Nightfall

Jacques Tourneur was one of cinema’s great second stringers. A director who could make the feeblest budgetary constraints outshine its big budget brethren through sheer force of style and atmosphere. He shined brightest when his films were their darkest – Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Past. While Nightfall is not up to the level of any of those films, it is a sturdy little crime thriller that offers plenty of pleasures.

The problem isn’t that so much of the plot feels like it was rolled off the film noir conveyor belt, but that it’s main character never fully commits to his emotional downfall or flirtation with amorality. Aldo Ray’s beefy sensitive artist is setup to everything in his corner so his chase from one greedy moment years prior is not energized by noir’s typical sense of danger or domestic stasis gone out of sync. He’s a white hat character that we’re told is a gray but never really see or become convinced by this point.

He’s got an insurance agent on his tail that’s on his side (James Gregory), a beautiful woman (Anne Bancroft), and a narrative that wants to give him a happy ending. A better film noir would fully explore Ray’s opportunist motivations and the ethical quicksand so much of the film plucks him in. There’s still the picturesque climax that places us squarely in the mountains of Wyoming, a nice change of pace from noir’s typically concrete jungle rhythms and imagery, and the solid performances from a game cast to make Nightfall routinely engaging.

It’s just a film that will always a B-lister in comparison to far better work by Tourneur, like the similarly “man haunted by his past” noir Out of the Past.