Jacques Tourneur | Nick Carter, Master Detective | Phantom Raiders | Cat People | I Walked with a Zombie | Days of Glory | Experiment Perilous | Canyon Passage | Out of the Past | Berlin Express | Easy Living | Stars in My Crown | The Flame and the Arrow | Appointment in Honduras | Stranger on Horseback | Wichita | Great Day in the Morning | Nightfall | Night of the Demon | The Fearmakers | Timbuktu
Short films: Harnessed Rhythm | The Grand Bounce | The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning | The Man in the Barn | The Magic Alphabet
Television: The Gunsmith | Break Out | Night Call
Classic Film and Television Home Page
Common subjects in the films of Jacques Tourneur:
There is much talk about how the innovative airplanes there could change the balance of power in the world. While such ideas are the standard stock in trade of a million thrillers, they also anticipate Tourneur's interest in stories about the balance and nature of world power, such as Berlin Express and The Fearmakers. Tourneur also made documentary shorts about scientific discoveries that drastically alter the nature of the world, and how people live: radioactivity in Romance of Radium, vitamins in The Magic Alphabet. In all of these films, we are in a drastically unstable world, one that is about to change in new and unforeseen ways. For a director who is famed for a light and delicate touch, he is willing to take on stories of drastic social change not often seen on the screen.
Nick Carter, Master Detective, Berlin Express and The Fearmakers also deal with the sinister military applications of air power. Nick Carter, Master Detective shows the invention of new war planes; Berlin Express depicts the horrific results of aerial bombardment; The Fearmakers discusses the possibility of aerial strikes against cities. These new scientific horrors are never far from Tourneur's depiction of the 20th Century.
Nick Carter, Master Detective opens with an airplane ride. It anticipates Night of the Demon and The Fearmakers, both of which also open with their hero taking a journey by air. In all of these films, the air journey brings the hero into an irrational and sinister world, a world in which he is not wanted by the strange characters who inhabit it. The airplane is signaled to land by bad guys setting off a huge pillar of black smoke, striking against the intense white desert of the scenes. This anticipates the sinister, tall clouds which envelop the demon in Night of the Demon.
Later, we meet another of Tourneur's doctors. The doctor makes x-rays, which are shown on screen; they recall the early shot of a key made in Romance of Radium (1937). The nurse is also one of several nurse characters in Tourneur.
At one point, Carter tracks the bad guys' car by air plane; a big white cross has been painted on the car's top, making it highly visible. If memory serves, a similar gambit appeared in the comic strip Radio Patrol, early the previous year, 1938, in the episode "A Gem of a Frame-Up".
Bad guys try to steal the inventor's briefcase, which is full of data about lab tests of his invention. The hero of Out of the Past will steal a briefcase full of tax records. The attempt to obtain secret data also anticipates The Fearmakers, and its secret index used for polling.
The inventor at the start mentions that he used to be considered crazy - but now he is a big admired success. This expresses the Tourneur theme of a universe, in which science moves and makes discoveries in unexpected ways. Many scientific discoveries seem to come completely out of left field: see The Magic Alphabet.
The airport has some of Tourneur's beloved gates. The film opens with a car driving through them: anticipating the opening of Night of the Demon.
The film is full of Tourneur's white clothes. The villain is always conspicuous in a dressy white overcoat. There are also a doctor and nurse in white uniforms. And patients with elaborate white bandages.
Towards the end, the bad guys will also have a desk for prints, and will use similar drafting tools.
We also see cameras used to photograph the prints. And a projector to cast them on a screen, like a slide.
The detective hero also makes a photograph of a foot print. He matches this up with an actual shoe. The comparison of image and reality seems suggestive, philosophically.
The manager has murals on his office walls. Such murals show up regularly in Hollywood offices of big businessmen. They always depict industry or business: here we see the airplanes manufactured at the factory.
Later we learned that the airplane bolts have been sawed through. These are also cut objects.
The conception of "detective" here never builds up any sociological realism. Nick Carter seems to work for some unseen detective agency. The big selling point of the Nick Carter prose stories, the detective's mastery of disguise, is nowhere in evidence in this film. Such a mastery of disguise was reportedly heavily featured in the early French films about Nick Carter, made by the pioneering director Victorin Jasset. These include a series of six short films about Carter, begun in 1908, under the collective title Nick Carter - Le Roi des détectives (Nick Carter - The King of Detectives). Jasset later made a second series about master criminal Zigomar, also brilliant at disguise; in the second, Zigomar contre Nick Carter (1912), he faced off against the sleuth. Please see Roy Armes' book French Cinema (1985) for details. According to Armes, Jasset's films were a strong influence on Louis Feuillade.
However, the hero's detection in Nick Carter, Master Detective is always perfectly logical. He finds a clue to show a death was really murder. He tracks down the method of smuggling the blueprint, through a systematic search for evidence. This "sound detection" (as prose mystery writers call it) was greatly prized in that era. These ideas might well be the contribution of the screenwriters. Still, their presence also shows a commitment to rationality by the director, as well.
By contrast, the hero of both films is a private eye, and in both, he is deeply disorganized. He seems to do whatever he pleases at the spur of the moment, and to have no organized plan or agenda. In both films, he is a slave to passion, more interested in chasing after pretty women than doing his job. He is rarely at his regular office, headquarters or home: instead he seems to be winging it, living out of a suitcase.
I confess, I find Tourneur's hero and his chaotic business life deeply annoying. I do not know if this is what Tourneur intended, or whether it is just my own strong preference for careful business planning coming to the fore. In any case, Tourneur shows the villain as being far more effective than the hero at his job. This certainly suggests some sort of attitude on Tourneur's part. The villain often seems just plain smarter than the hero in both films as well. In this comic little detective story, Phantom Raiders, everything comes out OK for the hero. In the more serious Out of the Past, things do not work out so well for the hero. This too is perhaps a commentary from Tourneur.
Both the hero and his assistant seem cast against type. Walter Pigeon usually played gentlemanly, intelligent, monogamous romantic heroes. His private eye is written to be the sort of constant skirt chaser played by George Sanders in the Falcon films. I confess I enjoy Walter Pigeon more in his regular roles, and found his character's womanizing and chaotic stupidity here unappealing.
Meek raises bees, giving his character an eccentric twist. He is introduced on the front lawn of his home, which contains bees. Tourneur often preferred to introduce characters outdoors, in a landscape environment revealing their personality. This is different from other directors, who often associate a character with a room. The front yard is one of Tourneur's micro-landscapes, small, intricately arranged areas full of color and personality.
The film's plot falls into Tourneur traditions. In several Tourneur films, Something Bad is going on. The audience knows this, but the good characters are either in ignorance or denial. The Bad activity is often quite destructive. Eventually the Bad activity can locate itself near water: the sea ships here, the swimming pool in Cat People, the aquariums in Experiment Perilous.
Also different looking: perennial tough guy Nat Pendelton also is in white tropical clothes throughout the film. I'm used to seeing Pendelton in 1930's movies, where he played good natured roughnecks from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. He seems so typically urban American, that it is startling to see him dressed in white tropical clothes for this sort of exotic adventure movie. He is still playing his traditional American roughneck, however.
Best effect of all: Donald Meek is in black clothes throughout the movie, the only person on screen not in head to toe white. This makes his character spectacularly eccentric looking, and makes him stand out in every scene.
Later, Tourneur moves his camera 90 degrees, and further down the hold. Now we are in one of Tourneur's "perspective down a corridor" shots. The corridor is made by a path through the bags; it leads to a doorway at the far end.
The heroine's condition is in some ways a code for being a lesbian. The film endorses the complete run of prejudice gays and lesbians faced in that era: the condition is seen both as a sin against religion, and a mental illness that needs to be treated by a psychiatrist. This is one of the worst cases of homophobia in 1940's film.
The film evokes other prejudices as well, in its attempt to make the audience fear the protagonist. The emphasis on her femininity tries to exploit misogynous fears of women. And making the heroine-villainess a Serbian immigrant appeals to xenophobes who hate immigrants.
I confess that I am not part of the Val Lewton cult. Many studies of Tourneur treat his films for Lewton as the high point of his career, and everything else as some sort of anti-climax. I Walked With a Zombie is an impressive achievement, but most of the Lewton films I have seen, whether directed by Tourneur or others, have just not pleased me. They tend to be cruel, and full of unpleasant material.
The sequence in which the rival (Jane Randolph) is stalked by the cat at night through city streets is famous. The streets are bounded by strange stone walls, and seem to have stone bridges over the streets. One suspects that these streets are passing through the city zoo featured in other parts of the film, but this is not explicitly made clear in the movie. They are certainly an unusual piece of architecture, one that is eerie looking. The sequence reminds one of the opening of Nightfall, in which the characters move along an urban sidewalk at twilight, just as the rival here moves down a sidewalk lit by pools of light from street lights. Both films eventually include a suddenly arriving city bus. In both films, the bus is photographed parallel to the plane of the camera. In both, it moves from right to left through the screen. In both, the camera is outside the bus, and photographs all the way through the windows on both sides of the bus, to show us the sidewalk beyond.
The swimming pool sequence is outstanding. It benefits greatly from Musuraca's photography, showing shimmering shadows reflecting from the water on the walls. This is a scene virtually constructed out of light.
The swimming pool is one of Tourneur's area in pits. The pool is in the basement, and the pool itself makes for a further deep region.
The office sequence has eerie looks at its end, of the elevator and revolving doors left in motion, after whatever is attacking the heroes has left. Both the elevator and doors can be considered as some of Tourneur's large machines.
Kent Smith's sweeping gestures with the T-square, are among the most conspicuous scenes in Tourneur in which a man gestures with an object.
Smith does get that other Tourneur favorite, the trench coat. This gives his look pizzazz.
Smith's profession embodies several Tourneur subjects:
Furthermore, unlike some other Tourneur heroes in the center of this W, Kent Smith does not adopt a boy, or interface with children.
The canopy outside Alice's apartment is a locale mixing indoors and outdoors. There is much more of this in other Tourneur films.
Cat People has many of Tourneur's repeating objects:
Tourneur also likes lamps, to form compositions. The huge lamp over the drafting table in the final suspense sequence is vivid, with a complex geometric shape.
Other camera movements are less purely in the Sternberg tradition. One of the film's finest shows the nurse and wife sneaking out of the home, on the way to the Voodoo ceremony. First we see the husband, sitting in the background in his room. As the camera tracks across the courtyard, we see the brother in the distance, apparently drinking on the dining porch. Finally we see the two women hurrying out. They too are in the deep background. Their motion is synchronized with the motion of Tourneur's camera. They gradually emerge down a small staircase, and make their way to the front of the shot. All the time, the camera is steadily moving from left to right across the courtyard. The fact the that first two characters seen, the men, are motionless, in the first half of the shot, while the women seen in the second half are in synchronized motion, greatly adds to the fascination of the shot. Motion seems to come out of nowhere. It is part of the beauty and mystery of motion, the ability of people to move, as part of the physical universe.
Another unusual camera movement: one which tracks the mother, as she goes upstairs after her confession near the end of the film. The camera pans through nearly 180 degrees, It keeps turning and following her as she winds up the three sides of the stairwell.
Other flat wall shots include a shot in bright sunlight. The nurse and the older brother are standing in front of a huge lowered blind. We can see outlines of trees and vegetation, dimly showing through the otherwise dazzlingly lit screen.
A third flat wall shot occurs towards the end. The wife is straining towards the outside gates, and is joined by the younger brother. The vertical bars of the gate fill the back plane of the screen, while the two people stand in front of it.
Tourneur gets great mileage in the scenes in the wife's room out of a harp. The harp has an elaborately curved head. Tourneur is always moving the harp, so that this curved line plays a prominent role in his compositions. The curved head line is the only curvilinear form in a room and screen filled with rectilinear objects. It is delicate and simple, but it adds a completely different formal accent to the compositions. Tourneur gets similar use out of the curved back of the couch on which the nurse sleeps. It too allows him to introduce slight curves in otherwise rectangular patterns. I have no idea if Tourneur or the set designers introduced these props, but Tourneur exploits them to maximum advantage. The curved lines suggest an element of mystery, a suggestion that the universe has complexities, and elements not easily understood.
The cantina in town also has three porches. One shelters the singers; one is where the couple sit during the day; a third is around the corner after nightfall. Tourneur stages three separate sets of corridor shots in these. During this third shot, first the singer (played by real life Trinidad calypso singer Sir Lancelot), then the mother, move steadily down this "corridor" towards the couple at the table. Here one side of the corridor is the wall of the cantina; the other side is the pillars that support the overhanging roof. In the background we see the sea.
The paths through the sugar cane can also be considered as corridors. Tourneur often shoots directly down a path. It gives a long perspective in the "corridor" style. Tourneur alternates such corridor shots with Sternberg style lateral tracks with masked foregrounds. The alternation of corridor shots and Sternbergian tracks give a rich visual mix to the sequence.
Even the nurse's room is treated as a corridor. Tourneur frequently shoots down its entire length. The walls of the room form a corridor effect. The photography emphasizes all the complex horizontal lines and shadows cast by the louvered doors and windows of the room. They form a prominent pattern down the whole left hand side of the room.
Both in the home and the cane field, Tourneur often shows people hurrying down the corridors. This gives beautiful movement to the corridor shots. Tourneur sometimes tracks along with the characters, adding to the visual complexity and force of these shots.
Tourneur used corridor shots systematically in his movies. They return again and again. They are at the center of his visual style. These shots are far from formulaic. They in fact show tremendous variety. Each one looks beautifully hand composed by Tourneur. Tourneur usually shows a detailed look at the architecture, furniture, vegetation and lighting down each side of the corridor. All of these elements are thrown into the visual mix. They are used to make parts of elaborate, highly organized compositions. Tourneur often includes ceilings in the compositions as well, plus doorways, archway tops, lintels, and other upper screen architectural structures down the corridor. These too are worked into his compositions. The whole effect can be compositionally extremely elaborate. Tourneur further adds to the richness of such shots, by sometimes including camera movement down the corridor.
The narration that describes early parts of the film recalls that of Rebecca (1940). In both films, it is in the heroine who narrates. As in that film, much of the commentary is about the large house the heroine visits, and about how the house allowed the heroine to experience both love and horror. This emphasis on a heroine and a house would become a staple of the "gothic" novels that were so popular in the 1960's, almost all of which involved the heroine going to live in a wonderful but spooky mansion. The cover paintings all showed both the woman and the house.
To get a near-W out of I Walked with a Zombie, one has to label Tom Conway the "hero" of the film. This is plausible, in that the film seems to endorse his actions, at least to a degree. But he is less clearly the central character than, say, Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Burt Lancaster in The Flame and the Arrow.
Conway, like other Tourneur heroes, has a relationship with two women: a good woman (the nurse), and a bad woman (his wife). As in The Flame and the Arrow, the hero is married to the bad woman, who has committed adultery with a sinister rival. In I Walked with a Zombie, this is James Ellison. Unlike other Tourneur films with the full W-pattern, this rival is not someone sort of evil crime lord. He is a perfectly ordinary man. The film does condemn his adulterous behavior, though, and he comes to a bad end, like a traditional movie villain.
Unlike the full Tourneur W-pattern, the Good Gal nurse is not romantically linked to any other man. She does have a friendship of sorts with the doctor. The doctor is a blandly respectable, good guy authority figure, like the sort of male rivals-to-the-hero that other Tourneur Good Gals get involved with. Only she does not actually have a relationship with him.
Also missing from the W-pattern: unlike other Tourneur films, hero Conway does not have any sort of relationship with kids.
As a propoganda film, Days of Glory tells its biggest lie right away: that its Soviet heroes are "free people" battling for their homeland, as the narrator puts it. They are not: they are living in a Communist dictatorship.
Days of Glory was reportedly Tourneur's first big budget effort, after years of working on short films and B-movies. However, it is hard to see the money on-screen. In fact, Days of Glory looks fairly shoddy, compared to much other Tourneur cinema. And it also seems less inventive and audacious than many of Tourneur's earlier works.
Hollywood made many semi-documentaries in this era. After 1945, these tended to be crime thrillers, documenting US Government crime-fighting units. Many of the earlier semi-documentaries, however, showed US military organizations.
Days of Glory, like Tourneur's later Berlin Express (1948), can be considered as an off-trail, not-always-typical, example of the semi-documentary movement. Days of Glory has features recalling the semi-documentaries of the 1940's:
Like other Tourneur films, Days of Glory is filled with mathematical data:
The telescopic gunsight used by the sniper at the start is visually fascinating. The scope produces an image, and oddly links to the many artists in Tourneur who create images.
The partisans get a radio, but are forbidden to use it.
We see the guerillas blowing up a train. Both the train and the explosives are technology. So are the enemy motorcycles.
The hero narrates his past as an engineer. He describes how in peace-time he helped build a major dam, and how in war-time he had to destroy it, to prevent its use by the Nazis. The hero is both one of several engineers in Tourneur, and another Tourneur protagonist who changes careers.
The two women have characteristics shared by other Tourneur women rivals:
In Tourneur films with the full W-pattern of romantic relationships, each of the women would themselves be involved with another man. However, this does not really occur in Days of Glory. A number of men are attracted to the ballerina, but she does not take any of them seriously: she only has eyes for the hero.
In the W-pattern movies, the hero often has either an adopted son, or more weakly, is shown being kind to young boys. Days of Glory takes a middle course: the hero mentors the 16-year-old Mitya, showing him how to be a guerilla. This is hardly an adopted son, but it is a long-term mentoring relationship, as well as a military command. However, the hero also seems to be the organizer and trainer of everyone in the band, not just Mitya.
The Nazi regime was so evil, that such attitudes still can be defended. But the war idea that "the only good enemy is a dead enemy" has troubling aspects. Tourneur later directed eight episodes of the TV series Northwest Passage, about the French and Indian War fought in North America (1754-1763). Northwest Passage has several similarities to Days of Glory:
In a society like the United States, in which even today women are not allowed in combat roles, the Soviet woman sniper was a striking contrast. A similar ultra-tough Russian woman soldier, played by the great Eve Arden, is the only interesting feature in the otherwise inane comedy The Doughgirls (James V. Kern, 1944), released the same year as Days of Glory. Days of Glory came first: it was already in release in January of 1944, before The Doughgirls was shot in March to May 1944.
In The Flame and the Arrow, each partisan has a background profession, typically working class. There is a parallel in Days of Glory, with one partisan being a blacksmith, one a geology student, one a scholar at Oxford, one a farmer, the woman sniper a factory worker, and the hero being a former engineer. These include more intellectual professions than The Flame and the Arrow, although the latter film does have an apothecary.
The speech is vague, and never mentions religion. But it does certainly seem to embrace human reason as the only good. By contrast, Stars in My Crown will take what seems to be the opposite point of view. In Stars in My Crown, the doctor tries to establish medical science as the only good, and condemns the preacher's visits to his patients. The preacher resists, and declares religion also to have value. Other Tourneur films will suggest that the supernatural is real, and that science should not be skeptical: see Night of the Demon, and more ambiguously, Cat People.
Others take place outside. An early shot shows an outdoor "corridor" through trees.
There are also striking shots down a road with the motorcyclists, and down train tracks.
Instead, many of the problems of the characters seem to stem from traditional gender roles: the way men and women were traditionally supposed to behave in upper middle class white society.
The heroine is trapped in the upper middle class wife role. She is supposed to be beautifully dressed, good at pouring tea, and with a few genteel accomplishments like being able to perform musically at a mediocre level. Otherwise, she is expected to be both passive and without a brain in her head. This passive attitude is exactly what keeps her in trouble. A more active woman would have many options: fleeing her home, hiring a private detective, seeking the help of friends or clergy or even servants.
A similar combination of passivity/thoughtlessness traps the sister. Together with the idea that she exists to take care of relatives, especially male relatives.
These women don't seem to me to be neurotic, or suffering from emotional disorders. Instead, they are following traditional gender roles, right into disaster.
Rotten as the husband is, it is not clear that his bad behavior stems from mental illness. Instead, his relentless desire to control his wife, seems to be a cultural norm. Laws and custom gave Victorian men absolute control over their wives, and many exercised this control to harmful extremes. The husband's behavior is nasty, but in many ways it seems to be encouraged by the society around him.
The husband doesn't just want to marry a beautiful young woman. He wants his wife to be on constant wide display, as a trophy he now possesses.
Experiment Perilous is different. Its two leads are a very wealthy man (the husband) and an upper middle class man (the doctor hero). The pair are both richer than the typical Tourneur male duo. However, they are just as contrasted, and just as sharply observed in sociological detail, as the more typical upper middle class vs middle class pair.
There is also a governess looking after the heroine's child.
Canyon Passage ends with the hero's store in ruins, other people dead, and the hero broke and unable to rebuild. This is an atypically pessimistic ending for a Western. The ending suggests suggests that war is intransigently destructive, and that it is not easy to cope with its damage.
Tourneur has a field day with the complex grounds of the buildings. Each is a mini-landscape, full of geographical features such as hills, paths, and sometimes water. Tourneur would include such micro-landscapes in his later films, such as the gas station grounds of Out of the Past, and the river and bridge scene in Stars in My Crown. Tourneur in general was fond of scenes that were neither purely inside, nor purely outdoors. His micro-landscapes are full of nature, but they also contain man-made features such as paths and bridges. They are not nature in its wild state; they are outdoor regions closely developed for human use. Similarly, Tourneur loved to film scenes on porches and under porticos, areas that are outside, but closely connected with buildings. His indoor scenes often include huge windows that show exterior landscapes in the background.
Often in the W-patterns, one of the women is "good", the other "bad". In Canyon Passage, their are hints of such things, but both women manage to stay "good". Lucy has some signs of "badness": she is quite a sexpot, and she is involved with two men at once without any guilt. And her boyfriend Camrose is a major villain, in the W-pattern tradition of the "bad" gal being romanced by a villainous man. However, although Camrose is crooked, he is not a gangster or other usurper of power.
Caroline shows signs of "goodness": she is prim and proper, nostalgic for England, here a sign of traditional strict standards, and eager for farming and being settled in one place. She has "family values". She also can come across as prissy. Her boyfriend is also "good", or at least devoted to the same quiet lifestyle as her. He is not an official however, unlike some W's.
Some Tourneur W's have the hero with an adopted son, or least children who admire him. The closest Canyon Passage comes to this, are Andy Devine's two kids, seen briefly. They hardly hero-worship Andrews though.
So are the early scenes at Devine's. There is red dirt out front, surround by green vegetation. Hero Andrews has a green jacket, Devine has reddish pants, many of the horses are red.
Tourneur's hero shows less psychological disintegration than many noir heroes. His hero will cover up his girl friend's crime, but otherwise is not especially corrupted himself. This makes him closer to Welles in Lady From Shanghai, than to the crooked heroes of Double Indemnity or The Killers. He is hurt by his past, and needs healing. But he is not an emotionally disturbed man. His reactions are those of a "normal" person who has been through a difficult experience.
Tourneur's style shows what Andrew Sarris called his "unyielding pictorialism". Shot after shot is astonishingly beautiful. Tourneur has an eye for composition. He knows how to arrange the elements on the screen so that they make up an exceptionally pretty picture. Nor does he need to linger over his compositions. He holds a shot just long enough for the viewer to comfortably absorb it. Then he cuts to another camera setup, one showing an equally beautiful composition. Then another. His imagination seems endless.
Some of the scenes show deep focus. We often see directly through windows, either in or out of a building. This deep focus is associated with Orson Welles, and is a stylistic common denominator with films of the 1940's.
Tourneur makes his corridors out of many things:
Tourneur's approach here is architectural. But Tourneur does not concentrate on what might be called "official" architecture, such as buildings and rooms, unlike many directors with an architectural approach - such as Fritz Lang. Instead, Tourneur especially loves unofficial architecture, such as the projecting awnings of buildings. The opening, defining shot of this sequence shows the visiting hit man looking up at the projecting covered area of the gas station. This covered region is beautifully symmetrical. It is seen from the side, and forms a classic piece of Renaissance perspective. Its two sided view is emphasized by having the name "Jeff Bailey" appear on both sides, the name being the focus of the hit man's and the viewer's attention. The names are positioned to gently underscore the geometry of the areaway.
Other examples of unofficial architecture: the awning covered walkways of the sidewalk. The chairs along the dining counter. Each revolving chair is positioned in another direction: some are parallel to the counter, others perpendicular, making a beautiful mathematical effect. Later, in the canteen sequence that introduces the heroine of the film, she walks down a complex entrance way to the cantina. This is not one unified passageway. Instead, it is a whole succession of transition zones, each with its own geometry and architectural features. It is a composite area, an example of "unofficial" architecture made up of bits and pieces of small areas. In Berlin Express, Tourneur will show many shots of sheds at the train station, and awning covered areas for the passengers to walk. He will also lead us through many unusual passages in the bombed out city of Frankfurt. All of these perspective corridors are made up of non-primary architecture.
Many of these features are constructed in an industrial style, out of industrial materials. They do not look like the gilded homes of the rich. Instead, the train sheds and gas station awnings look like factory components or industrial constructions. Even the lunch counter has a metallic feel. Tourneur loved machines. His characters are always happy and at peace when they are near machinery. Machines often play a major role in his compositions. The hit man and the boy are framed against the giant towing machine in the gas station. Its tow lines and projecting metal arms form a beautiful composition enveloping the two men. Many of Tourneur's street scenes involve cars, usually positioned perpendicularly to the line of vision. These are as carefully arranged as the revolving chairs in the diner. The best known still from Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939) shows the characters with a gleaming airplane, its surface full of complex patterns of rivets. Tourneur loved such machines for the complex compositions they could make. But they also give the characters a sense of peace and joy. The machines seem like gigantic pets, something his characters can play with, fool around over, and be happy. Their great complexity suggests that they are mentally and intellectually fulfilling to the characters who work with them. This is very different from Fritz Lang, whose machines tend to be sinister devices controlling the lives of his characters.
There is more architecture that bridges indoors and outdoors:
Both have the hero romantically involved with a good gal and a bad gal. In both, the hero faces a good guy rival for the good gal - and a crime lord rival for the bad gal. This is the same complex romantic pattern.
However, there is a big difference between the "bad gals". In Out of the Past, the femme fatale is evil, pure and simple. The only thing "bad" about the bad gal in Great Day in the Morning is that she's a saloon hostess, and hence a "loose woman". Otherwise, she is a wonderful human being.
Both films have crime lord villains with sinister possessive attitudes toward their girlfriends.
Both heroes face blandly handsome, good guy rivals with not-real-important US Government official positions, and a life of conventional but strict and disciplined rectitude. Both rivals are genuinely supportive of the heroine. Both rivals make magnanimous gestures at the end, letting the hero go rather than turning him in to the authorities.
Both have the heroes unofficially adopting young boys, to whom they become very close. The relationship is acknowledged as being closer than that to the heroine, in Out of the Past.
Both films show romantic couples having dates in the woods.
Both films also have shots of women cooking. In both, the meals are extremely simple and plain.
The hero of Out of the Past looks great in his jacket. But as soon as he is contacted by the sinister mob enforcer, the hero stops wearing it, and he is never seen in his jacket again. It's a symbol of his separation from the life of the town.
The dressiest man in the film is the black man in the night club. He is wearing a pinstripe suit, always the ne plus ultra of forties style. This recalls the hero's pinstripe suit in Nick Carter, Master Detective. It is an interesting social commentary to have a black man be the best dressed.
Mess jackets are worn by waiters. These anticipate Charles McGraw's Army uniform in Berlin Express, and the hero's bolero jacket in Great Day in the Morning. Mess jackets are not that common in American film. The hero wears one in The Tiger of Eschnapur (Fritz Lang, 1958).
The plot of the film recalls Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), with characters of all nationalities and politics making an intrigue-filled train journey through a war torn country. Both films have a scene where obstacles stop the train.
The mind-reader stage show section of the film resembles Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935).
He is opposed by a fanatic German underground, the villains of the movie, whose politics are never made clear. Are these Neo-Nazis? One might guess so, but this is never spelled out by the film. Most critical commentators on the film declare these are Neo-Nazis, but do not give any hard evidence. Or could they be Communists? This is also a possibility.
Berlin Express shows a great deal of skepticism about the Soviets, suggesting that it is their own hostile attitude which is the main stumbling block with peace with the West. Still, the film does yearn for such East-West peace. This makes the politics of the film apparently largely in accord with liberal but non-Communist thinking of the time.
I am not sure that I am accurately representing the politics of this movie. One problem with the film: no one ever seems to talk about democratic government, which to me is at the center of all good politics.
Of all the main characters in this film, only hero Robert Ryan and Russian officer Maxim turn out to be what and whom they originally seem to be. This is typical of many of Tourneur's films. The characters in Nightfall also turn out to have multiple identities. Even when Tourneur's people are not lurking under false identities, their initial impressions are deceiving. The islanders in I Walked With a Zombie have a huge, hidden past, that only gradually comes out in the course of the film. The bad guys in Stars in My Crown are hiding under KKK hoods, and we also learn a lot of strange things about the villains in The Fearmakers and Night of the Demon. It is hard to be sure of what or who any Tourneur character really is. The surface version of the character seems to be just as "real" as the hidden depths. The hero of Nightfall says towards the end that he prefers his new name of Jim to his old, real name, giving a hint that he likes his new identity better than his original one. And in I Walked With a Zombie, telling what any character's "real" personality is, is a futile enterprise.
Berlin Express shares imagery with the later Nightfall. Both feature extensive location shooting. Both are city films, containing massive panoramas of urban areas. Both go to crowded transportation centers, train stations in the earlier film, bus stations in the latter, and both have major scenes of train or bus travel, respectively. Both have characters lurking under false identities. Both have a hero, a heroine he meets in the course of the story, and a benevolent older male who can be seen as a father figure, and who has official connections.
Tourneur films often have objects shipped under deceptive stratagems. In Berlin Express, it is not an object which is shipped, but the peacemaker. He is being "shipped" to Berlin, to attend the conference. And deceptive actions are taken to conceal the way he is being shipped, in the Tourneur manner.
That Tourneur image, paper passed from person to person, includes the pigeon message at the start, and the paper with similar information passed in the train.
Both use regions of elaborate background texture. Tourneur here is always shooting against walls covered with complex wall papers or moldings or grillwork, for instance. This means that certain regions of the screen will have a complex texture; other regions of the composition will have a different but just as elaborate texture. This is quite different from an architectural director such as Fritz Lang, who will emphasize the pure geometry of his rooms in his compositions.
Both Sternberg and Tourneur also like to mask the foreground of the screen with complex patterns. In Berlin Express this is mainly ornamental grillwork, which seems to be everywhere in Germany, and France, too, according to this film! Sternberg, by contrast, liked East Asian bead curtains and netting, which would probably have looked out of place in Frankfurt! All in all, both Sternberg and Tourneur seem part of a Pictorialist film tradition.
Similarly, the wide open plaza near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate at the finale recalls the open streets of the mountain town at the start of Out of the Past. There are also some large scale panoramas of Los Angeles city streets in Nightfall.
One dramatic panorama shot of Frankfurt is taken from some sort of elevated platform, on which a man is standing. This recalls the street scene near the bus station in Nightfall, which is also taken from some sort of elevated pedestrian walkway. In neither film, does Tourneur actually show us the walkway, or have an establishing shot depicting it from a reverse angle. He simply uses the walkway as his platform for a dramatic view. Both shots have a pedestrian standing on them, in the foreground.
One striking shot shows a perspective view down a Montmartre street. Then a 90 degree pan reveals another long perspective view, this time through a gate and into the courtyard of a Parisian police station.
Tourneur shoots straight down the corridor with the dressing rooms, backstage at the night club.
When the film gets to Berlin at the end, there are shots outside showing buildings near the station, in the "corridor" format. This is followed by a "corridor" shot straight down the Autobahn (highway).
Tourneur likes to shoot through windows, and the train sequence has shots both looking out from the train through windows to the outside, and looking in to the train through windows from outdoors.
The shot, introducing all of the characters, shows us each one through the windows of various compartments on the train. It somewhat recalls the shots through train windows near the opening of Clarence Brown's Possessed (1931). The compartments are some of Tourneur's repeating modules. So are the bunks within the compartments, which are featured prominently in this shot. (The beer vats at the end are also repeating modules).
The train sequence is densely written. It introduces us to most of the characters of the film. It shows the pattern of nationalities intersecting on occupied Germany - American, British, French, Russian and German - and their complex political interactions and history. It shows the mechanism of life and work in occupied Germany. It sets up the main aspects of the spy plot. And the micro-landscape sets this against a spatial organization and floor plan on the train. All of this makes this sequence rich and delightful. The sequence conveys much of the romance and excitement of train travel.
Tourneur shoots from every possible perspective on the train. He has shots from outside the train, looking into the compartments, from in the compartments, looking in the train, from the corridor, looking into the compartments, the reverse, etc. Tourneur shows a Fritz Lang like exhaustivity, exploiting his set for every possible direction of view. Most of the shots are dramatically just right. They vividly convey the mood of that part of the story. When the mood of the story shifts, Tourneur comes up with the right camera position for it, too.
Tourneur rarely shoots from a high or a low angle, unlike many other film noir directors, however. The use of an elevated angle is restricted to the shots immediately following the murder, where it helps to underscore the surprise of the situation. Even here, the camera is not too high. There is also a dramatic excuse for such an angle; the army officer in charge is bending down to the ground.
The spherical crystal ball carried in the night club act also seems strikingly geometric.
Easy Living, like The Leopard Man, also looks at the dark side of publicity. The team's public relations man and owner have built up the hero's reputation, making him a star. The film shows how evanescent this is, how it can all change in the twinkling of an eye. The poster that features the hero's photo is an ironical symbol of this. It keeps recurring in ever more sinister ways through the film.
There are a number of such episodes in Easy Living:
The film seems to accept this as the Way Things Should Be. Good women (Ball, Donnell) support this system, bad women (Scott) do not. This sure seems sexist. However, Easy Living also does not conceal this social system. At the very least, the film offers an eye-opening alternative, to the right wing lies that say women lived pampered lives in the 1950's.
I'm trying to imagine Jeff Donnell working full time unpaid as a coach's wife, and raising a new baby! The mind reels. Where will she find time to do all this? The film never explores this issue.
Easy Living also suggests that success in glamorous female professions such as modeling or interior design, depends entirely on the backing of rich sugar daddies. If women don't sleep with such men, they are not going to have "careers". I have no idea if this is true. Still, it too offers an unusual look at the behind-the-scenes economics of the era.
The finale is a sexist disaster. I don't have the heart to analyze it in any detail.
The film also recalls the first half of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Both take place in a richly depicted 19th Century town somewhere in the heartland; in both the hero has to stand up and try to prevent a lynching. This film tries to recreate a way of life in a past era. In this it recalls the films of John Ford, who specialized in recreating ancient lifestyles and traditions. The musical interludes here also seem Ford-like, with music used to evoke a different time and place.
Stars in My Crown contains a ferocious attack on racism. It is one of the boldest of the post-war films, that supported the growing Civil Rights movement of the time.
This film is like Out of the Past, in that it shows evil forces laying siege to people in small towns. Both towns are idyllic places, filled with small businesses and homes. In both towns people love to fish, something that is treated as a source of friendship between grown-ups and kids. But the gangsters of the one film, and the typhoid and race hatred in the other, threaten to destroy the possibilities of harmony.
People in Stars in My Crown tend to live where they work. The minister and his wife, Famous, the doctors, and the farm family of Alan Hale, all have combined work-living quarters associated with them. Tourneur spends a good deal of time exploring these places.
Stars in My Crown is one of the few sympathetic depictions of Protestant religion on the screen. The preacher hero of the film is a wholly good person.
The depiction of Protestantism in this film has formal similarities to the many depictions of Catholicism in the movies. The film emphasizes religious activities, and interweaves these with daily life. Three activities are especially high-lighted in the film: preaching, hymn singing, and visiting the sick. This focus on kinds of religious observance is typical of Catholic movies. Some of the specific activities are deeply Protestant, especially preaching and hymns. It is as if the filmmakers have taken the formal structure of Catholic movies, and merged it with the content of Protestant practice.
"Stars in My Crown" is a hymn tune. It is sung over the opening credits of the film, and recurs throughout the movie. It is an emotionally powerful work. The use of a musical refrain in an otherwise non-musical film is a basic element of the Sternberg tradition in filmmaking. It is one that Tourneur follows with great effectiveness. The text of "Stars in My Crown" is by the Presbyterian writer Eliza E. Hewitt; the music is by John R. Sweney, who also wrote the music for the hymn "Beulah Land", within text by Methodist writer Edgar Page Stites. Both Hewitt and Sweney were based in or near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hewitt and Sweney had ties with Methodist hymn writer Fanny Crosby.
In the book, there are indications that the church is Methodist: the church building is written up in The Southern Methodist Review. There are brief references to the other churches in town, which are Baptist and Presbyterian. The book doesn't emphasize denominationalism aspects, and the film omits any mention of them entirely.
Tourneur's approach to composition in Stars in My Crown recalls that of Out of the Past. Many shots, both outdoors and inside, show the "corridor" approach of that earlier film. The opening shots of Stars in My Crown show the small town in ways that recall the small town opening of Out of the Past. Once again, Tourneur favors covered porches and walkways, through which he creates deep focus shots stressing perspective.
An interior shot of a bar here recalls the lunch room sequence of Out of the Past. Tourneur shoots down two corridors in the bar: one between two lines of people down to the minister in the back of the bar; a second shot down the bar counter itself. This second shot also shows the "outdoor town seen through the large window" approach of the lunch room scenes in the earlier film.
When Tourneur gets to the minister's home, he creates a shot down the minister's back porch. Once again, this is a straight on perspective shot under a covered portico. It also faces directly on a large window showing the outside world.
There is a deep perspective shot showing the arrival of the minister down a long corridor-like road at Alan Hale's farm.
Another outdoor corridor shows Chloroform retreating down a gap between two buildings in the bullwhip sequence.
In addition to their pictorial possibilities, the corridor approach is often very informative to the audience. It shows them a great deal of a scene, all in one well organized, easy to comprehend shot. We see everything from the foreground to the background, all nicely laid out and easy to understand. Often times, the corridor passes through many different layers of background. For example, Tourneur can create a corridor showing three rooms of a house. The first room will be in the foreground, then another room will be seen through open doors in the center of the shot; then distant doors in the background of the shot will show a third room. Not only is the shot visually complex and beautiful, but it shows us the entire floor plan of the set, in one easy to take in view.
The fact that Tourneur favors corridors and porticos as the structural principles of his shots, does not explain their beauty. His compositions are often exquisitely gorgeous.
Other shots involve the road, and an equally angular bridge. The road and the fence turn sharply to the left, making a contrasting set of verticals. Tourneur shoots the whole fishing scene with a widely contrasting series of shots. He is as exhaustive as Fritz Lang, in trying to find every interesting image possible in a scene, then staging the scene around it.
The church finale also has shots close to the "flat wall" approach. We see the doors of the church in two shots that are almost parallel to the doors and their surrounding wall. One shot is fairly close to the doors and the hats on the wall surrounding them. The other camera set-up is further back, showing much of the rear wall of the church. Soon, we also see the front of the church and the preacher, in shots also fairly close to the "flat wall" approach.
The organ is also a Tourneur "large machine". The film emphasizes its mechanical aspect, with shots showing people working the bellows.
The town train is contrasted with a horse and buggy being driven through the streets. The train makes an arrival, a bit like the suddenly arriving busses in Cat People and the opening of Nightfall.
The villain uses a hand compass while pouring over documents, and gestures with it. He echoes other Tourneur heroes who gesture with instruments. Similar hand compasses are used for gesturing in Nick Carter, Master Detective and Great Day in the Morning.
The life-giving substances that play a big role in some Tourneur, find a small scale equivalent in the healing herbs the hero gives to the apothecary.
The hero is a Tourneur injured character, treated by the apothecary at the start.
Tourneur films often have sympathetic image creators. The mute good guy Piccolo draws on the ground to convey information.
Later, there will be more flowing water, with the stream emptying into the pool. There is also a town fountain, seen briefly at the start and end of the film.
Many Tourneur films have regions which combine the inside and outdoors. In modern-day and Western films, these are often covered porches or sidewalk porticos. In the Medieval The Flame and the Arrow, the equivalent might be the tunnel-like arches in the town. These recall a bit the tunnel-like entrance to the cantina in Out of the Past. There is also a tunnel to the ruins in the woods.
The use of minstrels to infiltrate a bad man's castle recalls The Three Musketeers (Allan Dwan, 1939).
However, there are plenty of people gainfully employed in the rest of Tourneur. He tends to show their occupations in detail.
The Adventures of Robin Hood and Zorro films have sympathetic priest characters, who give their blessings to the hero's rebel activities. These too are absent in The Flame and the Arrow. Religion is largely absent from the world of the film.
Near the start, the hero invoked mountain law, justifying his shooting of the falcon. The dictator Hawk rejects this claim. The Hawk explicitly says he knows this law - but he disregards it. This sets forth what will later be a major theme in Wichita: the rule of law, and the efforts of evil rich men to subvert it, doing as they will.
Such Tourneur horror films as Cat People and Night of the Demon show a great concern over devil-worship. But in the comic The Flame and the Arrow, the entertainers dressed as devils turn out to be good guys. They use their flame-blowing as part of the armed battle at the end.
Only the aristocrats show any color, notably the Marquese in his gold tunic. The Hawk in dark red velvet, and the dancing master and boy in green and blue, also show color. But all of this color seems dark, stiff and formal. It is color, but of a highly controlled, formal, stuffy, aristocratic kind.
But the minstrels at the end let color loose. They bring color to working people, and also have the most uninhibited color in the film. Color seems to represent the possibilities of life, either absent among the poor good guys at the start, or rigidly controlled by evil upper classes. At last it is set free.
The hero also succumbs to an attack of malaria, recalling the many medical scenes in Tourneur films. He initially dismisses any suggestion that he take quinine to prevent malaria, a bit of an echo perhaps of the arrogance of medical researchers in other Tourneur films. Eventually he takes it, and recovers. This recalls the health-giving substances in Romance of Radium, and The Magic Alphabet.
The covered motor boat used by the dictator's troops recalls the other "large machines" in Tourneur's films.
The tracing paper used by the hero to copy the map is visually striking. It is perhaps related to the see-through screens and windows in Tourneur films. In the days before copying machines came into widespread use in the 1970's, tracing paper, like carbon paper and mimeograph machines, was one of the few devices that could make multiple copies of documents. It played an important role in the circulation of knowledge in human society. Tourneur sometimes has imagery related to such subjects: see the way radium fogs photographic plates in The Romance of Radium. One also thinks of the hero's creation of drawings at his artist's desk in Nightfall, and Anne Bancroft's portfolio of modeling photos in that same film, as well as the draftsmen in Cat People, and the blueprints in Nick Carter, Master Detective.
Similarly, the treatment of the rich guy. He has the structural position of the Bad Guy, and is played by an actor who specialized in odious rich men, Zachary Scott - see Mildred Pierce. However, Scott's character never actually does anything wrong in the course of the film. Nothing he does can possibly justify his being taken hostage. Nor is there any justification for his wife dumping him, and having an affair with the hero. Are we supposed to hate this guy because he's rich? Or is there a deliberate ambiguity here? Or is this all just scrambled, again? It is hard to say. Appointment in Honduras is a film in which the "hero" enables the killing of innocent people during what seems like an unprovoked attack, and who commits adultery. And a film in which the apparent "villain", however snarling, and unlikable in personality, never commits a single bad action. This is just plain strange. It is deliberate, and of artistic significance? Just a mixed-up script? And how did this script ever get past the censors, anyway? This was in an era in which movie heroes never even killed the bad guys, usually rounding them up and turning them over to the law: an expression of belief in the rule of law in a democratic society that seems politically deeply admirable, to me.
If the rich guy is indeed a villain, the way his wife comes to aid and ally herself with the hero anticipates Night of the Demon, and Mrs. Karswell's warning the hero about her evil husband. It also recalls Out of the Past, and the way the femme fatale kept oscillating between the hero and villain, and the triangles in Nightfall and I Walked with a Zombie.
Zachary Scott can be seen as a member of the upper middle classes, and planter Glenn Ford as an upstart member of the lower middle classes. Scott sneers at Ford's manners to the Captain in the opening sequence. Such conflicts between two levels of men in business will recur in Night of the Demon and The Fearmakers. However, in those films it is the upper middle class Dana Andrews who is the hero, with the villains being the upstart lower middle class characters. This film reverses the approach.
There are no mysteries for the hero or the audience to solve. But the bad guys are regularly confused about the hero's goals, speculating he is looking for a treasure. This ties in with Tourneur's theme, of the difficulty of uncovering truth.
The film opens on a "corridor shot" down the deck. The deck set is fairly short, and we do not get as deep a perspective as in some of Tourneur's corridor shots. The deck contains two outdoor staircases, anticipating the fashion show micro-locale in Nightfall. The angle of the upper staircase is echoed by the angles of the backs of two deck chairs. Both the chairs and the cabin doors are the repeating units Tourneur likes in his shots. Red light is coming out of the doors, while blue light fills the rest of the deck - a color harmony that will persist in the shipboard opening. We also see an octagonal region on the floor near a lifeboat. The lifeboat will be a major visual motif throughout the whole first half of the film. It gets introduced here before any of the human characters.
Later, at the climax of the ship sequence, Tourneur will switch to a "flat wall shot" of the deck, with the plane of his image parallel to the wall of the deck. Tourneur will dramatically move his camera backwards and forwards, always keeping it parallel to the deck wall. This preserves the flat wall shot approach, yet makes for some striking camera movements.
The whole ship seems old, and very remote from anything in modern times, or other movies. The various cabins and rooms remind one a bit of the train in Berlin Express.
The sympathetic radio operator lives and works in the same room on ship, like many Tourneur characters, with his desk right next to the box containing his bed. The radio room seems like the brain center of the ship: it is full of papers and maps, and is the place where information flows in and out of the ship. In the second visit to the cabin, Tourneur will switch to a moderately elevated angle. This allows one to have an overhead view of the operator's use of the telegraph, and of the hero's making a trace of the map. Such an elevated angle is a bit unusual for Tourneur. It recalls a similar gently elevated angle in the heroine's apartment in Out of the Past. And as in that previous film, the shot turns into a camera movement, exploring the radio operator's cabin as a whole. In Appointment in Honduras, the angle is linked to exposition: Tourneur needs the angle to give the audience a better view of the action.
The hero wears white throughout the picture - first a white tropical suit, then a white explorer's outfit. This recalls the white tropical clothes in Phantom Raiders, and the hero's white coat in The Fearmakers. Later on, the dictator at the palace and his generals will all be in white tropical uniforms, with touches of red.
The scenes of the rising wind blowing the tropical vegetation are beautiful. They anticipate the wind storm in Night of the Demon.
I urge everyone to see this fine film, before reading further. The less you know in advance about its plot, the better. The following discussion tries to avoid spoilers, but the film will certainly be most enjoyable if you approach it with little foreknowledge.
Stranger on Horseback is unusually short for a 1950's feature film with major stars, just 65 minutes. This is closer to a B-movie of the 1930's or 1940's, or one of the compact TV dramas of the late 1950's. However, both its length and structure seem just right, while watching the film.
The contrast between the wealthy Bannerman family that rules the town, and the ordinary people, is sometimes framed in ways that recall the class conflict in The Flame and the Arrow:
Stranger on Horseback goes beyond the class conflict of The Flame and the Arrow. We gradually learn that the Bannermans do not simply embody the illicit rule of wealth and power, bad as that is. The Bannermans are also oppressors of Mexicans and women. They are full-scale instigators of the sinister schemes of racial and sexual oppression that have played such a monstrous role in history.
The ranch owned by the rich family recalls the housing complex owned by the wealthy planters in I Walked with a Zombie. Both are wealthy people who have an exploitative relationship to the poorer people around them.
The hero has to persuade a wide range of people to speak up, and tell what they know. His sheer presence as a social dissenter has a powerful effect. Many were formerly convinced that they were in a society where truth would always be covered up and concealed. His dissenting attitude shows them that such social pressure is not in fact universal, that there are alternatives. They go from discouraged, reluctant "going along" with this vicious consensus of lying, to a new hope in speaking up and truth telling.
There are also characters who permanently stonewall the hero, refusing to give him information. John Carradine and the saloon barman are examples.
Tourneur films often have characters who tell about events that are not shown on-screen; they often vividly evoke a story or world for their listener, and the film audience. These witness accounts of the crime in Stranger on Horseback seem related to these episodes. So does the Marshal's account of town events long past. On the other hand, one could argue that in any mystery film, eye-witness testimony will take such form, and that this is hardly unique to Tourneur. Still, it fits in with Tourneur traditions.
There is no Tourneur W of relations. Specifically, there is no rivalry between a good gal and bad gal for the hero's affections. The heroine of Stranger on Horseback combines in one person elements of the good gal and bad gal.
Tourneur films with the W-pattern often have the hero adopting a young boy, or at least being friendly to a young kid. There is a brief element of this in the scene where the hero is kind to the little Mexican kid.
The town boss keeps all land transactions under $500, the legal threshold that would submit them to federal authority. We hear costs of several transactions: a very simple example of the mathematics data that sometimes appears in Tourneur. It is also an example of the strange, "primitive" economic systems that occur regularly in Tourneur films.
The gunsmith is an example of the technology-based shop that tends to show up in Tourneur's historical films.
A later comedy scene revolves around a horse trough with pump, in the town. Water is thrown at the hero, one of many tossed objects in Tourneur.
Stranger on Horseback looks like something out of the silent era. Many of the images remind one of the old two-color Technicolor films. Stranger on Horseback also reminds one of early hand-tinted silent films. I think the results are quite beautiful. However, I am not competent to judge whether the current DVD print reflects exactly what the film looked like in 1955.
Many outdoors scenes are designed in red-and-green:
The ground is red in some of these desert scenes, at the film's opening and close. This recalls the white ground in some of Tourneur's black-and-white films.
A number of interiors are vibrantly blue-and-red:
Most of both the blue-and-red and red-and-green scenes have costumes carefully coordinated to match these colors.
The very dark blue suit of the hero sometimes seems like part of a blue-and-red or blue-and-orange scheme. But often it just seems like a neutral, almost black tone.
The nasty son Tom is in white shirt and very dark blue trousers throughout, looking very neutral. He is matched up against the films most neutral set, the jail cell.
The likable banker is also in a color outside these schemes, being in a gray suit. This helps make him the most normal looking character among the townspeople.
In Tourneur's next film Wichita, hero Joel McCrea starts out in a brilliant red shirt, then shifts into a neutral white shirt part way through when he becomes a government official. Stranger on Horseback reverses this process. For much of the film, judge McCrea is in a similar white shirt, expressing his official role. But towards the end, he bursts out into a blue shirt for the suspense-action finale. In both films, brilliantly colored clothes are worn by the hero in action scenes, white shirts when he is soberly practicing his profession.
Wichita resembles Tourneur's previous film Stranger on Horseback in several ways:
Many Tourneur films are set in centers of American political power. As the film stresses, Wichita, Kansas is the center of the American cattle industry. It is the railroad center to which all Western USA cattle are shipped. This is explicitly set forth, and underscored, by the big public speech early in the film.
The same speech talks about how cattle and beef are feeding America. Wichita is about farming and food production, another key Tourneur subject.
Wichita is about an attempted coup against democracy, also a key Tourneur subject. The hero makes a strong distinction between the wealthy men of the town, and the elected officials. He only regards the second group as legitimate leaders. Soon, these wealthy men are trying to control the mayor. And worse, some of them put in motion an assassination attempt against the town marshal. The marshal hero is an embodiment of democracy, being appointed by and representing elected officials. The rich men instead want a city run by their fiat, not the rule of law, and not under the control of the electorate.
Wichita shows a conflict between "business" and democracy. It depicts business as attempting to undermine and destroy fragile democratic institutions in the new city of Wichita. The film only uses the word "business", never "capitalism", and the film never mentions alternative economic systems like socialism or anarcho-syndicalism. Still, it is clear that the film is actually talking about capitalism, as a way of life.
The cowboys who regularly run amok in Wichita are an example of Tourneur small towns under siege from sinister forces.
The well-to-do men keep black servants. The rich men are part of a system of white supremacy. Black people in Tourneur are usually dignified and non-stereotyped. The black butler in Wichita is dignified, well spoken, hard working and honest. There is not the slightest trace of comedy relief. However, he is also subservient, which can be seen either as simple realism - no one would employ a militant as a butler - or as a concession to white racists in the audience. Still, the very first shot of a businessman's home features the black butler prominently, serving at table. The business culture, viewed with skepticism in Wichita, is seen to have white supremacy as a key element.
The Marshal's use of force is non-lethal, until the final shoot-outs. He does use violence, but his level of non-lethal force is consistent with his job as a policeman in a democratic society. The dialogue repeatedly underscores his avoidance of killing.
Earp is a another Tourneur hero who changes career. His initial plan is to open a business. But he gets talked into being town marshal instead.
The heroine makes food for the picnic. What could be more conventional? But this heroine soon makes a startling speech about how 90% of the cooking in the country is done by women. It recognizes that cooking is an institution, something done on an organized basis. In this it recalls the organized cooking among the partisans in Days of Glory.
Wichita differs from several Tourneur films, in that there are no "primitive" or alternative means of exchange. All the businesses run on US dollars, including cattle, railroads, buffalo hunting and saloons. We see a bank and money. Everything in Wichita is part of modern capitalism.
Both Bat Masterson and Earp do get involved with disputes with big shots, who feel they can give the heroes orders. The heroes have to clarify who they are actually working for.
Wichita condemns gambling. It is part of the sinister vice world at Keno House. The hero is explicitly "not a gambling man". Tourneur films are consistently anti-gambling.
We also see the printing press. Unlike the many image creating devices in Tourneur, the press seems to create only text: newspapers, advertisements, signs. The press can be considered one of Tourneur's likable, large machines.
The heroine's house also has a portico. A major scene takes place there near the end.
Next to the bank is a building under construction. Along with the porticos, such construction sites also are areas that combine indoors and outdoors.
Tourneur films often have windows showing the outside world. Often these are large. The hotel windows overlooking the street in Wichita are somewhat in this mode, but they are smaller, and less omnipresent in the hotel scenes. We only get views through them, when a character is explicitly looking out a window.
The newspaper office has a wall of pigeon holes, like the radio operator's cabin in Appointment in Honduras. It also has a set of filing cabinets with very small drawers.
The wash bowls used by the trail hands near the start, are also repeating objects.
When the hero and heroine have their first walk in the street, they pass by three signs featuring animals: a poster about a horse auction, a sign with a rooster, and a saloon ad for Buffalo Lager. (These anticipate a bit all the elephant images in Great Day in the Morning. A similar Buffalo Lager sign appeared in Stranger on Horseback, along with a picture of a horse in front of a livery stable.) The animal signs are part of the town: the old, pre-Earp wild-and-wooly town. By contrast, the good guys produce only text, from the printing press. They never create any sort of images.
There are also numerous signs all over the buildings. One of the last conversations in the film takes place under a sign reading "Wichita".
The Marshal's job is symbolized by his off-white shirt. Soon, when Bat is deputized, he is in a similar look of white dress shirt and string tie. The white clothes that run through Tourneur serve in Wichita as indicators of the Law. Both men wear them with brown pants, in keeping with all the brown in the film's second half.
There is a feeling that having "law and order" come to Wichita - symbolized by the moment the marshal is sworn in - has de-saturized the colors. In some ways. this is an impressive stylistic achievement. The whole look of the film changes, in a twinkling of an eye.
But there also is a feeling that potential has been lost. Color is part of the joy of life: and now it has fled.
There are some exceptions:
In some ways, it is a Western version of Casablanca, with the hero running a night-spot in a town tense with intrigue due to the start of a war. He's even given a bit of flip, evasive dialogue when asked about his past, just like Bogart in Casablanca. The hero also starts off by trying to stay neutral in the war, like Rick in Casablanca.
Just as Germany was divided in Berlin Express, so is the US coming apart into North and South in Great Day in the Morning. People try to kill the peacemaker and unifier (Paul Lukas) in Berlin Express; in Great Day in the Morning, a man who speaks out against the war in the name of brotherhood is whipped in the street by war mongers. Tourneur seems to be showing the evils of war fever. Perhaps he is hoping viewers will remember, and not get caught up in real life wars in the future.
The way the Union Colonel is prepared to sacrifice the townspeople casually as cannon fodder till his regular troops arrive, also adds a sinister touch. It is one of several anti-war points made by the film.
The gold claims are another kind of Tourneur "pieces of paper", that get transferred from character to character. Here they are part of the economy, as in The Grand Bounce.
References to Lincoln recall The Man in the Barn.
Several more sinister activities are promoted by characters as substitutes for religion:
Great Day in the Morning recalls Canyon Passage, in that both are Westerns set in remote, isolated communities, filled with gold mining and where ruinous gambling changes the characters' lives. Both have violence between whites and Native Americans. Both communities are about to undergo a major collapse: fighting with Native Americans in Canyon Passage, the Civil War breaking out in Great Day in the Morning.
The heroine who owns a dress shop anticipates Anne Bancroft in Nightfall, who is a model. Both are seen surrounded by glamorous dresses.
The villain is associated with an animal: not cats, as in much of Tourneur, but elephants. He will eventually be trampled by horse-drawn wagons in the street: more Tourneur animals who are out of control.
The saloon waiter was a frontier cannibal, once. This is an odd, comic variation on the Tourneur theme of nutrition.
As in I Walked with a Zombie and Berlin Express, several characters are harboring dark secrets. However, we perhaps expect that the hero has a hidden mission regarding the war, but he does not. He does show up in town after learning secret information about the gold - but purely out of personal greed. This recalls a bit the secret message that triggers the plot of Berlin Express.
Romantic triangles are everywhere in Great Day in the Morning. The hero is involved with two women; each in turn is involved with another man.
The shoot out-inside the Circus Tent saloon starts with a flat wall shot, showing the front wall of the saloon. In the foreground, there are lamps hanging from the ceiling. They too are parallel to the plane of the shot. But they are much closer, and offer an intriguing variation on the pure flat wall shots that run through Tourneur. This composition is excellent.
When the hero and the dress-seller have their late night talk in her home, they are shot flat against a wall covered with regularly dotted wall paper. They look as if they are floating against a sea of color. Two brightly colored circular orange plaques are also on the flat wall, behind the heroine. It is a strikingly abstract composition.
A striking shot shows the hero spread out on his quilt. The quilt pattern forms a background behind the hero, something akin to a flat wall shot.
Later, when the hero is injured and brought back to the bed and its quilt, Tourneur stages a pure "flat wall" shot, showing the events parallel to the back wall of the bedroom. This sequence also contains a closer two-shot of the woman and boy, which is also parallel to the same wall.
The film's most unusual corridor shot is the long take in the Free State saloon. Captain Kirby is trying to organize the fanatic volunteers, into something like the regular Army. The shot begins with a classic Tourneur "flat wall" shot, showing the front interior wall of the saloon. The shot does have a bit more non-wall space at the bottom (showing tables and chairs) than do several other Tourneur flat wall compositions. The shot runs a long time, and has some simple camera movement, adjusting position a bit, without affecting the overall composition much. Towards the end, Sgt. Masterson starts organizing the troops. He forms the rag-tag volunteers into line, herding them into a straight military line down the left hand side of the image. When he is done, we suddenly see the image is now in the form of a perfect Tourneur "corridor shot". The line of troops on the left forms the corridor; Captain Kirby is on the right; and we see a perspective corridor shot of the saloon between them. The whole shot is quite remarkable: we see a "corridor shot" being built and arranged, right before our eyes!
In his book on Tourneur, Chris Fujiwara shows how the cutting and polishing of the diamond in The Jonker Diamond is a metaphor for Tourneur making a film. In Great Day in the Morning, this long take is also a demonstration of how Tourneur constructs a composition.
Tourneur includes more compositions with vertical trees, in the finale showing Union troops riding through the woods.
The cave at the end is used to mask and frame the action. Such masking was a signature of Tourneur's father, Maurice Tourneur. One wonders if this is a deliberate homage. Earlier, the first gun lesson is also seen through a small four-sided opening in the forest.
Wind blowing the grasses is also a motif in the opening. Wind is a Tourneur image.
Great Day in the Morning has a pit, smaller than those in other Tourneur films. It is filled with ashes to disguise the gold strike there.
We have another country church, a Tourneur motif, once again made of white wood in a traditional style. The forceful, good guy priest recalls the minister hero of Stars in My Crown.
The boxes of rifles labeled "Bibles" are full of irony. Tourneur will soon have more mislabeled crates in Timbuktu. As far back as The Jonker Diamond, Tourneur showed valuable cargo being sent through the mail in a deceptively casual manner.
The heroes of such movies are always exemplars of middle class life styles. Everything is done to underline how ordinary and conventional they are. This often includes putting the men in such films in as ordinary and unspectacular suits as can be found. Here hero Aldo Ray is de-glamorized, wearing a typical 1950's suit and tie. Jeffrey Hunter will sport a similarly square look in Key Witness. Only towards the end of the movie does Ray get in clothes that are a bit more glamorous, a shiny black air force jacket. Ray also suffers from a terrible haircut, designed to make him look square. I kept thinking he should sue the wardrobe department. Tourneur does frequently shoot so that Ray's huge, muscular back is emphasized. Ray is an extremely macho looking actor. But the main use the film seems to make of this, is to show that even someone as tough as Ray is shows little chance against these monstrous crooks. Ray gets little chance to unroll the dynamism that made his supporting performances in George Cukor's Pat and Mike (1952) and Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead (1958) so entertaining.
One might note, that for a director who is often accused of a lack of force, that Tourneur's heroes are often the toughest, most macho actors on screen. Even Tourneur's more gentlemanly actors, such as Tom Conway, James Ellison, Dana Andrews, Glenn Ford and Joel McCrea, are very macho performers. And Tourneur is very comfortable with tough guy actors like Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster. Tourneur often makes these men play characters with intellectual depth, such as Ray's artist here, or Ryan's agricultural expert in Berlin Express, as well as the many doctors in Tourneur films.
Much better than the grim scenes with the criminals, are the happy scenes in which Ray encounters love interest Anne Bancroft and good guy investigator James Gregory. Anne Bancroft is making her film debut here. We all owe this film a big debt of gratitude for bringing Anne Bancroft to the screen.
The artist hero works where he lives, a recurring Tourneur theme. His artist's desk recalls the draftsmen in Cat People, the tracing paper on the map desk in Appointment in Honduras, and all the blueprints used by the workers in Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939).
A triangle involving the hero, his doctor friend, and his friend's young wife recalls I Walked with a Zombie. It is a fairly minor element of this picture, though.
The large snow plow machine at the end of this film is unusual in that it is purely sinister. Usually Tourneur's huge machines are friendly, like a pet. This sequence bears some resemblance to the nightmare plowing scene in Anthony Mann's Border Incident (1949), surely one of the most horrifying scenes in the movies. Even in this grim Tourneur finale, however, there is something pretty about the visual patterns made by the snow plow's machinery.
There are numerous clocks, mirrors and staircases in this film, all traditional symbols of film noir. There were also many clock shots in Berlin Express, another Tourneur film noir. In David Goodis' original 1947 novel, the hero is afflicted with traumatic amnesia, from which he recovers at the end: a noir plot gambit if there ever was one. All of this is eliminated in the movie, perhaps to make the hero be more like a regular, ordinary person.
Later, an outdoor fashion show will be staged in an interesting area just outside a building, with staircases and balconies overlooking the site of the show. The fashion show is one of the livelier sequences in the movie. The way the show's announcer keeps describing the color of the gowns on view, in this black and white movie, makes an odd touch. The fashion show has elements of ritual, that recall the ceremonies in I Walked with a Zombie. This scene shows Anne Bancroft's talent, as she performs with human warmth in a mild suspense scene. This is the sort of light hearted suspense typical of Hitchcock's more comic thrillers. Aldo Ray also gets to make beautiful music here, in the sequence's comic finale, where he shows his dynamic self. If more scenes had this sort of spirit, Nightfall would be a lot more fun. The opening dinner with Bancroft and Ray also has a little of the same warmth, especially when the two characters discuss their work. This is another expression of joy in the film.
Judging by the credits, the fashion show takes place at a real Beverly Hills haute couture salon. We see some corridor shots in front of this building at the show's start. The building has a 50's modernist style architecture, anticipating some corridor shots in front of modernist buildings in The Fearmakers. The show itself is full of beautiful lateral tracking shots, which move along with the models to and fro along the outdoor sidewalk serving as a runway. These shots are full of beautiful trees and shrubs, a favorite Tourneur subject. One shot of the bad guys films them through a spiky, modernist steel sculpture, a sinister touch. Later, when the hero and heroine have moved up to street level at the end of the sequence, there are more camera movements parallel to the sidewalk and the characters' path. These too involve beautiful trees. Everything in the whole fashion sequence is visually beautiful.
There are also some striking shots of outdoor staircases at the show. One shot with both Bancroft and Ray has a staircase making a strong diagonal from the upper left corner; this diagonal is continued by a hedge in the lower right. Counterpoised to this, is the opposite diagonal, a gently series of steps on which Bancroft and Ray stand. Both characters look pleasingly glamorous and romantic here, with Bancroft in a spectacular gown. This other diagonal is underscored by a series of banisters moving up from the lower left corner of the screen. This is a delightfully composed shot. The X of the two diagonals gives it a dynamic quality.
A second inventive staircase shot shows Ray and Bancroft running up an outdoor staircase. Behind them, we see a deep focus panorama of the fashion show. When the two heroes run around a huge, visually obstructing concrete pillar, Tourneur tracks to the right, bringing them back in view along the next stage of the staircase. This is a richly complex shot.
Another fascinating micro-locale consists of the opening exterior of the restaurant, on Hollywood Boulevard. This street scene area has an outdoor news stand along one of its walls. This is one of many building exteriors in Tourneur that are full of complex projections, within which the characters wander. The overhead of the news stand forms an area that is both inside and outside, a Tourneur tradition. Tourneur has some "flat wall" shots here, with Ray photographed directly against the newsstand, with the stand forming the entire back of the shot, parallel to the plane of the camera. He also achieves shots at a 90 degree angle to this, with the sidewalk under the newsstand canopy forming a classic Tourneur corridor. Also very intriguing: the rounded corner of the restaurant building. Ray walks along this curve, and it is also prominently featured in other shots. It is a most intriguing piece of architecture, one typical of the complexity of Tourneur's exteriors. This scene includes the arrival of a city bus. Tourneur photographs Ray through the front and back side windows of the moving bus. It is an intriguing piece of photographic imagery.
The bus station forms a third outstanding micro-locale. We see a spectacular Los Angeles city landscape, that includes the bus station, along the right hand side of the long city street that makes up the "corridor" of the shot. This is one of Tourneur's largest corridor shots. We are at an elevated platform of some sort in the foreground; James Gregory maintains his surveillance of Ray from up here; meanwhile, we see Ray crossing the street below, with the huge cityscape receding to infinity in the background. He soon turns at a right angle, and starts along the street to the bus station, as the shot ends. It is very fine!
Once inside the bus station, Tourneur finds a whole series of corridor shots: from the shoe shine stand, from the weight and fortune machine, from the ticket booth. These all lead to long perspective views, with the shots' "corridors" reaching out to distant doorways within the bus station. One spectacular shot combines the "flat wall" and "corridor" approaches in Tourneur. This shot contains murals on a large, interior bus station wall (the flat wall portion of the shot, photographed head on, as usual), with a row of lockers on the right side of the shot. The lockers form a deep perspective view. They form one half of a Tourneur corridor, the right hand half, and they lead to distant doors. However, there is no matching left hand part of the corridor, as there typically would be in a corridor shot. Instead, the whole left part of the image is taken up by the flat wall shot of the giant murals. It is a beautiful and striking image, one that creatively combines two of Tourneur's paradigms.
There is also a "corridor" shot, in the nocturnal sequence showing Gregory staking out Ray's apartment. The "corridor" stretches down Gregory's apartment, all the way to a back window, through which we can see Ray's apartment across the way.
I am not a believer in the supernatural, while Tourneur is. However, Tourneur does not present much of anything positive about the supernatural in Night of the Demon. All of the devil-cultists we see in the film seem to be purely evil. They are terrible human beings, and out to exploit others. Much more innocent are the briefly seen medium and his wife, the only decent characters involved with anything supernatural in the movie. Similarly, the Voodoo celebrants in I Walked With a Zombie seem innocent. However, nothing good comes out of Voodoo in this film - the consequences are purely disastrous for everyone.
It is a cliché to compare Night of the Demon with the early horror films Tourneur made with Val Lewton. The mother here recalls the mother in I Walked With a Zombie. Both play a far more independent role than one might expect, with hidden depths to their characters. They are not the simple, supportive figures one is used to in the works of other directors.
The cat sequence here also recalls Cat People.
Oddly enough, the least British member of the cast is the heroine. She is an English woman, but she has few specifically British traits. Her job of kindergarten teacher is one common to many countries. Her home is not especially English. She is first seen on a plane from the US to Britain, and her nationality seems indeterminate. She represents universal human values throughout the picture, not someone specifically English. One recalls the nurse in I Walked With a Zombie, who also is independent of the island society. Anne Bancroft's sophisticated fashion model in Nightfall also seems independent of the North Woods setting of many of the characters.
Many other Tourneur films are set in a different society. One thinks of the island in I Walked With a Zombie, the Southwest in The Leopard Man, the 19th Century community in Stars in My Crown, and the many small towns in Tourneur.
Throughout his career, Dana Andrews often played men who were very well dressed, but whose surface charm hid serious character flaws. His smooth looking characters were downright duplicitous in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel, Daisy Kenyon and Where the Sidewalk Ends, and in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. He is not a crook here. But his polished, upper middle class exterior is viewed with skepticism by Tourneur. Andrews often played men whose power and authority came from their upper class middle class position. This position comes from their professions: Andrews plays a famed psychologist here, a newscaster and author in Lang's While the City Sleeps, a tycoon in Daisy Kenyon. But this professional standing is symbolized by Andrews' elegant clothes: he is always dressed at the height of upper middle class good taste. On the screen, his social standing seems to come from his appearance. Tourneur suggests that Andrews is using his position to cover up insights into the supernatural unearthed by less upper class characters: the kindergarten teacher, Andrews' less famous colleagues at the conference. His beautiful suits symbolize his social power, a power used to hide and suppress the truth.
The schoolteacher and the colleagues are also middle class, but from its lower reaches. A subtext of the film is a hidden battle between the upper middle classes and the lower middle classes. This will return in the conflict between Andrews and Dick Foran, who represent two styles of 1950's businessmen in The Fearmakers. In some ways, Karswell's devil cult here is a "going business concern", just like Foran's empire in The Fearmakers. Both films pit Andrews' upper middle class gatekeeper against these lower middle class upstarts who've made it big financially. In both films, these upstarts are crooks, who have succeeded through sinister schemes. But there is also a bit of sympathy with them, as Andrews' character looks like an old money establishment figure who is trying to keep them out of the country club.
Andrews' polished clothes and appearance makes him irresistible to women: he always gets the girl in his films. His directors do everything they can to glamorize him, and fully display this side of his characters to add romance and glamour to their films. But they also suggest that there is something false about such glamour. It can be used to depict Andrews as a polished crook, or to suggest that his social authority is illegitimate and based on image alone, as Tourneur does here, or as Lang hints in While the City Sleeps.
But both magic shows, however seemingly innocent, have a dark side. The magician is frightening to the boy hero of Stars in My Crown. Worse, both magic shows are immediately followed by sinister disasters: the boy comes down with the disastrous plague during the show in Stars in My Crown, and we get the frightening windstorm raised up by Karswell in Night of the Demon.
The sceance in Night of the Demon is begun by the members singing the traditional song "Cherry Ripe". This tune was actually sung at many real life British sceances. The scene recalls another group of non-professionals sitting around at night and entertaining themselves with a song: the partisans in Days of Glory. These scenes invoke folk traditions of group sing-alongs. The popularity of folk music was nearing its peak in 1957 in the USA, and families frequently conducted such folk music sing-alongs in their homes.
The singing of "Cherry Ripe" is delightful. It is sure to please folk music fans such as myself. But there is also perhaps some special pleading going on. In real life, I disapprove of sciences and the supernatural as much as Dana Andrews in the movie. But people like me are lured into enjoying and valuing the sceance, by treating it as a delightful folk ritual, filled with traditional music and customs. It is that - but its also a full scale endorsement of the supernatural.
The first shot of Harrington's car speeding down a road at night, is filmed from behind a series of trees. Some of the tree trunks stand straight up; other smaller branches are on diagonals. The complex of strong, thick verticals and gentle diagonals makes a strikingly composed image. The far left of the shot includes a strangely bushy tree, with some horizontals, too. Tourneur gradually turns this shot into a pan along the road. Later, when Harrington is leaving the Karswell home, and presumably retracing his steps, Tourneur includes this same shot again: only it is reversed from right to left. The inclusion of both a shot and its mirror image reverse seems like a highly unusual film technique. I cannot recall anything like it in other films. It produces an echoing effect. It also makes the world of the film seem more geometrical, and more like a self-enclosed world containing the characters. It also allows Tourneur not to "waste" what must have been a very hard shot to set up, compose and light. (Most of the reverse printing I recall from films is due to technical reasons. Much of Roy Del Ruth's The Babe Ruth Story (1948) was reverse printed, to make the right-handed actor William Bendix look like the left-handed ball player Babe Ruth he was portraying. But these shots were only printed once in the film. There were no echoing effects, as there would be in Night of the Demon.)
The windstorm is a striking episode. It links shots of Dana Andrews, to those of the wind blowing in the trees. The later shots of the kids fleeing from the windstorm anticipates sequences in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).
Andrews' suite at the Savoy is full of curved forms. There are curtains, and an arch over the window. There are tables, lamps, chairs and sofas. All of these make up a complex, "geometric environment" for the hero and his friends. Tourneur regularly makes graceful compositions out of these. The heads of his characters are often associated with the curving curtains in the background of the image.
More semi-circles include the repeated arches in the corridors in the Savoy Hotel. And the complex fire screen, against which the parchment tries to fight.
The bridge outside Karswell's house is also associated with Andrews. The bridge goes over a repeating series of semicircular arches. Like the lamps at the British museum, such repeating forms takes us into a "geometric" world. The bridge is itself a highly obtuse triangle, adding to the geometric effect. It recalls the bridge sequences in Stars in My Crown. The flowing water, falling over a series a dams below the bridge, recalls the emptying aquariums in Experiment Perilous. Tourneur shows this bridge as the final stop in a pan through the countryside. Pans are frequent in Night of the Demon. From the bridge, one can see the grounds of the Karswell home in the distance. The countryside and grounds together make up one of Tourneur's most complex micro-locales, an elaborate landscape in which much of the film's action takes place. We see the gates of Karswell's estate; earlier we saw the gates of the British Museum. These recall the gates of the estate in I Walked With a Zombie, and the grilled gates of the French government offices in Berlin Express.
The balustrade in the Karswell home is full of curves. It is shown during the telephone conversation, in which Mrs. Karswell informs the heroine about Hobart's knowledge of how the curse can be lifted. Such a convoluted way of revealing new layers of knowledge is typical of Tourneur's mystery plots, which reveal layer after layer of truth.
Curves here seem to be related to scenes in which the hero has supernatural experiences. And scenes in which the hero learns something about the nature of the curse being invoked.
Another shot with repeating geometric forms, is the first overhead interior view of the Karswell house. There are checkerboard patterns on the floor, of three different sizes; a series of four cylindrical pillars; and a round chandelier, with repeated light fixtures sticking up from it, along its sides. This too seems like a whole environment made up of repeated geometric forms.
At the airport, Tourneur repeatedly shoots down the long central passage of the airport. This is a complex piece of architecture, containing the vast terminal. Tourneur varies this shot in several ways. First we see a straightforward look down the passage. Next we see Andrews exit through a door in another room - also somewhat of a corridor shot - followed by a 90 degree pan by Tourneur, which comes to rest down the long corridor again. Later, Tourneur adds a telephone booth into the mix. He shoots both outside the booth down the long terminal; then from inside the booth, through its glass walls. This last shot seems especially eerie. It combines the small space inside the booth with vast vistas. It perhaps suggests that we are surrounded by complex environments and forces at all times. These airport scenes recall the bus terminal in Nightfall.
At the end of the British Museum sequence, Karswell walks down a rectilinear corridor, like a long box. Tourneur has the image waver here, to convey a "supernatural" effect. This is one of several associations of corridor shots and the supernatural in the picture.
At the Savoy Hotel, Tourneur has one of his beloved porticos at the front entrance. He uses this for a corridor shot, in his typical manner. Soon, another corridor shot goes the exact opposite direction through the portico. Immediately following, inside the Savoy, Tourneur shoots down a series of hotel corridors. These are surrounded by a series of rounded arches, which repeat for a perspective effect. The shots are dramatically striking. They convey a sense of being trapped in an infinite, purely geometric world. A sense of supernatural menace is strong here.
The scene in the farmhouse is in Tourneur's "corridor" style. First Tourneur shoots directly down one side of a table, which is aligned with the walls of the farm house. Then Tourneur gradually moves his camera so it is aligned with the other side of the table.
During the brief telephone conversation between Mrs. Karswell and the heroine, both are shown in corridor shots. The first shot of the Karswell home is horizontal; it shows a series of rooms receding into infinity. A similar shot shows a series of rooms in the heroine's home. A second shot of the Karswell home is quite different, but also a corridor shot. This shoots through the arch, and up the staircase behind it. It too is a very deep perspective view. Early in the film, the first shot of Karswell and his mother had also been a deep perspective view through several rooms of the Karswell house.
The shot of the ambulance going down the road, opens with a corridor shot of the street, framed between two rows of trees. Trees are everywhere in this film. As in the opening shots, these involve a moving camera traveling down the corridor. These shots are not supernatural, but they still convey a great sense of danger and alarm, underscored by the ambulance bell. When the body gets to the lecture hall, there is a long perspective shot with Andrews lecturing in the background, and the body in the foreground.
The finale of Night of the Demon concerns trains, recalling Berlin Express. The finale also has many corridor shots: in the train station (recalling the airport at the beginning), along the portico covered platforms, in the corridors of the trains themselves, and finally, along the tracks. This is the most systematic use of corridor shots in the picture. The long corridors here once again convey a strong sense of the supernatural, that one has wandered into a strange, geometric world far removed from everyday reality.
The chemist's inner room is seen through windows. Its symmetrical large glass windows, and shelves filled with technical bric-a-brac, recall the gas station at the start of Out of the Past.
The book is written in a secret code. This links to coded messages elsewhere in Tourneur. The runes also seem like a sort of code.
Dana Andrews' white robe and towel are more of Tourneur's white clothes.
The accident at the start cuts the power line pole in two. Tourneur's films are full of cut objects, such as the diamond cutting in The Jonker Diamond, the puffy breakfast bread that is cut open in I Walked with a Zombie, or the pins cut by the doctor in Stars in My Crown. This electric pole is much bigger than any of the other cut objects.
As a rock formation, Stonehenge looks a bit like the rocks at the base of the rapids in Out of the Past. The Snakes and Ladders game also looks a bit like the same rapids in Out of the Past.
The insane man has made a drawing under hypnosis. Tourneur films are full of drawing.
The mother has made homemade ice-cream. Tourneur films sometimes feature women cooking. The mother here is not actually shown making the ice-cream, but she is dishing it out.
Once the movie gets to the public opinion agency office, it closely follows the events of the book. The whole story of how our hero lost the agency while he was in the service, and its transformation into something new and sinister, is taken directly from the novel. The book shows us more of the employees of the agency, and its work in actual operation. One suspects that the ultra-low-budget nature of this movie prevented this. The film is restricted to a handful of sets. It loses the opportunity to show us the business as a whole, and its numerous employees.
In the novel, the agency was conducting Nazi-inspired hate campaigns among the general public. These were "whispering campaigns" in which large numbers of operatives spread anti-war effort and racist ideology among the American people. All of this seems entirely lost in the movie, aside from one brief scene in which Andrews wanders into a room where operatives are making racial references. Among other things, it makes the title nonsensical. The Nazi agents were actually spreading fear among the public, causing them to hate and fear minority groups. Nothing like this is occurring in the film. The book also had sympathetic minority characters, both black and Jewish, among the least stereotyped of any in 1940's mystery fiction. These too have been deleted in the movie.
By contrast, the film centers on the idea that phony, slanted or biased opinion polls could have a sinister influence on elections, media and business. Such polls can be used to get TV shows canceled and elect crooked politicians to office. This is an interesting idea. Considered purely as a practical scheme that might actually work in real life, it sounds more plausible than the whispering campaigns of the novel.
The film's treatment of politics is almost as ambiguous as the maybe supernatural, maybe not elements of Tourneur's early horror films. The hero condemns and rejects the "Ban the Bomb" group because of its Communist sympathies. But its organization's leader makes a passionate speech about the evils of military-based science, a speech that is never refuted by anyone in the film. One suspects that Tourneur has much sympathy with the horror expressed over the bomb, even though he has little sympathy for Communism. Hero Dana Andrews also makes an anti-war statement in the film. Similarly, Berlin Express is one of the few films to show the devastation wrought by bombs in World War II. Both films suggest armed struggles going on, with a chilling speech about a possible Soviet attack on Washington in The Fearmakers.
Both Berlin Express and The Fearmakers have finales in public locales of great historical resonance: Berlin Express in a plaza near the Brandenburg Gate, The Fearmakers in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with the Washington Monument in the background. These areas are political examples of Tourneur's micro-landscapes. Both locales involve both automotive vehicles, and characters who move on foot. The movements of both vehicles and pedestrians is carefully staged to create geometric patterns. These patterns are both visually interesting, and suggestive of political attitudes and commentary.
Phantom Raiders also took place in an area of American power, being set near the Panama Canal Zone. Both I Walked with a Zombie and Stars in My Crown take place in communities showing the legacy of slavery. History is very much alive and omnipresent in these locales.
In many films, the hero wears the darkest colored suit, making him stand out and look authoritative. Here, however, Andrews wears the lightest colored suit. This also makes him stand out, and look different from everybody else. His clothes have an upper middle class elegance that the other businessmen's suits do not.
Andrews regularly wears a white trenchcoat, as well. This looks terrific. It recalls both the white clothes worn in Phantom Raiders, and the hero's darker colored trenchcoat in Out of the Past.
There is also a corridor shot, showing all the characters leaving the office building. The left side of the shot is the front of the building; the right side, a railing. As is often the case in Tourneur corridor shots, we see the ceiling of this outdoor entranceway. The building is charming in a modern, 1950's style; its surface is broken up into several striking geometric regions. The whole effect is of a geometrical abstraction, with trapezoidal and rectangular regions creating a soft image in the tradition of Mondrian and Constructivism, but gentler and more refined in Tourneur's personal visual style. It is interesting to see Tourneur incorporating this sort of modern building into his corridors; many of the shots in previous movies had dealt with older and more traditional architecture.
This scene starts out with Andrews trying to use his executive rank to get the key from the secretary. This does not work; he then pleads with her to help him, as part of the mystery plot. The tone changes from someone giving someone an order, to a relationship among equals. Tourneur changes the staging as the story develops. First Andrews is seated above the heroine, in a giving dictation pose; then when he asks for help they move to an equal level.
Timbuktu is a minor movie. It has too much war material, and too much violence. It is most entertaining in its middle third, where the three main characters engage in one of Tourneur's romantic triangles. The film also has some good visual style.
The light-colored desert sands are repeatedly used to highlight dark-colored clothes and horses framed against them.
Also like The Gunsmith in Northwest Passage: a Lieutenant is ordered to create a map, to be used for military purposes. Unlike most of the other image makers in Tourneur, we don't actually see him working on the map. We do see the finished product.
Also like Days of Glory, Timbuktu has a hero who used to concentrate on engineering work, but who is now involved in World War II activities. The hero of Days of Glory blew up the bridge he built; the hero of Timbuktu had to give up his plans to build a pipe carrying salt. Both are examples of Tourneur heroes who change careers.
Salt transportation relates, in a general way, to the farming that is so important in Tourneur: salt is something people eat.
The young Lieutenant who gets executed by the bad guy in Timbuktu, recalls the young partisan executed by the Nazis in Days of Glory.
Evil in Timbuktu is largely restricted to an aristocrat (played by John Dehner), who wants to bring back the absolute monarchy practiced by his ancestors. In this he recalls the rotten aristocrats of The Flame and the Arrow, who oppress the peasants and the workers.
The politics of Timbuktu is undoubtedly over-simplified. But however naive, Timbuktu applies the same beliefs Tourneur advocated elsewhere among Europeans, to this Third World situation. If The Flame and the Arrow showed dictatorial aristocrats were bad in Europe, Timbuktu depicts them as bad in the Sudan. If Stars in My Crown glorifies a Protestant Christian preacher who advocates racial equality, Timbuktu praises a Moslem holy man who is a non-violent independence advocate.
Timbuktu is probably out of touch with the complex historical realities of such very complicated subjects as French Colonialism, Sudan and Mali history, and North African history. A film that set forth these in full complexity would likely last ninety hours, not ninety minutes like Timbuktu. Timbuktu is just an adventure movie, and no one should regard it as a scholarly study.
The tent interior in the last third, is also geometric. It has a circular opening at its top, and a cylindrical pole in its center.
The city gate, with it circular windows and circular arch, and minaret at the end are full of geometric forms. The overhead shots down the minaret stairs are especially good.
The medallions are also seen in multiple quantities.
But most of the repeating units in Timbuktu are unfortunately linked to the torture scenes:
The horses here resemble a bit the "large machines" that run through Tourneur's work. Just as those machines often resemble large pet animals, so are the horses here the pets of the heroine. The harness cart attached to the horse is an actual machine. Most importantly, the steady running of the horse sets up a rhythm, that is similar to the rhythmic repeated motions of some of Tourneur's machines, such as the fan in Stars in My Crown and the snow plow at the end of Nightfall.
At the end, the horse loses its cart and driver, and runs on the track alone. This is a bit like other Tourneur films in which animals escape from human control: the dog who goes off on mysterious nocturnal adventures in Killer-Dog, the leopard that escapes in The Leopard Man.
The check's progress from person to person anticipates the sinister parchment in Night of the Demon. Both also wind up with a similar fate. It also recalls somewhat the message on the pigeon at the beginning of Berlin Express, another piece of paper that makes a circuit of different people. That Berlin Express segment is also a silent film with narrator.
The film's ultra-complicated plot reminds one of the complexities of Tourneur's feature film plots. And character types who appear in them also show up here: gangsters, enforcers (Out of the Past), doctors, a pro athlete and his girlfriends (Easy Living). Most of the characters in this film are sure the check is good, and base their actions on this premise the viewers know is false: this is another example of Tourneur's deluded characters. The characters here are of many different social classes, all mixed together: another Tourneur tradition.
Some Tourneur films such as Easy Living and The Fearmakers have men battling career-threatening or career-destroying situations. The hero of The Fearmakers works in an office that is even more hostile and frightening than the one in The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning.
A number of Tourneur films show primitive economic systems. The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning is just the opposite. It shows modern day, standard business tools: invoices, credit systems, all in a conventional modern day business office. The hero's mortgage is mentioned, and we see timecards punched, also conventional and modern.
The boss is upper middle class, the hero is more middle class (despite a very snazzy house). Upper middle class vs middle class conflicts conflicts are a Tourneur subject.
Like many other Tourneur mysteries, the one in The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning turns out to have medical aspects, although this is far from obvious in its early stages. SPOILER. The boss' stomach problems are the cause of his grouchiness.
Groups of men all working at what is elsewhere "woman's work" such as typewriters or switchboards, are frequent in police thrillers. These police tend to be uniformed, serious, and highly disciplined looking. The scene in The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning has something of the same feel. These men seem high-powered, and on an important mission. But they are in business clothes, not uniforms.
Later we see the hero's desk at home, which has repeated slots for correspondence. These approach the pigeonholes, which are a specialized subcategory of the repeated objects in Tourneur. When we last see the hero at work, at the film's end, he has some sort of office object on his desk, also with repeated slots for correspondence.
In addition, young males are everywhere: there is an office boy at work, and later, caddies help the hero with his golf.
Tourneur films are full of pieces of paper that get passed from one person to another. Here the passing often involves boys. The office boy gives the hero an invoice. Later, the hero gives his son a letter to mail. Both invoice and letter play a key role in the plot.
A doctor is called on to study a corpse, and determine whether or not it is Booth. This is an early example of the medical mysteries that run through Tourneur. Like other such mysteries, it is filled with ambiguity. The doctor, like so many later doctors in Tourneur, is confronted with a seemingly unsolvable puzzle. Evidence points both ways, and coming to any conclusion is very difficult.
The Man in the Barn also deals with a center of political power: here Washington DC, right at the end of the Civil War. Tourneur will return to Washington in The Fearmakers. That film will have a scene in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
The shipboard sequence anticipates Appointment in Honduras. It is set against a large metal background on deck, that looms up behind the characters, like the cabin on the ship in Appointment in Honduras. This ship is an early armored warship: an instance of Tourneur's interest in large machines.
The Magic Alphabet shares subject matter with later Tourneur films. First, the film deals with doctors battling mysterious illnesses which they barely understand or control. A major part of the film shows the original discovery of vitamins. Here, Dr. Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) is trying to understand the causes of beriberi, a disease which is causing numerous people in Java to sicken and die. These sections strongly anticipate the Tourneur films I Walked with a Zombie and Stars in My Crown. In all of these films, the illnesses which grip patients are horrible, and their causes are not understood. Not only do doctors have to treat patients with these illnesses, but they also are carrying on research to try to understand their causes. They desperately pit their intellects and their training against dimly understood medical disasters. In all the films, the doctor and other heroes operate in a shadowy world, in which they face a lone battle against overwhelming odds.
This point of view is underscored by the frame sequence of The Magic Alphabet. The film opens with three different stories, showing modern day Americans coming down with mysterious diseases. As in later Tourneur films, these diseases lead to a sort of living death for the patients. At the film's end, we revisit these three highly dramatic stories, and learn how a lack of vitamins is the cause. Tourneur leaves these three subplots hanging through the entire film, increasing the sense of a mysterious medical calamity overwhelming his characters. The secretary who gets sick here loses her job, just as Victor Mature will in Easy Living.
The imagery in The Magic Bullet is close to I Walked with a Zombie of the following year. There are people in sick rooms, hushed and tropical, and bodies being carried on litters. Even the prominence given to chickens here anticipates the later film. Chickens are a historically accurate part of the real Eijkman's research. Family groups sitting around tables having meals are also a key image in both pictures; they show up again in Stars in My Crown. Dr. Eijkman was played by the young Stephen McNally, who made several short films during this period.
Other Tourneur films have similar subjects. In Easy Living, apparently healthy football player Victor Mature is stricken with a major illness. It changes his entire life, and the course of the film. Hollywood movies rarely showed men who were so afflicted. The hero of Appointment in Honduras collapses due to malaria. The hero of The Fearmakers also has attacks of weakness. In Experiment Perilous, doctor George Brent has to come to the aid of patient Hedy Lamarr, and her mysterious problems. And Night of the Demon can be interpreted as a scientist battling a mysterious calamity that he does not understand, although here the calamity is supernatural, not medical. There is also a doctor character in Nightfall, who comes to a terrible end. The hero of Nightfall is also severely beaten, and needs medical attention, provided by the heroine. A medical crisis is at the center of such shorts as The Grand Bounce and Romance of Radium.
In most of the films, the medical researchers show arrogance and hubris. The problems facing their patients are deeper than their conceptions of them. In The Magic Alphabet, the doctor is sure beriberi is caused by a microbe, the main model in medical science of the day for the cause of diseases. This is not true. He keeps on futilely researching this while people are dying all around him. Only a chance intervention by outsiders shows him the error of this idea. Medical researchers in I Walked with a Zombie and Stars in My Crown will show similar false ideas and false confidence. So will psychologist Dana Andrews in Night of the Demon.
Both Sternberg and Ford, directors who influenced Tourneur, depicted illness in their films. The troubles in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932) begin with the husband's life threatening illness. However, he is mainly sick off screen, and this film does not especially resemble Tourneur's. However, John Ford's approach is close to Tourneur. Ford's Arrowsmith (1931) is a whole film about medical researchers, including an epidemic, and The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) has similar scenes in its climax. The prisoners in Ford's movie anticipate those involved with the medical research in The Magic Bullet. Another epidemic occurs in Ford's Doctor Bull (1933). The young boy who has trouble walking in Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) resembles the one in The Magic Bullet. There is also the alcoholic doctor in Stagecoach (1939), the equally troubled Doc Halliday in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), and Anne Bancroft's gutsy doctor in Seven Women (1966). Like Tourneur, Ford sets his physicians in remote and often tropical areas. Many of Ford's doctors are as fallible as Tourneur's. However, Ford's doctors do not seem beset by the almost metaphysical doubts of Tourneur's. It is the ignorance and helplessness of Tourneur's heroes in the face of the unknown that troubles them.
The Magic Alphabet also shares a tropical setting with other Tourneur films. All of these works show people from Northern countries living in tropical areas: Panama in Phantom Raiders, a Caribbean island in I Walked with a Zombie, Mexico in Out of the Past. Tourneur has rich atmosphere, depicting life in all of these countries.
The emphasis on scientists trying to provide proper food and nutrition for the public returns in Berlin Express, whose hero Robert Ryan is an agriculturist trying to feed the starving Germans after World War II.
Tourneur had worked with the star of Northwest Passage, Keith Larsen, when Larsen played the supporting role of Bat Masterson in Wichita (1955). Tourneur would direct multiple episodes of Northwest Passage, apparently eight all told. The Gunsmith and two others were re-edited into a feature film, Forest Rangers, and it is in this form that I've seen them. The Gunsmith forms the first third of Forest Rangers, that is, around the first 25 minutes of the film. Most of the other episodes of Northwest Passage I've seen are not any good at all.
Forest Rangers is full of racism against Native Americans. It is one of the most racist Westerns of the 1950's, an era in which many progressive, pro-Native American Westerns were in fact being made - although not by Tourneur! Forest Rangers also suffers from extreme violence, and lurid treatment of its female characters. As a whole Forest Rangers is pretty dismal, and I considered leaving it out entirely from this Tourneur study.
It takes place in the forest-and-water environment familiar in Tourneur. The canoes are miniature versions of Tourneur's ships.
Major Roger Roberts (Keith Larsen) and Langdon Towne (Don Burnett) are perhaps examples of the middle class vs. upper middle class pair that run through Tourneur. Much is made of Towne's Harvard background.
Langdon Towne is also one of Tourneur's sympathetic artist characters. He is a portrait painter, and we see him at work at his easel: one of many Tourneur characters at work producing images. Towne is also a map-maker. We see one of his fine maps, showing the Lake Champlain setting of Northwest Passage. This map was produced based on rough sketches researched and drawn by explorer Roberts. So both men are in fact image makers. They also are collaborators of sorts, one of the few such collaborators on image-making in Tourneur.
The collaboration indicates another aspect of the Roger Roberts - Langdon Towne relationship: it has homoerotic undertones. It is perhaps the most striking gay male relationship in Tourneur.
The relationship has dominance-and-submission aspects. Roberts tries to control Towne. This is modified in ways that soften what could have been hard-edged. The control has a playful side: both men see it as a game. And Towne's upper class status gives him protection and options: he could easily leave the relationship at any time he wants to. The fifteen minute sequence, in which the men meet and develop their relationship, if full of inventive detail, not spoiled here.
There are aspects of that Tourneur theme hero worship, in the way Langdon Towne comes to regard Roger Roberts.
Major Roberts' relationship with his Sergeant (Buddy Ebsen), also has dominance aspects. The Sergeant enjoys having Major Roberts throw a tomahawk at him (I am not making this up!). This recalls the way the bully in Stars in My Crown ultimately enjoys having his whip turned on him by the hero Joel McCrea, and tripped into the mud. The tomahawk is one of many thrown items in Tourneur. And the tin cup it splits is one of Tourneur's cut objects. (There is also a tossed bag, in another scene.)
There is a triangle relationship: both Langdon Towne and Roger Roberts are attracted to the same woman. However, unlike most Tourneur triangles, this one seems perfunctory. It mainly seems like an excuse for the men to have a rivalry relationship.
The green Forest Ranger uniforms often match the lush green vegetation. They also make a contrasting color harmony with the red uniforms of the British troops. Color looks ravishing throughout The Gunsmith.
Keith Larsen is introduced with his shirt off, a common sight for 1950's Western TV leading men. It also recalls Burt Lancaster's shirtless scene in The Flame and the Arrow. Tourneur often employed macho leading men in his films. When Larsen is next seen in his Forest Ranger uniform, it emphasizes the "getting dressed up" quality of his uniform.
The hidden identities have an eerie effect. We have a whole cast of men who are concealing their names.
A life-giving substance, also a Tourneur theme, is part of this subject: his fellow prisoners reduce his fever through the use of river water.
We see a detailed progession of the prisoner's illness, through many stages. Illness and injury are often complex in Tourneur, rather than simple.
SPOILER. Here, the injured man is deliberately getting his treatment withheld, by the monstrous people who run the camp. We only learn this mid-show: it is a new complication in the situation. Other Tourneur films have medical mysteries: here their is hidden information not about the injury itself, but its lack of treatment.
Night Call shows Tourneur's interest in woman's work: the three on-screen characters are all female, and two of them are shown at work.
The mail the housekeeper gives the heroine is perhaps a simple example of the paper passed around in Tourneur.
Tourneur himself is interested in communication devices, such as phones and switchboards.
Like other Tourneur films, there is a mystery, that only yields after very detailed, multi-stage investigation. This mystery has both technological and supernatural elements. Like other Tourneur mysteries, it is frighteningly hard for the characters to solve. They need to go through many stages, and experience failure along the way. The technological aspects are perhaps analogous to the medical mystery in so much of Tourneur.
The cemetery has aspects of a geometric world, especially in the shot of the telephone pole and the grave. The cemetery is full of tombstones, each in a different pure geometric shape.
The switchboard operator's headset is full of geometric forms.
The house has no grass or separate lawn outside, just dirt. This gives it an aspect of the ruins in other Tourneur.
The cemetery is entered by a gateway between two posts, although there are no actual gates. It has a sign. Gates and signs are common Tourneur motifs.