NIGHTFALL (Columbia Pictures, 1957)

D: Jacques Tourneur. P: Ted Richmond. W: Stirling Silliphant, novel by David Goodis, Ph: Burnett Guffey. M: George Duning. St: Aldo Ray (James Vanning), Brian Keith (John), Anne Bancroft (Marie Gardner), Jocelyn Brando (Laura Fraser), James Gregory (Ben Fraser)

“I’m glad you finally caught up with me. Will you please just take me in?”

Had Aldo Ray sustained the same disturbed demeanour he displays when LA’s city lights illuminate the dusk in the film’s opening scene, he may have made a more memorable anti-hero. Instead he remains largely passive, rousing himself only for a few bursts of action as the tone of Tourneur’s thriller drifts from noir towards romance.

After picking up fashion model Marie Gardner, Vanning is accosted in the street by two familiar faces - John and his vicious sidekick, Red (Rudy Bond). Driving him to an oil field, they attempt to wrest the whereabouts of a bag of loot Vanning snatched from them. Under pressure from the hoods, wanted for a murder they committed and living with a fake identity, Vanning tries to stay alive, reclaim the hidden money and clear his name. Marie, under threat herself, goes along for the ride.

 

 

As observed by Geoffrey O’Brien, in Tourneur’s best works, “Crucial things happen off-screen or before the movie starts.”[i] In this case, his signature flashback structure is employed. In comparison with Out of the Past, the paradigm of expressionistic noir, the flashbacks here, while seamless, feel derivative (partly because Nightfall appeared late in the noir cycle).

We discover that Vanning and his friend, Dr Gurston (Frank Albertson), on a hunting trip, assisted John and Red after a car accident. The duo have robbed a bank and their rescuers have become unwitting witnesses. Opportunistically, Red sets Vanning up in a murder/suicide scenario, killing Gurston but only wounding Vanning. Red and John neither bank on Vanning surviving nor that they, in their haste, would flee the scene with the doctor’s medical bag, rather than the money.

Blind chance, as so often in noir, thus conspires against the innocent Vanning, but mere survival is only one of his problems. It transpires that Gurston’s young wife has written “indiscrete letters” to the handsome ex-serviceman; now, believing that Vanning killed her husband, the spurned woman posts a reward for his arrest.

 

 

Nightfall is a stylish picture. The interrogation at the oil field is consistent with Tourneur’s visual sensibility. Vanning stands in front of a derrick, its revolving hammer crashing down inches behind his head while John fires questions at him. Cross wires of the giant structures form irregular angles, mirroring Vanning’s mental ordeal. In other scenes, the bleak arena of the Grand Teton National Park is powerfully evoked by Guffey. Transposing these stories from an urban environment does not always work, but the location’s barrenness works in this film’s favour. It’s a canny reversal of noir tropes: urban darkness representing safety for Vanning while snowy peaks and stark light impose a sense of danger. This is strongest in the final scene, in which John and Red are holed up in an isolated wooden cabin. Using the frames of its glassless windows, Tourneur separates antagonists and protagonists. An out-of-control snowplough makes for a tense finale, which, had the film been made 30 years later, would have been a gore lover’s dream.

Aldo Ray’s brawny stature is not matched by his too-cool demeanour. He is, as scripted, a pure noir protagonist – paranoid, backed into a ‘dark corner’ – but seems reluctant to punch his way out of it, preferring instead to run. Marie is similarly low key; it is never convincing that she would blindly follow a man whose life is in such danger without displaying the ruthless ambition of a femme fatale – there is money involved after all. Keith’s John, whose controlled aggression is as unnerving as the craven violence of Red, is the most commanding presence, but it’s perhaps the most law-abiding of the principal characters who’s the slyest and most intelligent. Ben Fraser, the insurance investigator whose job it is to find the bonded money, intuits that perhaps there’s more to the scenario than Vanning being a lone player. He’s more streetwise than the hero, biding his time before he enters the fray.

 
Nightfall is in no way a bad film; it benefits hugely from the meticulous compositions of Guffey, whose noir work included In a Lonely Place and Human Desire. Compared with the more ethereal atmospheres of Tourneur’s work for Val Lewton, however, and the puzzle-box plotting of Out of the Past, his late noir never strays into the preternatural world between reality and illusion. Artistically, though it’s a robust production, it struggles to match those achievements.

Clark Hodgkiss

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[I] Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film (2002, 2012), Counterpoint, 2013