Nightfall (Copa Productions, Columbia, copyright 1956, released 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next item on TCM’s schedule November 7 was Nightfall, a 1956 film noir made at Columbia with Jacques Tourneur directing from a script by Stirling Silliphant based on a novel by David Goodis. Goodis had lucked out early on in the film noir cycle when his second novel, Dark Passage, had been published successfully and purchased by Warner Bros., who made it a big-budget, high-prestige thriller starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Goodis expected Nightfall to attract similarly high-powered movie attention, but it didn’t, and TCM host Eddie Muller suggests it was due to Goodis’s difficult-to-film stream-of-consciousness narrative style. He also claimed that when it was finally filmed in 1956, the major studios were finally selling their old movies to TV after nearly a decade of having resisted doing so, and so Tourneur and cinematographer Burnett Guffey were told to shoot their film without the high-contrast chiaroscuro visual style of classic noir because it didn’t look good on the low-resolution cathode-ray TV’s of the time. Nonetheless, Tourneur and Guffey came up with some striking visuals and also shot on real locations -- some of L.A.’s landmarks are visible in the film even though the Italian restaurant where the leads meet, represented on the outside by its real sign, is a studio set indoors. James Vanning (Aldo Ray) is shown arriving in L.A. (and ironically using one of the same sorts of bus-station lockers that gave Rita Tushingham such comic trouble in The Knack) and being accosted by a mysterious stranger who asks him for a light (this is one of those old movies that show the characters smoking everywhere, including locations like train stations and restaurants where it’s strictly verboten today) and questions what he’s doing in town.

It turns out that he’s suspected of stealing $350,000 from a bank in Chicago, and the man at the train station who accosted him is an insurance agent whose company had to compensate the bank for its loss and so he’s trying to get the money back. Inside the restaurant Vanning, a commercial artist, meets Marie Gardiner (the young Anne Bancroft,who’s quite good in a pretty thankless role) and is attracted to her even though she warns him that she’ll have a dinner date with him but it’ll stop well before they get to her bedroom door. Alas, as soon as he chats up Marie outside the restaurant to ask her for her name, phone number and a second date, two sinister-looking men approach Vanning and he assumes they were using Marie as a decoy to get close to him. But when the baddies chase him through L.A., kidnap him, take him to an oil field, rough him up and shoot him -- though their shot goes wide and he survives by playing possum. There are some interesting intercuts between Vanning’s attempts to hide out from the villains -- though he still doesn’t fully trust her, he goes to Marie’s place because he can’t think of anywhere else, and though he’s wanted for murder as well as bank robbery (albeit we don’t learn until later in the movie just whom he’s supposed to have killed), and she in turn loves him and maintains the same almost childlike trust the heroine had for the central character in Goodis’s Dark Passage -- and the almost depressingly ordinary home life of the insurance agent, Ben Fraser (James Gregory, later a regular on the TV series Barney Miller) and his wife Laura (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister and to my mind a more appealing actor if only because she played a human being and didn’t indulge in the often ridiculous affectations of her superstar brother) in which she’s constantly sending him off to work like a normal housewife with only the dimmest awareness that at least at this point, his job involves possible confrontation (and worse) with a couple of psycho killers.

Eddie Muller’s intro gave Silliphant credit for adding depth and complexity to the bad guys, John (Brian Keith) and Red (Rudy Bond), who we learn later not only actually committed the robbery but killed Vanning’s friend Dr. Edward Gurston (Frank Albertson, probably the only actor who ever made films with both the Marx Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock --- he’s the playwright in the Marxes’ Room Service and the out-of-town depositor from whom Janet Leigh steals the money in Psycho) when they’d crashed their car in the Wyoming mountains and Vanning and Dr. Gurston had gone out just to help them. One plot gimmick is that Vanning realizes he lost the money somewhere at that mountain site in Wyoming near a deserted and decrepit cabin -- but can’t go there until winter eases enough that the snow plows can clear the roads leading to it. On the crucial day Marie is working a fashion show at a department store (a real one, with the real MC for the actual shows playing that part on screen) and the villains have tracked her there, so she and Vanning have to make their escape and take the bus to Wyoming while she’s still wearing her last gown from the show, an expensive number by Columbia’s real-life costume designer, Jean Louis. (It reminded me of the famous incident in which Britney Spears bolted from a video set in mid-shoot still wearing the insanely expensive dress the producers had borrowed for her to wear.) The finale features Vanning, Marie and Ben arriving at the cabin, only to find that the villains already made it there, recovered the money and were just getting ready to leave when Our Heroes arrived. Vanning escapes but the bad guys tie up the other two and Ray, who’s already been established as by far the crazier of the two, gets into a snow plow and is about to start it and use it to pulverize the cabin and thus kill Marie and Ben, who are tied up inside -- only there’s a brutal falling-out between the baddies, Ray kills John, and Vanning tries to break into the snow plow and is ultimately able to turn it away from the cabin. Eventually the snow plow goes out of control and slices and dices Ray with its front blades --- a macabre death anticipating the disposal of the body in the woodchopper in Fargo, another crime thriller set in snow country.

Nightfall isn’t one of the great noirs, and I suspect what keeps it from the upper echelon in its genre is the appalling weakness of Aldo Ray in the lead. Through much of this film I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like with a real noir actor in the lead -- Bogart (though he probably would have been too old by then), Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell or Alan Ladd -- and come to think of it Tourneur might have made a better film even with the cast he’d had if he’d had Ray and Keith switch roles. One good thing about Aldo Ray in the part is that his sheer impassiveness and almost total inability to act at least makes the character’s naivete believable -- with someone like Bogart (who’d so superbly played another of David Goodis’s victims of circumstance in Dark Passage) we’d probably wonder why he doesn’t figure out the bad guys’ plot earlier. At this point Brian Keith had been typecast almost exclusively as a villain, and it was a real surprise to Hollywood executives and audiences alike when he, like Raymond Burr, emerged as a good guy on TV. Anne Bancroft is excellent but the role doesn’t really challenge her and if Silliphant had given her character more moral ambiguity, she would have delivered a more powerful performance and made this a better movie. And frankly I was expecting a final twist in which the insurance investigator would turn out to be the mastermind of the whole plot -- which would have been a major surprise if only because family men in films noir usually don’t end up crossing over from the light to the dark side of the moral ledger unless they’re seduced away from their wives by a femme fatale, and there isn’t one in this story. Nonetheless, Nightfall is at least solid entertainment, well worth seeing and a good testament to Jacques Tourneur’s talent even if it’s hardly as good a movie as the film of his TCM showed a week ago on Hallowe’en, I Walked With a Zombie (which Tourneur called his best), or the 1947 film Out of the Past, which Eddie Muller named as his all-time favorite film noir (if I were forced to pick just one, it would be the 1944 Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet, the first film to use Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character and to my mind the Raymond Chandler movie the way the 1941 Maltese Falcon is the Dashiell Hammett movie).