| NIGHTFALL (1956) : J.Tourneur : 6/10 : review ONLINE MON.1.DEC. |
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 "David Goodis is the mystery man of hardboiled fiction. ... He wrote of winos and barroom piano players and small‑time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his own. ... He was a poet of the losers. ... If Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this."Geoffrey O'Brien Although Delmer Daves' Dark Passage (1947), Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jean-Jacques Beneix's The Moon in the Gutter (1983) are the best-known examples of movies based on David Goodis novels, Jacques Tourneur's version of Nightfall is also worth at least a look. An offbeat, slightly over-ambitious noir, it has an unusual narrative structure, and an even more surprising choice of leading man: the bluff and burly Aldo Ray, enjoying a rare break from his usual run of thuggish heavies and military tough-nuts. As commercial artist Jim Vanning, Ray's character here is rather more sensitive and sympathetic than his usual roles - he's even quite disarmingly touching, at times. But Jim is certainly more than able to look after himself, and can quickly switch into a two-fisted brawler when situations dictate. As it turns out, trouble does come looking for Jim one steamy, sweaty Los Angeles summer - in the form of a pair of gangland thugs (Brian Keith as John, Rudy Bond as Red), who are convinced he knows the whereabouts of a suitcase containing a fortune in stolen cash. The hoods deploy brutal methods in order to get Jim to talk - during which he repeatedly flashes back to the previous winter, when he'd been minding his business on a fishing trip in a remote corner of snowy Wyoming... The geographical and climatic differences between the urban environment of big-city California and the vast expanses of rural Wyoming are effectively drawn via Burnett Gufffey's crisp cinematography (his other credits include Bonnie and Clyde, From Here to Eternity, Birdman of Alcatraz and In a Lonely Place) and the picture's classy cast includes a young Anne Bancroft as a mysterious woman who crosses Jim's path and may or may not be that classic noir staple, the femme fatale. The Manchurian Candidate's James Gregory is also on hand as a persistent but sympathetic insurance-agent on Jim's trail. But, while both of these characters add colour and nuance (plus romance from the former and humour from the latter) to the enterprise, both are essentially superfluous to a plot which essentially boils down to the conflict between Jim, John and Red - the latter a giggling, mentally-deficient sadist in stark contrast to his cool-headed partner-in-crime. Tourneur and his editor William Lyon, meanwhile, are stymied by a script (by Stirling Silliphant) that isn't so much bifurcated as broken-backed - the switching between present and past bogs down the momentum, with the result that Nightfall feels considerably longer than its trim-sounding 79 minutes. Even more distracting are a couple of crucial plot-points involving the stolen cash which strain credulity to an unsatisfactory degree - it's therefore no surprise that, when loosely updating the story into Fargo, Ethan and Joel Coen brothers took only certain key details and images from the original and reconfigured them into a quite different sort of tale. Fans of that movie's grisly "wood-chipper" incident will, however, certainly get a kick out of Tourneur's startlingly violent climax. Neil Young 1.Dec.08 -------------------------------------------------------------------- USA 79m (BBFC timing) director : Jacques Tourneur (Night of the Demon, Cat People, Out of the Past, etc) editor : William A Lyon (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny, Barefoot in the Park, etc) seen 20.Nov.08 London (BFI South Bank [ex-NFT] : £7.60) |
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