous is the first one I picked up.
This is a gothic romance, woman-in-peril film of a type that Hollywood became fascinated with in the '40s, perhaps most famously in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Cukor's Gaslight (also 1944). Tourneur had just made his name on three gothic horror thrillers produced by Val Lewton at RKO, so this was a natural step for him. To the extent that it is also a story of an overly-sophisticated European wrestling with a down-to-earth American over a beautiful innocent, the French Tourneur brings a complex, self-effacing perspective.
There's a lot going on in the story. As so often in this era of Hollywood, the film has a dense, novelistic feel. (It was based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter.) Tourneur is also an elliptical director who leaves out explanations or proffers conflicting ones. As in his famous film noir, Out of the Past, the narrative is twistingly recomplicated, with historical flashbacks thrown on expository lumps leavened with psychological and philosophical analysis and speculation. Above all, Tourneur was a supreme visual artist, and he creates amazingly textured shots that convey a sense of elaborate, nested spatial, ideological, and social relationships.
The Thomas Elsaesser essay I linked to yesterday does a nice (if academically Freudian) job of delineating the sexual, libidinal struggle at the heart of the movie. It's love and death all the way, baby, and it's as much the death of the male ego as anything else, thus something of a reversal of Tourneur's The Cat People (1942). So it's interesting that after two viewings, the movie it makes me think of most is Last Year at Marienbad. Partly it's the dark, sumptuous, heavy, suffocating, endlessly-articulated decor of the bourgeois mansion where the struggle takes place, but it's also the schematic three-body problem of the threatening husband, the petrified wife, and her pensive, narrating lover(s).
It must also be said that I have just acquired the ability to make my own screen caps, so I'm having to fight the impulse to drown this post in images. Perhaps I have failed to fight it! There are so many arresting images in the film, so many doppelgangers in the form of reflections, sculptures, or manikins. The libidinal struggle is also a struggle over representation. Another similarity with Marienbad is that one of the battles is the battle to establish a narrative. Who gets to tell the story? Who gets to direct? Does anyone actually win such a battle? The happy ending of this movie says yes, at least for today. Yet the screen is haunted with beautiful second thoughts.
Peira sphalere
Nov. 7th, 2009 12:59 pm
The scene voices with rare candour one of the commonplaces of the post-romantic romantic (i.e. gothic, decadent) imagination (but also of Lacan): perfection is equated with death, though not of the woman, but of the man. And what death here means is the death of desire. Translated into the terms of Experiment Perilous, the film tells not so much the story of the seduction of Dr Hunt Bailey by the beautiful Allida via her portrait, but of Hunt's seduction by Nick Bedereau, the older man seducing the younger in the hope of rekindling, through the desire of another, his own desire, which is ultimately not for his wife, but for his own death: the glacial world of the film's New York winter is as frozen as Allida is in her portrait. The portrait appears as merely the ruse, or rather the Medusa's head, which mesmerizes Hunt and makes him an easy prey not for a femme fatale but for an homme fatale, for Nick's diabolical plans and monstrously skillful designs. As "Hunt" says to Clag when he suggests a visit to the Bedereaus: "I'm game".
-- Thomas Elsaesser, Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous
Where was I?
Nov. 4th, 2007 08:21 amSo I worked on Way 2 yesterday, for the first time in probably a month or more. How did it fall by the wayside, so to speak, for so long? Well, anyway, I edited the letters and wrote a few responses. I'm going to try to learn how to use Publisher with this issue, so that's probably going to extend the process as well. I also need artwork, if anyone is feeling artistic.
Around noon I walked up to the post office to mail a couple of zines. It was overcast when I started out, but the sun had broken through by the time I got there. However, there was a line out the door, and I decided life was too short for such a long line, so I just turned around and walked home along a different way. It was good weather for raking leaves, so that's what I did when I got back, although it was breezy enough that more leaves kept falling where I had just raked. What the hell, it was an aerobic workout as far as I was concerned, and it felt good to sweat and huff and puff a little after too many hours staring at a computer screen.
After more work on Way back on the computer screen, I watched the University of Oregon play Arizona State in football on a different screen. This was a battle between the 4th and 5th ranked teams in the nation, so it was on national TV. It was a good game, which meant I felt nervous for much of it, because I wasn't sure Oregon would win until the end of the third quarter. I'm working on the zenlike acceptance it's only a game, but I haven't gotten there yet. In the end Oregon did win, so the nerves were better than they might have been. The Duckies are still in the national championship hunt.
Last night I watched another Jacques Tourneur movie, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), which is the next movie he made after Stars in My Crown. This is a technicolor swashbuckler that's very much a star-vehicle for Burt Lancaster, who gets to show off his impressive acrobatic skills. (The DVD was released as part of a Burt Lancaster collection.) It's set in the 13th century of the Hollywood imagination, in Lombardy under occupation by the Germans (i.e., the Holy Roman Empire). Lancaster is the free-spirited Dardo who lives in the forest with his young son and doesn't care about the oppression of his people by the imperial Germans. Well, you can see where this is going already.
It's a fairly superficial and predictable copy of Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, for the most part, although it's beautifully shot (which almost goes without saying in a Tourneur film) and has a few interesting hints of darkness and internal conflict here and there. For example, Dardo's wife (and the mother of his son) has left him to take up with Count Ulrich, the leader of the German occupation force. The rebel encampment is set in some beautiful Roman ruins -- a little reminder of the vanity of power. In the ruins, Dardo keeps Count Ulrich's niece, Anne of Hesse (played by the almond-eyed Virginia Mayo), on a metal dog collar chained to a tree. (Guess who falls in love?) There's also an interesting character in the Marchese Alessandro de Granazia, a Lombardian nobleman who refuses to pay taxes to Count Ulrich but is not exactly enamored of the peasant rebels either. Another strange character in the rebel troupe writes with his feet rather than his perfectly capable hands. Why? he is asked. "The art of civilization is doing natural things the unnatural way," he explains. It almost seems that Tourneur is mocking his own movie with this line -- look, ma, no hands!
For the most part, however, these hints of something deeper are not developed. Nonetheless, it's still a lot of fun just as an action picture full of sword fights and danger and acrobatic derring do. It doesn't reach the heights of its model as such, but it's a perfectly good way to while away a Saturday night. "What sets it apart from its peers," says one online source, "is the witty script and imaginative situations the characters find themselves in."
Maybe now I'll get around to watching the pirate movie follow-up that Lancaster made a couple of years later, The Crimson Pirate (1952), directed by another noir great, Robert Siodmak. I guess the early '50s saw a wave of technicolor swashbucklers.
Around noon I walked up to the post office to mail a couple of zines. It was overcast when I started out, but the sun had broken through by the time I got there. However, there was a line out the door, and I decided life was too short for such a long line, so I just turned around and walked home along a different way. It was good weather for raking leaves, so that's what I did when I got back, although it was breezy enough that more leaves kept falling where I had just raked. What the hell, it was an aerobic workout as far as I was concerned, and it felt good to sweat and huff and puff a little after too many hours staring at a computer screen.
After more work on Way back on the computer screen, I watched the University of Oregon play Arizona State in football on a different screen. This was a battle between the 4th and 5th ranked teams in the nation, so it was on national TV. It was a good game, which meant I felt nervous for much of it, because I wasn't sure Oregon would win until the end of the third quarter. I'm working on the zenlike acceptance it's only a game, but I haven't gotten there yet. In the end Oregon did win, so the nerves were better than they might have been. The Duckies are still in the national championship hunt.
Last night I watched another Jacques Tourneur movie, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), which is the next movie he made after Stars in My Crown. This is a technicolor swashbuckler that's very much a star-vehicle for Burt Lancaster, who gets to show off his impressive acrobatic skills. (The DVD was released as part of a Burt Lancaster collection.) It's set in the 13th century of the Hollywood imagination, in Lombardy under occupation by the Germans (i.e., the Holy Roman Empire). Lancaster is the free-spirited Dardo who lives in the forest with his young son and doesn't care about the oppression of his people by the imperial Germans. Well, you can see where this is going already.
It's a fairly superficial and predictable copy of Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, for the most part, although it's beautifully shot (which almost goes without saying in a Tourneur film) and has a few interesting hints of darkness and internal conflict here and there. For example, Dardo's wife (and the mother of his son) has left him to take up with Count Ulrich, the leader of the German occupation force. The rebel encampment is set in some beautiful Roman ruins -- a little reminder of the vanity of power. In the ruins, Dardo keeps Count Ulrich's niece, Anne of Hesse (played by the almond-eyed Virginia Mayo), on a metal dog collar chained to a tree. (Guess who falls in love?) There's also an interesting character in the Marchese Alessandro de Granazia, a Lombardian nobleman who refuses to pay taxes to Count Ulrich but is not exactly enamored of the peasant rebels either. Another strange character in the rebel troupe writes with his feet rather than his perfectly capable hands. Why? he is asked. "The art of civilization is doing natural things the unnatural way," he explains. It almost seems that Tourneur is mocking his own movie with this line -- look, ma, no hands!
For the most part, however, these hints of something deeper are not developed. Nonetheless, it's still a lot of fun just as an action picture full of sword fights and danger and acrobatic derring do. It doesn't reach the heights of its model as such, but it's a perfectly good way to while away a Saturday night. "What sets it apart from its peers," says one online source, "is the witty script and imaginative situations the characters find themselves in."
Maybe now I'll get around to watching the pirate movie follow-up that Lancaster made a couple of years later, The Crimson Pirate (1952), directed by another noir great, Robert Siodmak. I guess the early '50s saw a wave of technicolor swashbucklers.
Stars in My Crown (1950)
Oct. 9th, 2007 01:42 pmSo another movie I watched over the weekend that I've been thinking about ever since is Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown. I'm a huge fan of Tourneur's films, as I've written before, particularly Out of the Past (1947), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and, as of recently, Canyon Passage (1946). These are all dark, dreamy, pictorially beautiful movies straight from the heart of the Hollywood studio system. (Well, perhaps from just off to the side of the heart, but still pretty close.) Tourneur claimed he was a craftsman, not an artist, and that he never turned down a script. He made movies in a lot of different genres, some from pretty crappy scripts. I've now seen eleven of them, and in some ways Stars in My Crown is the weirdest of all. Weird because it's so goddamned wholesome compared to the others.
We're talking wholesome as in Invite-the-Parson-to-Sunday-Dinner-and-a-Movie wholesome. In fact, it's about a parson (played by the great Joel McCrea) in a small southern town just after the Civil War. It reminds me a little of A Christmas Story (which is also very, very wholesome) in that it's narrated by someone looking back at his childhood during the events of the story, when he was an orphan boy adopted by the parson and his wife. There are two different conflicts in the story, both of which are actually fairly typical in Tourneur's movies, although not always so prominent. The first is the conflict between faith and reason, which is at the heart of all his horror films, particularly The Night of the Demon (1957). It's embodied here in the conflict between the parson and a young doctor when the town is struck by typhoid fever. The doctor blames the parson for spreading it, and the parson comes to doubt himself.
The other conflict is more interesting to me, probably because it's much less wholesome. Some of the neighborly, church-going white people in town want the land that belongs to a freed black slave, Uncle Famous, but he doesn't want to sell. They terrorize him, but he gets support from the parson and one other white family. What's interesting about this is that it comes before the Civil Rights movement and thus long before Hollywood had begun to examine its own racial attitudes very seriously. Tourneur was a Frenchman, and maybe he was able to deal with American racism more clearly as an outsider. None of his movies has the cringe-inducing black characters typical of so many other Hollywood features of the era. In fact, I Walked with a Zombie is notable for its critical subtext regarding colonialism in the Caribbean and for filming a voodoo ceremony in almost documentary terms (although also exploiting voodoo for its more Hollywood-mythological values as well).
So while the MGM-wholesomeness of Stars in My Crown was irritating to me, I need to give this film another shot. The first conflict was resolved in a way that I thought totally spoiled Tourneur's usual ambiguity about the supernatural, but Chris Fujiwara argues, in his excellent book on Tourneur, that he actually films it in such a way as to leave no room for God. I'll have to give that another look, because it sure was too subtle for me. The second conflict is also resolved in a very wholesome way (what, no bloodbath?! fuck!!!), but inasmuch as it involves a confrontation between the parson and the torch-wielding Ku Klux Klan, it's still a very exciting scene. Take that, D.W. Griffith! However, it seems more than a bit of a whitewash when compared to real history, or at least what I know of it.
Tourneur claimed that this was one of his favorite of his own movies, but I'll need some convincing. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see him approaching the same concerns that he explores in his noirs and horror films but from a completely different angle. Meanwhile, I watched his Great Day in the Morning (1956) last night, which is a color film that takes place in Denver right before the Civil War. You see, this gambler from North Carolina is looking for some gold miners who are exploiting a motherlode so they can buy weapons for the South for the war everyone knows is coming ...
We're talking wholesome as in Invite-the-Parson-to-Sunday-Dinner-and-a-Movie wholesome. In fact, it's about a parson (played by the great Joel McCrea) in a small southern town just after the Civil War. It reminds me a little of A Christmas Story (which is also very, very wholesome) in that it's narrated by someone looking back at his childhood during the events of the story, when he was an orphan boy adopted by the parson and his wife. There are two different conflicts in the story, both of which are actually fairly typical in Tourneur's movies, although not always so prominent. The first is the conflict between faith and reason, which is at the heart of all his horror films, particularly The Night of the Demon (1957). It's embodied here in the conflict between the parson and a young doctor when the town is struck by typhoid fever. The doctor blames the parson for spreading it, and the parson comes to doubt himself.
The other conflict is more interesting to me, probably because it's much less wholesome. Some of the neighborly, church-going white people in town want the land that belongs to a freed black slave, Uncle Famous, but he doesn't want to sell. They terrorize him, but he gets support from the parson and one other white family. What's interesting about this is that it comes before the Civil Rights movement and thus long before Hollywood had begun to examine its own racial attitudes very seriously. Tourneur was a Frenchman, and maybe he was able to deal with American racism more clearly as an outsider. None of his movies has the cringe-inducing black characters typical of so many other Hollywood features of the era. In fact, I Walked with a Zombie is notable for its critical subtext regarding colonialism in the Caribbean and for filming a voodoo ceremony in almost documentary terms (although also exploiting voodoo for its more Hollywood-mythological values as well).
So while the MGM-wholesomeness of Stars in My Crown was irritating to me, I need to give this film another shot. The first conflict was resolved in a way that I thought totally spoiled Tourneur's usual ambiguity about the supernatural, but Chris Fujiwara argues, in his excellent book on Tourneur, that he actually films it in such a way as to leave no room for God. I'll have to give that another look, because it sure was too subtle for me. The second conflict is also resolved in a very wholesome way (what, no bloodbath?! fuck!!!), but inasmuch as it involves a confrontation between the parson and the torch-wielding Ku Klux Klan, it's still a very exciting scene. Take that, D.W. Griffith! However, it seems more than a bit of a whitewash when compared to real history, or at least what I know of it.
Tourneur claimed that this was one of his favorite of his own movies, but I'll need some convincing. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see him approaching the same concerns that he explores in his noirs and horror films but from a completely different angle. Meanwhile, I watched his Great Day in the Morning (1956) last night, which is a color film that takes place in Denver right before the Civil War. You see, this gambler from North Carolina is looking for some gold miners who are exploiting a motherlode so they can buy weapons for the South for the war everyone knows is coming ...
I believe I posted a while back about Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of a dozen eccentric Westerns, and I've since watched a few more of the films, including Nicholas Ray's sublimely hysterical and operatic Johnny Guitar and William Wellman's scenery-chewing dysfuntional family art Western, Track of the Cat. The latest is one I've longed to see for years and wasn't sure I'd ever get the chance, Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage, which is now available on the Classic Western Round-Up Volume 1 DVD set from Universal.
( A long and winding review ... )
( A long and winding review ... )
