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Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall

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Chris Fujiwara is one of the world's best film critics. (Look for his soon-to-be-published work on Otto Preminger.) "The Cinema of Nightfall" is specifically about the great(and vastly underrated) Jacques Tourneur, but it is much more than that. It is one of the best books ever written about how to see and experience movies. Fujiwara goes inside the process of just how a film creates meaning, using Tourneur's very subtle genius as his base. The chapters on the more famous works("Cat People", "I Walked with a Zombie" and the immortal "Out of the Past") are the best analyses ever written on those titles. However, perhaps the most impressive part of Fujiwara achievement is his coverage of the more obscure Tourneurs: "Stars in My Crown", "Canyon Passage", "Berlin Express", the shorts. (His chapter on "Nightfall" is worth the price of admission -- a whole film theology in miniature.) "Cinema of Nightfall" is a model of film understanding and film love.

Jacques Tourneur has long been a favorite of horror fans, French critics, and a few sensible American observers like Manny Farber as a creator of some of cinema's most subtly potent effects, particularly in his trio of B-horror films for Val Lewton at RKO in the early 1940s and his Lewtonesque Curse of the Demon in 1958. His most famous film noir, Out of the Past, is also widely considered one of the genre's greatest. Fans who have wished to better understand Tourneur have had to cobble together a biography, production histories, and analysis from widely scattered sources -- obscure academic journals like Film and Psychoanalysis, zines like FilmFax and Photon, French-language studies for those who can read them, and one of the several books devoted to Val Lewton. The Edinburgh Film Festival issued an anthology of essays in English devoted entirely to Tourneur, but that book was aimed squarely at academics. It's Chris Fujiwara's book Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, which straddles the academic and popular, that will likely be the standard reference in English for the foreseeable future.

Fujiwara begins by persuasively rescuing Tourneur from one of Sarris' gulags: the dreaded third ranking in American Cinema. Sarris' backhanded praise in phrases like "subdued, pastel-colored sensibility" and "a certain French gentility" has been seconded by many critics, who attributed the virtues of the Lewton-produced films to Lewton and the brilliance of Out of the Past and Night of the Demon to Tourneur's "intelligent" manipulation of prosaic generic elements. Fujiwara argues that the things that distinguish Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and Leopard Man -- narrative ambiguity, lyrical mise-en-scene, understated dramatics -- are also present in such unjustly forgotten thrillers, westerns, and historical dramas as Experiment Perilous, Stars in My Crown, Way of a Gaucho, and others. By examining Tourneur's early French features and many MGM shorts, he shows decisively that the director's stylistic maturity occurred before his first widely acclaimed feature, Cat People, and only grew from there.

Fujiwara devotes meaty individual chapters to each of the features, with a close reading and critical analysis leavened with production data and contextualizing commentary. True to the author's missionary zeal, some of the best material is the most polemical, as when he effectively articulates the minority view that Leopard Man is not the mess that many (including Tourneur) have claimed, but a major work of "precise and inexhaustible poetry" that presaged the anti-narrative cinema that would be de rigeur in Hollywood two decades later. Fujiwara is also strong on the visual beauty of Stars in My Crown, the sense of personal conviction in Night of the Demon, and the connection between the underrated Experiment Perilous and the Lewton films. Overall, a worthy, well-written and -researched tribute to an auteur who deserves a higher ranking than Sarris, and too many other critics, has given him. Included are a detailed bibliography and filmography, along with photos.

Jacques Tourneur was a uniquely talented director with a string of distinctive films to his credit, including Cat People, Canyon Passage, I Walked With a Zombie and Out of the Past. Tourneur's best films look and sound like no one else's, stylish, subtle and strangely...quiet. At last there is an intelligent, discerning book on the subject of the talented Frenchman. Perhaps a bit more background on the making of the films would have been appreciated, otherwise this is an excellent and eye-opening bit of original film scholarship.

A fascinating look at the work of this remarkable director whose horror films are among the great films of the genre. The book is well researched and nicely wirtten with good photos.