I wanted to offer some comments on Jacques Tourneur's masterpiece,
"Nightfall," which I recently resaw at Doc Films in Chicago.

It seems to me to be easily Tourneur's greatest film. Other favorites
include "Stars in My Crown" and "Curse of the Demon," great but
clearly not as great. "Out of the Past" is great too, but there the
time crossing techniques seem graceful uses of convention, while the
cross-cutting in "Nightfall" seems considerably more profound.

One key to "Nightfall" is the way it moves from cutting between
different scenes in the present to cutting between past and present.
At first we cut between James Vanning (the protagonist, played by Aldo
Ray) and the investigator stalking him. Soon that intercutting becomes
also cutting to flashbacks, as Ray tells his story. A cut to a plate
of fish being cooked over a campfire has never been as great as it is
here! In familiar "noir" fashion, the intercutting, and the original
way it weaves together pursuer and pursued and present and past,
creates a net trapping Vanning. Little moments like lights coming on
in the pre-credit sequence leading to the title "Nightfall" are
similar to cuts as well, signaling the passage of time, as does the
cutting within scenes, creating a wonderful feeling of time's
irreversible, one-way flow. The flashbacks do that too, because rather
than representing the triumph of memory over the present, as in, say,
Ford's "How Green Was My Valley," the give life to power of awful
facts of the past, the crime Vanning cannot escape, over his present
life. This results in part from the way they are interwoven with the
present, rather than being presented in a single flashback.

The intercutting also presents time and space as interdependent, and
yet connected loosely rather than tightly. And it is sometimes
mirrored by cutting within scenes, not colliding images so much as
placing them side by side, in a way the reinforces the gentle, liquid
gracefulness of Tourneur's imagery, his supple and almost tactile
sense of light and space. These elements seem almost contrary to the
trap. Nearly an opposite of, say, Lang's, Tourneur's vision is less
one of global paranoia or terror than of the modesty of individual
lives in the face of larger forces, and somewhere in the gentleness of
his light lies a way out of the trap, the possibility of those lives
triumphing as well.

Though I had seen this film perhaps four times before reseeing it on
Thursday, there is a single line of dialogue that, while always a key
moment for me, for the first time moved me to tears. Near the film's
end, the investigator who had been stalking Vanning finally introduces
himself, but rather than "taking me in," as Vanning pleads, he
presents his own reasons for believing in Vanning's innocence. When
he's done, Vanning holds out his hand and says something like,
"Pleased to meet you." Why was this so affecting? Not because I cared
all that hugely about Vanning as a particular character, but rather,
because that moment represented a sudden untangling of the film's
spider-web-spinning montage, a sign of possible coming freedom.

Similar moments occur often in the greatest of Hollywood films: a line
in the dialogue seems to somehow engage all of the imagery. In
Minnelli's "Home From the Hill," there's a devastatingly powerful line
that begins "His illegitimate son...," somehow pulling the cycles of
repetition in the film ever tighter. A similar later line, Rafe's
explanation of his reasons for a marriage proposal, is just as moving
for seeming to unsnarl them.

I think what I'm trying to argue here is that many of the most moving
moments in Hollywood films come from an intersection of dialogue and
the deepest levels of the style, one affecting, perhaps explaining,
and even transforming the other. The titled shot of Uncle Charlie in
his room in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" has no dialogue, but its
frozen claustrophobic spaces evokes his mind, and the image has a
similarly resonant power across both images and narrative.

Fred Camper