It’s hard to believe Jacques Tourneur only directed two films that are deemed canonical film noir. I’m not sure who are the gatekeepers for inclusion in that club, but even his horror films like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie have a look at feel and that scans as noir-adjacent, if even they don’t have gangsters. The former definitely has a femme fatale, and she’s the lead.
The director’s Out of the Past greatly overshadows what is considered to be his other noir, 1956’s Nightfall. Not that the 1956 picture is missing any of the right components—it just put them together as effectively as his other noir.
For one thing, regardless of how one regards his acting, lead Aldo Ray is not Robert Mitchum. That is not necessarily to the detriment of the film, but Ray’s character is less nuanced here than the other actor in Past. And yet, Ray gets to stretch his legs a bit more than in early roles where he was largely thugs and soldiers. This time, he’s a commercial artist, which scans as somebody who is sensitive yet practical.
After a truly horrible title song over the opening credits, James Gregory sidles up next to Ray at a downtown bus stop and makes small talk. What intrigued me about this bit is how natural it feels. They talk about the heat, which leads to the tropics, which gives Ray the opportunity to talk about serving in a place with such a climate during his service in the war. Gregory talks about how he wasn’t allowed to enlist because of a bum ticker.
A similar scene in a bar that night plays out in a similar, though less natural manner. Anne Bancroft takes the stool next to Ray and hits him up for five bucks. She claims to have had dinner plans with a friend but got stood up. Now she can’t afford that martini going warm on the counter in front of her. I like her reply when he asks why she thinks he can afford that: “You smell like you’ve just been to a barbershop. Men don’t go to the barbershop when they’re down and out.” He takes pity on her after she says of the bailed date: “The men I usually want into don’t want to talk to anybody but their wives, their secretaries.”
Neither of these encounters were by chance, and both are related to an incident months earlier in the wilds of Wyoming. Ray and a doctor played by Frank Albertson were on a fishing trip when they see a car crash through a guardrail and down a hill. They rescue Brian Keith and Ruby Bond, and Albertson even makes a crude split and sling for former’s fractured arm. Alas, no good deed in noir ever goes unpunished and these mysterious men, who had been fleeing with loot they just stole from a bank, kill Albertson. They think Ray is dead, but what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head was from a rock off which a bullet ricocheted.
Now Ray is in the big city far from there, but the robbers had hired Bancroft as bait to keep Ray there until they can grab him outside the restaurant. They take him to some oil derricks on the outskirts of town, where Bond uses the pendulum of one to smash a board, demonstrating how the same could be done to one of Ray’s legs if he doesn’t confess to where he supposedly hid the thieves’ loot.
You see, back in Wyoming, the bag Bond grabbed after thinking Ray is dead was Albertson’s black doctor bag. As for the loot, Ray truly has no idea where it is. On a long car ride to those derricks, the robbers emphasize the trouble they went through to locate him. Keith: “We spent a lot of money tracking you down.” Bond: “And it’s not tax deductible!” Ray pleads his innocence, but the sadistic Bond looks forward to the cruel things he’s going to do to make the man talk: “The tougher they are, the more fun they are.”
At the derrick, we experience the first of the flashbacks through which we learn about what happened in Wyoming. I don’t usually mind flashbacks, as those are a staple of the genre, but these are dropped into the narrative so abruptly as to be mildly irritating. There’s a good reason why crossfades are usually employed for such a purpose. Without them, you might suspect you had a stroke and lost some time.
Almost as abrupt is the speed with which Bancroft falls head over heels for Ray, and that is yet another convention of noir. Soon, she and Ray will be on a bus to Wyoming to try to find that missing bag containing 350 grand before the robbers can.
On that same bus will be Gregory, whom the film has checked in with off and on since his casual conversation with our hero at that bus stop. Gregory is with the bank’s insurer and so has also been keeping tabs on Ray. And the more he surveils the man, the more convinced he is of his innocence. As Gregory says to him once they finally have the opportunity to have an open conversation: “A man with $350K doesn’t stay up all night with a watercolor set to meet an agency deadline.” Gregory also did a comparison of the bullet pulled from Alberton and that which was used in the heist. My wife wondered aloud why he was doing that forensics work and not the police—further evidence that she is the brains of this particular partnership.
There’s a lot I liked in this, though much of it scanned as too artificial for me to lose myself in the film. There’s a crazy scene at a runway show where Bancroft, working as a model, sees the thugs and tears off through the crowd. Just imagine the headlines if that happened at such an event today. There’s the tinge of melancholy to Ray’s performance, with him looking out his apartment window and telling her, “You can’t imagine how many times I’ve stood here and watched it get dark. I know where every shadow falls.”
Still, Nightfall feels a bit less like how I normally think of Tourneur’s work, and more like an early version of the more grisly comedies of the Coen Brothers. All of my reasons for thinking that concern Keith and his partner, whom the former describes as “sort of an adult delinquent”. Bond is the kind of very bad man who will give a man to the count of five to run, shoot him in the back right after “2”. Then he’ll quip, “I never could count past 3.” There will even be a moment towards the end which made me gasp, something which immediately brought to mind a certain memorable scene from Fargo, though it is handled with far greater restraint here.
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Starring Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith
Watched on Arrow Video UK blu-ray (region B)