Jacques Tourneur

Jacques Tourneur (born November 12, 1904, Paris, France—died December 19, 1977, Bergerac) was a French American filmmaker of broad range known for horror, film noirs, and westerns.

Early work

Tourneur was the son of one of French cinema’s preeminent directors, Maurice Tourneur, who made more than 90 pictures, more than half of them in the United States between 1914 and 1926. Jacques immigrated to the United States with his father in 1914, working as a script boy on many of Maurice’s films. He returned to Paris to join his father in 1928 and was his editor and assistant director until 1933. He directed his own first movies there, beginning with Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour (1931; “None of That’s Worth Love”), but in 1934 he returned to Hollywood, where he would work for the next 30 years.

Tourneur’s first American credits were as second-unit director for such Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) projects as The Winning Ticket (1935) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935). Beginning in 1936, he then directed 18 shorts, mostly for MGM, before he was given his first features, the prison drama They All Come Out (which began as a documentary short) and the mystery Nick Carter, Master Detective (both 1939). Those were capable if unremarkable B-films, as was his next Nick Carter entry, Phantom Raiders (1940), and the gangster drama Doctors Don’t Tell (1941). But Tourneur was ready for more, and he got his chance when he left MGM for producer Val Lewton’s new unit at RKO.

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Films of the 1940s at RKO: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and Out of the Past

Tourneur’s first project for Lewton was Cat People (1942), a modest production about a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) in New York who fears that she will turn into a giant cat if her emotions are aroused. Rather than showing any such transformation, Cat People relied on suggestive shadows and sound to create a sense of unspeakable horror about to descend on its characters. It was one of the year’s surprise hits and came to be recognized as a horror classic. Despite its lurid title, the macabre I Walked with a Zombie (1943) was an atmospheric and haunting drama that loosely updated Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre to a modern-day Caribbean island. With his final film for Lewton, The Leopard Man (1943), a thriller about a small New Mexico town terrorized by an escaped leopard, Tourneur clearly proved that his was a talent that could not be restricted to low-budget films.

Tourneur was rewarded with RKO’s ballyhooed production Days of Glory (1944), in which Gregory Peck made his screen debut as a heroic Russian peasant fighting the Nazi occupiers. It was timely and earnest, though seldom exciting. Experiment Perilous (1944) was a gothic thriller set in 1903 New York featuring Hedy Lamarr; it provided Tourneur with plentiful opportunities to demonstrate his mastery of shadowy menace. He then was loaned to Universal to direct Canyon Passage (1946), a western starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward.

Tourneur returned to the present with Out of the Past (1947), which fit squarely into the postwar vogue for bitter, cynical film noirs. Tourneur’s technique was well suited to that genre, and the result was a brooding masterpiece, a candidate for the best noir ever made and the film that launched Robert Mitchum to stardom. It would be one of the few times Tourneur worked with such material, despite his obvious proficiency.

The first American film shot in postwar Europe, Berlin Express (1948) was a spy yarn set on a train, in which an American officer (Robert Ryan) and a French secretary (Merle Oberon) try to outwit the Nazi underground. Easy Living (1949) was an adroit drama about a gridiron football star (Victor Mature) with a heart defect that could end his playing career. Lizabeth Scott and Lucille Ball also turned in fine performances in that adaptation of an Irwin Shaw story.

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Later films: Stars in My Crown, Nightfall, and Curse of the Demon

Tourneur’s contract with RKO expired in 1948, and he then freelanced for other studios. His first freelance project was the atypically sensitive Stars in My Crown (1950), with Joel McCrea as a Civil War veteran who has become a minister in a small Tennessee town. It was Tourneur’s own favourite among his films. However, he noted that because he had accepted the minimum salary for a director to get the film made, he was never able to command a decent wage again or the respect of the studio heads. The Flame and the Arrow (1950) was a swashbuckler set in medieval Italy that starred Burt Lancaster.

Circle of Danger (1951), a British film about an American (Ray Milland) investigating his brother’s suspicious death during a World War II commando mission in France, returned Tourneur to the familiar terrain of crime and punishment. Anne of the Indies (1951) starred Jean Peters as a remorseless pirate captain. The big-budget adventure Way of a Gaucho (1952), filmed on location in Argentina, was not well received critically or commercially.

Tourneur made a variable assortment of genre pieces throughout the 1950s: the jungle adventure Appointment in Honduras (1953), with Glenn Ford and Ann Sheridan; the westerns Stranger on Horseback and Wichita (both 1955), with McCrea; and Great Day in the Morning (1956), a Civil War drama with Robert Stack, Virginia Mayo, and Ruth Roman. Better than those were Nightfall (1957), a trim film noir from a David Goodis novel, and Night of the Demon (1957; also called Curse of the Demon), a superb adaptation of M.R. James’s supernatural story “Casting the Runes,” starring Dana Andrews. In The Fearmakers (1958) an adman (Andrews) returns from the Korean War to find that his firm has been taken over by communists, and in Timbuktu (1959) an American gunrunner (Mature) and a French colonel (George Dolenz) face a revolution in the Sahara desert.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Tourneur worked mainly in television, directing for such series as Northwest Passage, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, and Twilight Zone. He returned to the cinema only to make the Italian sword-and-sandal film La battaglia di Maratona (1959; The Giant of Marathon), starring bodybuilder Steve Reeves; the tongue-in-cheek The Comedy of Terrors (1963), featuring horror icons Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone; and The City Under the Sea (1965; also called City in the Sea and War Gods of the Deep), with Price as the ruler of an underwater community of immortal smugglers and their fish-men slaves. Tourneur then retired, returning to France to live.