Jacques Tourneur was a French American filmmaker of broad range known for horror, film noirs, and westerns.
Background
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.
Education
He started a career in cinema while still attending high school as an extra and later as a script clerk in various silent films.
Career
The son of director Maurice Tourneur, Jacques emigrated to America in 1913 with his father. He functioned as script clerk on many of his fathers films and acted small parts in Scaramouche (Rex Ingram); The Fair Co-Ed (Sam Wood); Love (Edmund Goulding); and The Trail of'98 (Clarence Brawn). His slow apprenticeship was tied to his father’s return to Paris in 1929. Jacques went back too and was assistant and editor to Maurice until 1933. He made a few films of his own in France but then broke away and committed himself to America. He was second-unit director on The Winning Ticket (Charles Reisner) and on A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway), where he met Val Lewton.
From 1936-39 he directed some twenty shorts, principally for MGM. The delay in breaking into serious American direction is the odder in that Tourneur quickly proved himself an adroit director of action pictures with an exceptional visual sense. He remained basically a B-picture director, assigned to a series of projects and rarely asserting any creative personality let alone consistency.
His reputation still refers initially to the sense of unrevealed horror within the everyday that he showed in the films made for Val Lewton—Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. But the same talent is evident in the British Night of the Demon, taken from an M. R. fames story. Time and again in these films, it is the imaginative use of light, decor, space, and movement that makes the impact of the movie. There is nothing finer in Lewton's work than the zoo sequences or the swimming-pool nightmare in Cat People, supreme vindications of the menacing nature of shadow, composition, and pace. Short of ideas, Tourneur is a classic instance of cinematic fluency, invaluable as a contrast to such opinionated drabs as Zinnemann, Kramer, or latter-day Stevens.
In addition to his horror pictures, Experiment Perilous is a first-class period thriller; Out of the Past a classic IS picture and a major Robert Mitchum film; Berlin Express is a good “train” film; Stars in My Crown is a gentle Western about the relationship between Joel McCrea and Dean Stockwelf The Flame and the Arrow a cheerful attempt to make Burt Lancaster a Tuscan Robin Hood; Way of the Gaucho a very successful opening up of strange territory; and Great Day in the Morning another Western with unusual attention to atmosphere. There are duds, including Circle of Danger and most ol the more recent films, which are lazv TV originals or tongue-in-cheek horror pictures. The director of B pictures always needed a prosperous industrv: today, in TV, he has been rationalized into the ground. But from 1942 to 1955, for Lewton or RKO, Tourneur made modest, cheap, quick films that still radiate narrative imagination and visual invention.
I like Tourneur as much as 1 did in 1975. But something now makes me flinch from propositions that lie was a genius with a unique vision. Tourneur, rather, was a functionary blessed with rare plastic . . . skills? No. skills is not enough. He had talent, grace even—there is so little in his work that comes close to being clumsy or awkward. But is it more? Could—or can—directors handling assignments be more?
Consider Out of the Past. That noir is a lasting joke because of story structure, dialogue, the imagery, the playing. But isn't it actually nonsensical as an idea, the old genre given one more wicked twist? And isn’t there a profound clash between Tourneurs grace (which always aspires to intelligence and taste) and the cynical dead- endedness of the project? So many of the allegedly great auteurs prompt this question. Out of the Past is terrific and not good enough: it is like a brilliant palace made of matchstieks, by a prisoner on a life sentence.
Tourneur is one of the barely known pioneers of silent cinema. His reputation for pictorial invention, often touching on the fantastic, tends to be accepted, if only because he is the father of Jacques Tourneur, a proven adept at visual excitement. But this account given by Clarence Brown, Tourneur’s devoted assistant, has more than a hint of artiness: “He was a great believer in dark foregrounds. No matter where he set his camera up, he would always have a foreground. On exteriors, we used to carry branches and twigs around with us. If it w'as an interior, he always had a piece of the set cutting into the corner of the picture, in halftone, to give him depth. Whenever w:e saw a painting with an interesting lighting effect we’d copy it. It should be added that in 1918 a year before Caligari for The Blue Bird. Tourneur had used impressionistic painted backdrops. It is doubtful if even the archives could settle the question of his talent, but likely that he w;as an exponent of the sort of profuse prettiness to be seen in Victorian book illustrations.
He was a painter and an actor with André Antoine before be began directing for Eclair. In 1914, he went to America and eventually set up Maurice Tourneur Productions. An individualist, he quit Hollywood when MGM insisted that he have and pay heed to a producer on The Mysterious Island (later completed by and credited to Lucien Hubbard). Thus he stands as an example of early, individualist cinema, in the age before Thalberg regularized production. Back in Paris (with his son as assistant), he directed some of Harry Baur’s films—Samson, Le Patriate, and Volpone.