Chris Fujiwara,
Jacques Tourneur.The Cinema of Nightfall.
John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0801865611
344pp
US$18.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the sixth film directed by Jacques Tourneur, is one of the great American films. I have been waiting many years to write that. Although there has been sporadic academic interest in Tourneur since the 1970s, most notably Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen’s 1975 edited volume of papers from the Edinburgh Film Festival, he is not well known and, still today, producer Val Lewton often receives the credit for the unique qualities of Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie rather than Lewton and Tourneur.

This lack of interest is due to many factors. Martin Scorsese, in the foreword to Chris Fujiwara’s masterful study, foregrounds the difficulty of analysing Tourneur’s contribution when he writes that it’s:

appropriate that so many of Jacques Tourneur’s movies deal with the supernatural and the paranormal, because his touch as a filmmaker is elusive yet tangible, like the presence of a ghost – in a way, you could say that Tourneur’s touch is so refined and subtle that he haunts his films. (xi)

Unlike Hitchcock, Ford, Capra and Hawks, Tourneur remained a shadowy figure, apt to portray himself in public as craftsman and content to work in B-movies he never made grand statements and he never worked with large budgets or big stars. He cultivated the most fleeting and elusive aspects of experience, things that other filmmakers would never bother with but that, for Tourneur, were the essence of the movies. (xi)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Tourneur’s reputation suffered from the judgement by Andrew Sarris, published in-the-then influential The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, of being placed in the “Expressive esoterica” category. Sarris then damned the director with faint praise by asserting that whilst he brought a “certain French gentility to the American cinema” (142), his “career represents a triumph of taste over force” (142). In describing some of his films, Sarris reiterated this point by referring to the “subdued, pastel-colored sensibility” and “unyielding pictorialism” of Tourneur’s films (142). Fortunately Chris Fujiwara’s comprehensive study of Tourneur’s entire output, rather than a few well-known films, provides a necessary antidote to the perception that the “gentility” of Tourneur’s films often mitigated their dramatic impact.

In the Foreword Scorsese cites key films such as  Cat People, The Leopard Man (1943), I Walked With a Zombie and Out of the Past (1947). With the possible exception of The leopard man, these films are not just superior genre films but great American films. Interestingly, however, Scorsese reserves most of his space for a lesser-known film, Canyon Passage (1946), which Tourneur made on loan-out from RKO to Universal. This hybrid film, which Scorsese describes as a “noir western”, was a “picture that is very special to me. It’s one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the western genre ever made” (xii). The film’s special quality was a “strange undercurrent that runs through every scene” (xii), a characteristic evident in many of his films.

What exactly is this “strange undercurrent”? Part of the explanation has to do with the fact that Tourneur worked almost exclusively in “low-brow” genres such as the horror film, film noir, the pirate film and the thriller. With relatively small budgets, iconic performers such as Joel McCrea, Robert Stack and Dana Andrews, and overly familiar material there was, seemingly, little space for a talented director to impose his “personality”, his worldview and his style. Yet Tourneur did. Consider, for example, Great Day in the Morning (1956) and Anne of the Indies (1951). Both draw on exceedingly familiar generic conventions. Both utilise this familiarity to invert and challenge many of the thematic and aesthetic conventions on their genres.

Fujiwara provides a theoretical context to discuss their “strangeness” when he writes that within:

the language of Hollywood cinema, Tourneur, like his European colleagues, developed a variant mode of expression. According to Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari, in a ‘minor literature’, ‘the expression must break forms, mark ruptures and new branch-lines. A form being broken, reconstruct the content which will necessarily be in rupture with the order of things'(7).

Even Stars in my Crown (1950), which Fujiwara describes as:

beautifully wrought but seemingly anomalous work that, by its optimism, constitutes an enigma of its own within a career based on enigma, can be related to this subversive impulse in Tourneur’s work. Stars in my Crown examines ‘the order of things’ itself – a homogeneous, organic pattern that is precisely what the narratives of Tourneur’s other films exclude as unrealisable. (7-8).

On the other hand, in a deeply ironic film such as Great Day in the Morning, Tourneur foregrounds the absence of motivation by creating a divergence between the mise-en-scène and the narrative. The bleak, unresolved ending of this film challenges the formal conventions of the Classical Hollywood system.

The son of legendary Silent film director Maurice Tourneur, Jacques was born in Paris in 1876 but raised in the United States. After failing to make much impact as an actor in Hollywood in the 1920s he left America to work with his father who was shooting a film in Berlin. Jacques subsequently directed four films in France between 1930 to 1934 and then returned to Hollywood where he worked at MGM as a second-unit director on features and as a director of numerous short films. In 1939 Louis B. Mayer decided that one of Tourneur’s two-reel films, They All Come Out, in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series, should be expanded with extra footage and it was released as a seven reel feature film. Tourneur followed with two more films for MGM in their short-lived detective series based on the adventures of Nick Carter (Nick Carter, Master Detective, 1939 and the superior Phantom Raiders, 1940), starring Walter Pidgeon.

After a poor medical film released from Republic, Doctors Don’t Tell (1941), Tourneur was invited to join producer Val Lewton at RKO. Lewton had been lured away from David O. Selznick to head a new unit formed at RKO for low budget horror films. He proved to be the perfect producer for Tourneur and their first two films, Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, were not only commercially successful, despite limited publicity, small budgets, recycled sets and little known actors, but also, aesthetically, two of the finest films produced in Hollywood in the 1940s. Cat People, with a budget of $134,000, grossed an estimated $2 million and was held over at the Hawaii Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for a record 13 weeks. Tourneur and Lewton were never to achieve such box office success again. Promoted to A films at RKO, beginning with Days of Glory (1944), Tourneur worked at RKO for the rest of the decade (except for Canyon Passage). In 1947 he directed a key film noir, Out of the Past, which extended many of the motifs found in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). Whilst the reputation of Out of the Past grew steadily over the years, it was only a moderate box-office success at the time of its release and did not generate great enthusiasm from the critics in the late 1940s.

Without a major success and lacking a studio base, Tourneur’s career faltered in the 1950s. His status was also affected by the changing pattern of Hollywood production, changes that, partly, resulted from new screen formats and a different audience demographic. In 1950 Tourneur contributed to his descending status by cutting his normal fee so that he could direct Stars In My Crown (1950), a populist, low budget MGM film starring Joel McCrea as a minister in a small rural community in the nineteenth century. This action had a long term effect on Tourneur’s income as other studios often checked with MGM to find out how much he had been paid (164) for Stars In My Crown and adjusted their offer accordingly.

In the early 1950s Tourneur made two films for 20th Century-Fox, the sublime Anne of the Indies (1951) and a melodrama set in 1870s Argentina (Way of a Gaucho, 1952). Although the studio was pleased with his work on Anne of the Indies, and picked his option for Way of a Gaucho, Tourneur fell out with influential 20th Century-Fox producer Philip Dunne on Way of a Gaucho, possibly because of the wide-spread drinking by the director and other members of the crew whilst on location in Argentina (199-200). Whatever the reason Tourneur’s status in Hollywood suffered and he never worked with this studio again.

Despite the absence of a studio contract, Tourneur continued to direct quality genre films in the 1950s – including Great Day in the Morning and the film noir Nightfall (1957), based on David Goodis’s story of an innocent man (Aldo Ray) forced to live in fear from both the police and a pair of vicious killers when he inadvertently takes a satchel containing stolen money. Tourneur’s last great film was Night of the Demon (1957) with Dana Andrews and Peggy Cummins. This film re-worked a familiar Tourneurian dilemma: the conflict between the powers of reason and the powers of the unknown- sometimes cited as the director’s fascination with ‘parallel worlds’. In earlier films, such as Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, he was more problematic and ambiguous regarding the dominance of one world over another (although he invariably came down on the side of the unknown). In Night of the Demon Tourneur was more strident and highlighted the folly of Dana Andrews’s unyielding repudiation of any evidence of the supernatural. This was Tourneur’s second British film – in 1951 he directed Circle of Danger with Ray Milland investigating the death of his brother, who died under mysterious circumstances whilst participating in a British army commando mission in Brittany in 1944.

Tourneur’s last five films, directed between 1958 and 1965, varied from mediocre to poor and for much of this period he was dependent on television for regular employment – beginning with The Martyr, an episode of The General Electric Hour starring Ronald Reagan, in January 1955, to The Ring of Anasis, and episode of T.H.E Cat in December 1966. A number of series programs directed by Tourneur were re-edited and released as feature films. A few months before he died in 1977 Tourneur was asked what place he thought his films had in the history of the cinema. He replied: “None. Nothing is more evanescent than an image in celluloid I’m a very average director, I did my work the best I could, we’re all limited” (289). Fortunately, Fujiwara’s book repudiates Tourneur’s modest assessment of his own career. The study also contains the credits for all of his films, including the French films, the short films he made for MGM between 1936 and 1942, a 1944 short made for the U.S. Public Health Service (Reward Unlimited), all of the television episodes he directed, as well as the feature films where he was second-director, and a list of his other contributions such as bit player, script clerk, assistant director and editor.

The strength of Fujiwara’s study, other than his comprehensive analysis of each feature film, resides in an ability to reveal consistent stylistic and thematic patterns from seemingly discrete scenes in different genres. Occasionally, the linkages are banal – such as like “Jeff Markham in Out of the Past, Martín [in Way of a Gaucho] assumes a new name; but unlike Jeff, he does so not to conceal himself but to wage war against the social order’ (206). Mostly, however, his analysis exposes the complexity and intelligence of the films. For example, he establishes the significance of the mediating function of Hi Linnet (Hoagy Carmichael) in Canyon Passage, especially the bravura night sequence at the bank when the audience learns that George Camrose (Brian Donlevy) is stealing money from the miner’s deposits to feed his gambling addiction (130-132). Or, the crucial moment in Anne of the Indies when pirate Anne Providence (Jean Peters) briefly discards her “masculine” veneer.

This shot dissolves to a night scene: the camera tilts down from a dim Lamp, hanging from the ceiling of the tent, to Anne, lying in bed and wearing a white nightgown …In a single shot, the camera follows her as she gets up and goes outside the tent to stand, backlit, on the shore, gazing away from us at the glittering sea. (This beautiful shot recalls the shot in I Walked With a Zombie in which Betsy … …or the first time, she experiences the temptation of narcissistically loving herself, of identifying with the desire of the other – it is secondary that the film hesitates to attribute this desire actually to the other (Pierre visibly resists when Anne offers herself to him …. (195)

Fujiwara’s analysis of this seemingly unimportant scene demonstrates its centrality to both Anne of the Indies and Tourneur’s approach to the cinema. It is a tragic inflection in a predominantly melodramatic genre:

The important thing is the unfolding of the internal drama; our uncertainty about Pierre’s attitude is merely the projection onto another narrative plane of the conflict going on within Anne. At this point, Anne of the Indies becomes tragic, but we must give ourselves to the film to realize this, because the tragedy is not communicated and consists, in part, in this failure of communication. The issues in Anne of the Indies seem straightforward, but the film leaves the essential unexpressed (195).

Similar examples can be found in Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Experiment Perilous (1944), Out of the Past, Stars in my Crown, Great Day in the Morning, Nightfall and Night of the Demon. Fujiwara’s analysis exposes the imaginary and symbolic “boundaries” (human/animal; living/dead; law/crime; male/female; rational/supernatural) that permeate such films thus allowing the director to concentrate on his “special territory”, the “space between these poles” ( 3). While Tourneur worked within the language of the Hollywood cinema he often challenged its basic precepts. For example, when Robert Stack finally reveals his feeling for Virginia Mayo in Great Day in the Morning by kissing her, Tourneur emphasised not the romance, but, through mise-en-scène, especially light and shadow, the futility of their actions and feelings. Darkness in Tourneur’s world “signifies a barrier between what can and what cannot be known about the characters” ( 231). After this scene, they never come together again. Fujiwara’s book is a perceptive study of a great director.

Geoff Mayer