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FILM COMMENT
July/August 2002
Artisan of the Unseen: The Parallel Worlds of Jacques Tourneur
by by Geoffrey OāBrien
above: Leopard Man
Jacques Tourneur could figure as a test-case for auteurism. A director who said that he never turned down a screenplay ÷ć I did my best with whatever they gave meä ÷ Tourneur produced a succession of films of which almost every one belongs to a clearly defined, often formulaic genre: the Western, the horror movie, the noir thriller, the pirate movie, the spy movie, the medieval adventure movie, the jungle movie, all the way down (as the studio system collapses around him) to Timbuktu (59), with Victor Mature lending able-bodied support to French colonialism in the Sahara, and The Giant of Marathon (59), with Steve Reeves fending off hordes of invading Persians. His filmography suggests the workaday artisan, an identity Tourneur was happy to claim for himself. When a French critic asked him what place he thought his films would occupy in the history of cinema, he replied: ćNone.ä To find profundity among the frames of Appointment in Honduras (53) and Great Day in the Morning (56) might strike some as the ultimate expression of auteurism as mystical cult, perceiving revelation in what to the unreceptive looks very much like standard industrial product, more or less pleasing but singularly devoid of any obvious ambition. The spectatorās question becomes: Is there really something there at all, or am I imagining this? That question, as it happens, leads directly into the heart of a lifework that, however unassuming, has over time surrendered none of its power to fascinate. Can there be a durable will-oā-the-wisp, a monumental glimmer? Maybe only in the movies, and most particularly in the movies of Jacques Tourneur.
If the classical Hollywood film can embody a science of manipulation, Tourneurās films stand out by their refusal to dictate a reading. This is not to be confused with vagueness, even if Tourneurās films elicit the same words over and over from a range of commentators: hypnotic, elusive, enigmatic, uncertain, mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent. His French admirer Louis Skorecki wrote an essay entitled ćTourneur Does Not Exist.ä Sometimes itās possible to feel that his films donāt exist, especially when theyāve eluded you for years. I can remember seeing The Fearmakers (58) for the first time on late-night television in the mid-Sixties, and hanging on to the memory of its unaccountable strangeness for decades until a second chance came along. That second exposure only deepened the mystery of how this little movie got its hooks into me in the first place.
The Fearmakers, in the light of retrospect, turned out to be an extremely low-budget late-Fifties anticommunist melodrama based on a Forties antifascist novel, full of wooden speeches about subversive forces trying to influence public opinion, taking place (mostly) on a couple of office sets that would not have been out of place in an Ed Wood movie and filmed in a style verging much of the time on TV-perfunctory, with a cast of almost indigestible oddity (a brainwashed Dana Andrews doing battle against sinister Red agents Dick Foran, Mel Tormé, and Veda Ann Borg). By the standards of Out of the Past (47) or I Walked with a Zombie (43), it wasnāt much to look at. Yet once again the movie began to work its effect: there was that crucial encounter with a stranger sitting next to Dana Andrews on an airplane, with its grungily accurate evocation of the claustrophobia of plane travel; that unsettling boardinghouse where Andrews spends a sleepless night; that persistent mood of insomnia and restlessness: all so many points of incursion into the ordinary, to the point where even the banal desks and corridors started to take on the quality of a distracted reverie.
Was this the movie I had remembered seeing, or had my imagination in the interim between viewings created a sort of phantasmal Fearmakers, like those Tibetan gods that the devotee sees come to life in the swirling abstractions of a mandala? There is often a sense, with Tourneurās films, that space is being created for precisely such an alternate movie; where other directors close in on an explicit point, Tourneur makes room for an indeterminate openness. The collaborations with Val Lewton that established him as a director ÷ Cat People (42), I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man (43) ÷ were built explicitly around the notion that what you donāt see is scarier than what you do, an idea sufficiently high-concept that it even found its way into the screenplay of Minnelliās The Bad and the Beautiful, as the brilliant gimmick that launches Kirk Douglasās career: a rare instance of film theory becoming a plot point in a Hollywood movie.
Yet to speak of openness is not to suggest mistiness. The effects, moment by moment, are exactly defined, so much so that at times Tourneurās cinema seems nothing but a flow of etched surfaces, to be savored in somewhat the same spirit as cloud-drift at dusk, or ebb tide on the shingle. The technical mastery is obvious, the deeper question being toward what end it is deployed. His films leave a tantalizing sense that the next time you see them they will have changed; and, indeed, years of returning to them have convinced me that their apparent resistance to the jadedness of overfamiliarity is not an optical illusion. The best of his work remains curiously unfixed in the mind even after many viewings.
Their precise details fade from memory more than those of other directors; you remember an effect but have trouble recalling precisely how it was achieved. If with other directors you can mentally evoke compositions, assertive camera movements, shock cuts, moments of emotional crisis or sudden revelation or jazzy byplay, with Tourneur you cling in memory to a vivid but uncapturable sense of place and mood, like a scene from early childhood or from a dream that even though only half-remembered lingers stubbornly in mind. They come in, so to speak, under the radar, carrying a suggestion of infiltration and concealment, a pervasion of unseen forces ÷ and this is as true of an upbeat, wholesomely spiritual story like Stars in My Crown (50) as of Night of the Demon (57). Happiness and faith are no less mysterious, in fact no less troubling, than the outer reaches of anxiety and occult possession.
The directorial touch is exact but disconcertingly light. He makes everybody else look overemphatic. As Chris Fujiwara points out in his superb study Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, Tourneurās films have a way of beginning in the middle, with characters making obscure references to previous events. With many of his movies ÷ for instance, I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Past, Canyon Passage (46) ÷ you have the sense that no matter how many times you see them you can never altogether untangle the storyline. Crucial things happen offscreen or before the movies start; motivations and backstory are never quite made explicit; minor characters turn out to have complicated stories of their own that we never quite learn about. He makes time mysterious. We move backward (the return to childhood in Stars in My Crown) or find ourselves seemingly stalled in an endlessly prolonged moment (the trek through the jungle in Appointment in Honduras) or forget who is supposed to be telling the story (the shifting viewpoints of I Walked with a Zombie) or lose track of sequence (the disorienting narrative turns of Out of the Past and Nightfall, 57). To find out all we want to know we would have to break through the screen, entering that space that we can perceive only as a stream of two-dimensional configurations. If the movies perpetually suggest a crossing of boundaries, the ultimate boundary is the uncrossable one closing the spectator off from what he watches.
Tourneur gives you the drama and at the same time a distance from the drama, establishing a strange calm even in the heart of violent or unnerving circumstances. This has nothing to do with an aestheticization of violence or horror. Anne of the Indies (51), for all its scenes of plank-walking and seafaring mayhem, must be the gentlest pirate movie ever made, and certainly the only one where you find yourself seriously wondering about the quality of the piratesā emotional life. A scene like the murder of the gold miner McGiver in Canyon Passage ÷ or rather the prelude to it, the murder itself taking place offscreen ÷ is marked by a detachment that makes it possible to feel equal pity for the victim and for the murderer, a sympathetic weakling about to seal his own doom. The emphases in such sequences can be so gently placed ÷ the compositions so free, seemingly, of any imposed viewpoint ÷ that you watch a film over and over simply to feel out its dramatic rhythms. A first viewing of Canyon Passage (certainly one of Tourneurās four or five best films) might be merely puzzling: it seems to be a Western in which none of the characters has a clearly defined goal, but each is full of hidden and often contradictory feelings toward the others, and in which the scenes of lull and mild anticipation weigh as much as the occasional bursts of violence.
Tourneurās pleasures are in some sense obvious; you can think of Canyon Passage as an exercise in the contemplation of appearances, a sheer appreciation of space and color, of live glances and movement flickering in the corner of the frame, all the mysterious random choreographies of everyday life. Returning to the film simply to indulge again in those appearances, on closer look you find a world apart, a place with its own peculiar rhythms and modes of behavior. Yet itās a world that in its way seems more real than that of other movies, as if the characters didnāt know they were characters or that anyone was looking, a world ÷ and this is what makes Tourneurās B-pictures so unusual ÷ without histrionics. As many have remarked, vocal delivery in his films is unusually low-pitched, approximating the level of ordinary conversation, and he is thus able to create an air of unlikely verisimilitude even in the context of backlot adventure movies. You might call it a sort of neorealism of the imaginary. Perhaps thatās why, in Berlin Express (48), the cutting between staged scenes of noirish intrigue (complete with a scary clown to rival Langās Spies) and documentary footage of war-ruined German cities is far less jarring than it ought to be.
Tourneurās life appears to have been almost as understated as his art. The major determining aspect of his biography precedes his birth: he was the son of the silent film director Maurice Tourneur, and thereby had the inestimable advantage of learning all about movie technique as a matter of course and at a very early age, working as bit player, script clerk, cutter, assistant director. Tourneur père (he had changed his name from Maurice Thomas because, according to Fujiwara, the latter sounded ćtoo Englishä) was an evidently flamboyant character who had been an illustrator and designer, an assistant to Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes, an artillery officer, a stage actor, and ultimately a successful filmmaker who by 1914 had migrated to America. He declared to Motion Picture Magazine in 1917: ćWe are not photographers, but artists. . . . We must present the effect such a scene has upon the artist-directorās mind, so that an audience will catch the mental reaction.ä
In one of his rare interviews Jacques states simply, ćI learned everything with my father.ä He also suggested in more ways than one that his fatherās character was marked by coldness and cruelty, and itās possible to read his own approach to direction as a mix of emulation and criticism. He disparages the notion ÷ which his father seems to have embodied ÷ of director as dictator, expressing a particular aversion for the bullying of actors. Indeed, Tourneur speaks more often about the problems of actors than his own problems as a director: actors must be treated gently, he insists, the director must understand how traumatic their job is. He emphasizes matters of gentleness and delicacy, whether in handling actors or light sources.
He likes to speak of himself as lazy, spoiled, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Indeed, he credits whatever success he has had to a sublime passivity: ćAll my life, everything has come to me by itself, and I think itās because I made no effort to bring things to me; if Iād made an effort, maybe I would have harmed myself; everything came by itself.ä It isnāt clear whether by ćeverythingä he means the yachts and Cadillacs and fine wines on which he spent the money that finally wasnāt there anymore, or rather the professional career about which he is not in the least apologetic: ćIām a director, itās my profession. I believe itās a profession that takes all your time; you canāt be producer and director and writer all at once. To be an honest director, you have to devote all your time and all your energy to it.ä He was there on the set from seven in the morning until eight in the evening, he tells us; he gave the cameramen a hard time because the lighting had to be exactly the way he wanted it; he did everything he could to make the actors feel free and relaxed. ćYou have to like what you do, because a person who likes his work makes life pleasant, and if a person doesnāt like his work, itās painful.ä If most of those who master directing come to it from the outside, as a castle to be stormed, Tourneur was the odd case who stayed in the place where he started out, for whom filmmaking was simply the only thing he had ever learned how to do.
The sonās legacy is a comfortable technical command, further polished in the second-unit work with Val Lewton on A Tale of Two Cities (35) and in a long series of MGM shorts on everything from harness racing to the discovery of radium, with a special emphasis on strange tales of uncanny prediction and unaccountable coincidence. By the time he gets to Cat People, heās a technician who can afford to be calm and to obey his dictum that ćitās bad to think too much, everything should be instinctive.ä For a range of studios and with widely varying budgets, and despite the fact that he almost never had much say about scripts or casting, Tourneur would continue to exercise a remarkable degree of control over the feel of his films. He complained about a few instances (most famously the close-ups of the slavering monster in Night of the Demon) where producers interfered with his conception, but for the most part his accommodating approach seems to have enabled him to preserve an enviable freedom in the matters that concerned him most.
His best films÷and it should be said that, until the misbegotten final features for American International, none is without interest÷have a quality like fin-de-siècle symbolist painting, and are effective, like the best of such paintings, to the extent that the symbols resist final interpretation. Out of the Past, long since accepted as perhaps the paradigm of film noir, looks more and more like the supreme visual poem of an extraordinarily rich period of American filmmaking: a supernatural film so uncanny that it doesnāt even need the supernatural, and an American vernacular work so un-American that sometimes it feels like the greatest film that Jean Cocteau never made. They couldnāt all be sustained on that level ÷ not all actors were Robert Mitchum, and not all cameramen were Nicholas Musuraca, and few scripts were so full of opportunities ÷ but as you watch them unreel you are constantly being surprised.
We might take as a kind of self-portrait the alcoholic shipās doctor so beautifully played by Herbert Marshall in Anne of the Indies, philosophical advisor to Jean Peters (magnificent in the title role), who tells her: ćLong ago, my dear, I gave up all beliefs.ä Tourneur, sybarite and aesthete though he may have been, did apparently cherish a few beliefs: in more than one interview he spoke of parallel worlds, sources of signals that we would pick up on if only we were on the same wavelength: ćThere is another world, and if only we could . . . .ä If only we could, what? The enduring charm (and I mean the word in its more ancient and forceful sense) of his films is to suggest an answer ÷ not quite visible yet, but almost perceptible beyond the next frame ÷ to a question that cannot even be formulated.
Geoffrey OāBrienās most recent book is Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle (Counterpoint Press).
© 2002 by Geoffrey OāBrien
© 2002 by The Film Society of Linoln Center
