Tell me about Jacques Tourneur

there was a complete tourneur retrospective at the pompidou earlier this year.

can i confess to being a bit less impressed with the lewton films as i perhaps should have been? though there are awesome things in "i walked with a zombie." my favorite lewton is "curse of the cat people," directed by gunther von fritsch (aka "who?").

i found much to admire in "curse of the demon" but i can't say i was especially scared.

so what do you want to know about tourneur? apparently he really did have a mind inclined to supernatural speculation. perhaps that's what gives his lewton rkos something of their charge. especially "curse of the demon" with its story of a skeptic coming to believe in the supernatural.

you might know that his dad, maurice, was also a major director. he came to hollywood (from france) in the teens and left around the arrival of sound. in between he made some important films, notably "last of the mohicans." in france in the '30s he made some films that are well-regarded, though i haven't seen any of them. jacques grew up half in france and half in the usa, and his first few features were made in france, in fact.

and, even more bizarrely, co-directed by Robert Wise, who went on to bigger things. My favourite too btw.

supposedly there is a dvd box of all the lewton rkos coming out. there was an incredible laserdisc box set, hopefully the dvd set will more or less reproduce that (including the very nice booklet).

"cat people" has this great exchange:

Oliver: Alice, you're very swell.
Alice: That's what makes me dangerous. I'm the new type of other woman.

also, look out for appearances by the calypsonian sir lancelot!

Today at MoMA I saw his Universal western Canyon Passage -- '46, with Dana Andrews and Hoagy Carmichael in the same year as Best Years of Our Lives; Brian Donlevy and Susan Hayward co-billed with Andrews. Good one, tho I didn't like it this much:

http://www.thestopbutton.com/2008/09/18/canyon-passage-1946/

also odd seeing Ward Bond play a blackhearted rapist-killer.

chris fujiwara write a nice book about him called The Cinema of Nightfall

^had my eye on that for years

Nightlife is too talky in places, but generally terrific. Aldo Ray is the real surprise.

Nightfall of course.

Out of the Past might be my favorite noir.

Eating at my parents' favorite Argentine restaurant a couple of weekends ago, Dad was transfixed by OOTP (the restaurant plays classic films). "What IS this? It's great!"

Night/Curse of the Demon to be remade -- or rather, the book done again -- by Joe Dante.

http://www.movies.com/movie-news/39gremlins39-director-joe-dante-nabs-simon-pegg-for-new-twist-on-this-classic-ghost-story/12184

sorry for kneejerk groan but jesus M.R. James does not deserve this

joe dante has made some gd movies and knows his genre (as pegg does, too, i guess) but ugh. p sure they will never match niall macginnis in the original

http://cinenthusiast.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/night-of-the-demon.jpg

when i was in nyc i picked up some of those nice val lewton dbl bill dvds that have never been issued in the uk. the I Walked With a Zombie disc has an excellent commentary track by kim newman and stephen jones, including discussion of tourneur's late films that made me more interested in seeing them.

i've got no beef with Joe Dante - Pegg is a different issue - but i just think this wd be best left as "tribute to Night of the Demon" rather than bogus claims of having any kinship with James' work at all

otm!

gotta say though i think gremlins is up there with a bunch of the lewtons

bought "wichita" via warner archives and have yet to watch it. it's on the list.

Night/Curse was pretty much already - and successfully - remade as Drag Me to Hell.

ha i was gonna make the same point! DMtH is as good a re-imagining of the mechanics of Casting the Runes as you're going to get.

no real problem w/ this if it gets more ppl to watch night/curse, prob my favorite of these films.

Rewatched Stars in My Crown this morning, great community-through-adversity film w/ Joel McCrea as a Tennessee parson circa 1885, Dean Stockwell as his nephew. I wondered if it played the South in 1950 as there is a band of nightriders (led by Ed Begley Sr) trying to force a black farmer off his land.

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=13189

The bank robbers in Nightfall (and our hero's first encounter with them) seem like they're lifted straight from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Watched Night of the Demon last night. Fun flick, although the bit that stuck with me was the two women singing 'Cherry Ripe' during the seance because 'the spirits like it'. Were they supposed to be singing very loudly and bawdily, or is that just how people used to sing back then?

Just watched Experiment Perilous - very enjoyable, but not great. The psychodrama and the extended flashback in the centre were the best of it, and one clever and jarring shot in the climax.

exhaustive NYC retro -- thinking about the series pass

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/jacques-tourneur-fearmaker/#films

yeah that would be a fine way to spend 3 weeks

TImbuktu tomorrow?

Timbuktu is watchable, but no lost classic. The better of his Victor Mature vehicles is Easy Living (real good roles for Lucille Ball and Lizabeth Scott too).

I've been to the retro 18 times, and tonight is Gregory Peck as a Nazi-fighting Russian.

Yeah, so I finished with 19 films (15 for the first time). Good appreciation of Easy Living and JT in general:

https://letterboxd.com/etan_weisfogel/film/easy-living-1949/

I've started in on the Chris Fujiwara book, and it's as good as its rep. Good foreword by Scorsese too.

The better of his Victor Mature vehicles is Easy Living (real good roles for Lucille Ball and Lizabeth Scott too).

Just watched Night of the Demon properly for the first time at MoMI. Michael K. showed up somewhat unexpectedly at the beginning to introduce and to mention the new Reverse Shot collection about horror films.

Trying to watch Berlin Express before it times out.

Seems potentially pretty good except maybe Merle Oberon miscast.

I remember it being worth watching if not great, very cool location filming, and interesting to see the story play out when cooperation with the USSR still seemed like a possibility.

I watched Canyon Passage last week, great-looking (pacific north)Western with a 5-way romantic melodrama subplot. Depiction of the natives is not ideal but there’s a surprisingly direct acknowledgement of the theft of their land, and the inevitable attack is provoked by a horrific crime against them. Pretty interesting treatment of women and sexuality, there’s one scene that genuinely surprised me.

Just realized the Dana Andrews reference in "Science Fiction/Double Feature" is about Night of the Demon.

Even though Tourneur wasn't at RKO by that point.

Watched a few minutes of Night/Curse of the Demon on TCM yesterday. I wrote about it in university, I think in connection to a book...maybe David Pirie's A Heritage of Horror. Very good film.

https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2025/10/art-of-dar5kness-jacques-tourneurs-wichita/

EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA

EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA

WINE
WOMEN
WICHITA

Canyon Passage is screening next month at MoMA: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/11453

As part of the Universal Western series: https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5909

Nice! I saw this at the huge Tourneur retrospective at Lincoln Center back in December 2018. A good 35mm print and a great film, but this new restoration could improve a few things. I love good 35mm prints, but the Film Foundation has done some incredible restorations of 3-strip Technicolor films, fixing problems that couldn't have been fixed though photochemical means.

(The three Anthony Mann films are also recommended, though I'm not sure what's the source for The Far Country's DCP - Arrow Video did a 4K restoration awhile back but I see no credit for it. The other two have been restored too and it looks like that's what's showing.)

Did you by any chance manage to see Way of a Gaucho at that retro?

Sorry, missed this! Unfortunately I did not, and looking at the schedule, I'm guessing I was away for the holidays when they screened it. (I think Canyon Passage may have been the last film I saw before catching a train the next morning.)

Going today

How did it look? (Kino apparently has the new restoration on a Blu-ray too, which I may get.)

Good!