Nightfall

United States

1957

78 Min

Black and White

1.33:1

English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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SCR Stirling Silliphant, David Goodis

CAST Aldo Ray, Brian Keith, Anne Bancroft, Jocelyn Brando, James Gregory, Frank Albertson, Rudy Bond, Monty Ash

SOUND John P. Livadary, Ferrol Redd

Synopsis

Rayburn is a big bear type of friendly Chicago bachelor, commercial artist, and former Navy wartime veteran who is on a hunting trip in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with older best friend Dr. Edward Gurston, who married Jim’s friend—a woman twenty years his junior. Their camping trip is interrupted by a speeding car going off an embankment and Doc patching up the fractured arm of one of the rescued men. The psychopathic Red and the more puzzling contemplative John (Brian Keith) just robbed a bank in Seattle of $350,000, and decide to steal the camper’s car and kill them because they’re potential eyewitnesses to their perfect robbery. Trigger-happy Red kills Doc, but after making it look like a suicide leaves Rayburn unconscious and seemingly dead. The camper recovers when the thugs are gone and finds they mistakenly took Doc’s medical bag instead of the one with the dough. While fleeing on foot through a snowstorm, the camper buries the money in a snowbank near a shack and instead of reporting it to the police, he goes on the lam changing his name to Jim Vanning. He does it because his fingerprints are on the rifle that killed Doc, and that would make him a likely murder suspect. Also, his motive might be the suspicious relationship he had with Doc’s wife, who wrote him love letters and made sexual advances at the innocent man.

On the run all winter, Vanning lands in Los Angeles after being tailed for several months by insurance investigator Ben Fraser, who is accompanied by his wife Laura. The investigator is waiting for Vanning to lead him to the heist money, even though he knows that he’s also wanted in Chicago for murder. Ben tells his wife “He grows on you; it’s almost like he needs protection.”

In a Hollywood bar, Marie Gardner, a high-class fashion model, picks up Vanning claiming she has no money to pay for her drinks after her girl friend failed to show up for a dinner date. Outside the bar, Red and John accost him and roughly dismiss Marie, saying she did a good job relaxing him. She mistakenly helped them thinking they were police after a wanted man. The thugs take Vanning to a deserted oil derrick and are set to torture him for info on the money, but Vanning manages to escape and flees to Marie’s place where he explains everything. They spend the night innocently together and plan to go to Wyoming to find the money and return it to the police. —Ozu’s World of Movie Reviews

Director

Jacques Tourneur

The first director Val Lewton hired for his RKO unit was Jacques Tourneur, and the first picture made by that unit was Cat People, an original screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen.

When Tourneur’s father, Maurice, returned to Paris after a number of years in America, Jacques had gone with him, working as assistant director and editor for his father. In 1933, he made a few directorial solos in the French language and then returned to Hollywood, where he became an assistant director at MGM. It was at this time that he first met Val Lewton, and the two young men worked as special unit directors for Jack Conway on A Tale of Two Cities ; it was Lewton and Tourneur who staged the storming of the Bastille sequence for that film.

The first director Val Lewton hired for his RKO unit was Jacques Tourneur, and the first picture made by that unit was Cat People, an original screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen.

Tourneur remained at MGM, directing over 20 short subjects, and Lewton eventually went on to become David O. Selznick’s story editor. When Lewton left Selznick to head his own production unit at RKO, he had already made up his mind that Tourneur would direct his first production. Tourneur came to RKO, where he served as director for Lewton’s first three films— Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie , and The Leopard Man. The front office held his work in such esteem that he was given the “A” treatment—solo direction of a high-budget film called Days of Glory , which was Gregory Peck’s first starring film. It was not held against him that Days of Glory bombed. Tourneur immediately turned to another high budget picture at RKO— Experiment Perilous , starring Hedy Lamarr with Paul Lukas and George Brent. Under Tourneur’s skillful direction, it became a suspenseful mood period film, certainly one of his and Hedy Lamarr’s best.

Tourneur stayed on at RKO to direct Robert Mitchum in one of his finest pictures, Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High ), as well as an excellent melodrama, Berlin Express , starring Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan with Paul Lukas. Filmed partially in Berlin, the work was the first Hollywood picture to be made in Germany since the end of the war.

Tourneur then directed three excellent westerns for his friend Joel McCrea— Stars in My Crown, Stranger on Horseback , and Wichita , which featured McCrea as Wyatt Earp. He also directed The Flame and the Arrow , starring Burt Lancaster, and Great Day in the Morning , another RKO western with Robert Stack and Virginia Mayo. He then went back to make another horror picture in England, Night of the Demon , with Dana Andrews. This film is rated as highly as those he made for Lewton.

Television direction occupied the greater part of Tourneur’s time for the next decade, but he retired in 1966 and returned to his native country, where he died in Bergerac on December 19, 1977. The best pictures which he directed were those of suspense and genuine terror, though he also did well with those that had a great deal of action. He wisely resisted scenes with long patches of dialogue. When confronted with such scenes, he typically frowned and said, “It sounds so corny.” —DeWitt Bodeen

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Daniel S.

15Nov11

I reluctantly admit here that Nightfall's first hour could have been much more captivating. However, Nightfall's last part is so stunning that I'm ready to forget all the rest. From the moment Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft take the bus in L.A., the film becomes a classic of the genre. There, in the Wyoming snow, Jacques Tourneur shot scenes that numerous directors will, in the future, simply copy or subconsciously memorize. Highly recommended.

msmichel

30Aug11

Not bad noir exercise from director Tourneur with a crackling script by Stirling Silliphant and David Goodis. Acting styles vary with Brian Keith a quite good villian, Aldo Ray a weak protaganist and Anne Bancroft showing very little of her later acting prowness in an early role. Bancroft's "wanted man" line a real howler.