Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall

“Tourneur was a great director, fully deserving of the thoroughly researched and perceptive treatment he receives from Chris Fujiwara.”―Martin Scorsese As the director of Cat People , I Walked with a Zombie , and Night of the Demon , Jacques Tourneur crafted three horror classics which, decades later, have lost none of their power to frighten audiences. And his 1947 film Out of the Past is still acknowledged as the quintessential film noir . Yet Tourneur himself remains underappreciated and his contribution to cinema history neglected. Many of his films, however, reveal a fluid artistry absent from the routine studio fare of the era. Working in a variety of genres, from Westerns ( Canyon Passage ) and spy films ( Berlin Express ) to swashbucklers ( The Flame and the Arrow ) and melodramas ( Experiment Perilous ), Tourneur imposed a personal cinematic vision that emphasized uncertainty and ambiguity. In Jacques The Cinema of Nightfall , the first in-depth exploration of Tourneur’s career, Chris Fujiwara offers a detailed film-by-film analysis of the director’s four French films, his 20 MGM shorts, and his 29 studio productions, as well as his work in television. As Fujiwara shows, mystery, sensuality, and a deliberately restrained expressionism were the hallmarks of Tourneur’s style, which frequently overcame the difficult circumstances in which he worked. Informative and immensely readable, this book provides an insightful and comprehensive study of an important and unjustly forgotten director.