Nightfall

Jacques Tourneur's 1956 Nightfall starts at the magic hour -- a big lummox wanders the streets of LA as the sun sets and the neon lights flare against twilight.  A news vendor plugs in s string of lights.  A businessman waiting for a bus talks to the big man, idle chitchat, and, then, gets on the transport when it arrives.  The big blonde fairhaired moose goes into an Italian restaurant, meets a woman at the bar who asks him to lend her some money.  They eat dinner together and, then,she seems willing to go home with him.  Perhaps, the drifter's luck is changing.  Then, two thugs appear, dismiss the scared girl, and force the protagonist into a car that speeds away into the darkness.  It's a promising beginning, better than most of the rest of the film which turns out to be short (78 minutes) and mostly mediocre.  Even trivial films, cinematic ephemera, as it were, sometimes include moments that are poetic and beautiful -- here the gesture of the news vendor as he turns on the string lights over his wares immediately cut into shots of neon suddenly blazing in the darkness on the lonely boulevard is something remarkable, a lovely graceful instant that redeems much of the rest of the movie, some of it pretty good but mostly forgettable.

Aldo Ray plays Jim a commercial artist on the run.  He's pursued by not one, but three antagonists:  two  bank robbers think that he knows where their ill-gotten gains are stashed; an insurance agent for the bond on the stolen money has Jim under surveillance, and, of course, the cops are lurking around the edge of the picture -- they think that Jim murdered his pal, a doctor from Evanston, Illinois.  The story is intricate and told in flashbacks.  Jim's friend, the doctor, was married to a woman twenty-years younger -- the woman wrote some indiscreet letters of Jim and, when the physician is murdered, the hero is suspected of the killing.  In fact, the doc was killed by two bankrobbers who ambushed Jim and his buddy at a fishing camp high in the Wyoming mountains.  The criminals shoot both men, leaving them for dead.  But Jim is still alive and he discovers that the thugs have taken the doctor's medical bag and not their valise full of money left standing in the snow at the campsite.  Jim escapes with the money but, somehow, loses it in a snowstorm.  Then, he goes on the lam and ends up picking up the girl in restaurant.  The girl played well by Ann Bancroft is not in league with the gangsters, but, instead, has been their patsy.  When Jim escapes again from the murderous bad guys at a suitably desolate oilfield near LA, he flees back to the girl's apartment and, then, plans to travel with her to Wyoming to retrieve the money.  Of course, he is pursued by the insurance investigator (played by a character actor later a staple of TV -- he was in Barney Miller for years -- James Gregory).  The killers are also on his tail.  Everything converges at a snowy mountain pass in Wyoming.  Objects have a particular malevolence in this film:  an oil rig is proposed as an instrument of torture -- the off-kilter rotating pump can be used to crush someone's leg; at the mountain pass, there's a snow plow with a particular nasty-looking grin of auger stretched like a mask across its front -- needless to say this auger will be deployed to gruesome effect at the climax.

The film has an impressive set-piece involving a fashion show in Beverly Hills -- that sequence is not inferior to Alfred Hitchcock and the counterpoint between the glacial, indifference of the models and the killers tracking the hero is exploited for maximum suspense.  (As the bad guys approach, the hero and the fashion model played by Ann Bancroft are occupying a taxi-cab that an old lady has just exited; she argues with the driver over ten cents while the armed villains approach.)  The snow scenes in the mountains seem to be shot on location and they are effectively cold and desolate -- some of the camerawork looks like scenes from Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, a film that the movie resembles pictorially.  Some of the movie is sloppy -- the fishing camp next to a big lake in a glacial cirque is not well-integrated with scenes involving the approach of the villains in their jalopy.  Although the lake and the road where the villains are driving are supposed to be contiguous, the two locations can't be fit together in any convincing way -- the geometry of the terrain is all wrong.  Nightfall is most notable for the two villains -- Brian Keith plays the melancholy brains of the operation and he has a dumpy-looking fat sadist for a sidekick.  This guy loves to kill people and he is very frightening.  The sequence involving the murder of the doctor is chilling -- it's understated but really horrific.  Aldo Ray doesn't look like a leading man and it takes a while to get used to his lumpish face and proletarian profile -- but he's also excellent in the movie.

Like many film noir from this era, the movie is replete with good tough-guy lines.  When Jim explains to Ann Bancroft that he's an artists, she asks "Soup cans or sunsets?"  I wonder if Andy Warhol recalled this line five years later when he began painting soup cans as high art.