While I’ve increasingly found classic Hollywood as an industrial wasteland, one which produces without much care for the success of the product, the standards of quality within those old picture factories does allow the greats to rise up from the cracks. Some of the obvious stylists are easy to pick out, the Hitchcocks and the Fords that the French critics lauded—even Hawks, who’s usually considered un-stylistic, can be visually identified from his stagey two-shots. Then there’s those whose visual styles are more mutable, and it’s the mechanisms under the hood that are their most recognizable traits. The most obvious of these auteurs is Nicholas Ray, whose images almost never align film to film, but his social examinations and tragic attempts at reinventing the American family are always bursting out of the frame with his cynical yet tender personality.
Lately, I’ve found another good example of this phenomenon in Jacques Tourneur. Tourneur is not style-less by any means, and his mise-en-scene is striking no matter if the film is a location-based Western or a simple crime drama housed in sound-staged rooms. What shoots through the screen in Tourneur’s films is a sense of life informed by death. I think of Aldo Ray’s heartbreaking performance in Nightfall (1956), where you can hear the war-worn pain in his broken voice, spending the first dozen minutes of the film thinking he’s maybe finally making a human connection only to then think he’s been duped all along, and that everyone’s out to get him. His performance highlights the American psyche itself in the post-war era, where false fears that the populace perceives are confirmed by the way the world spins.
This psychological jockeying is reflected in the tension between what Tourneur’s films emotionally aspire to versus what’s politically acceptable in the system within which he operated. Tourneur was primarily prolific after WWII, in an age simultaneously defined by disillusionment and propaganda; a substantial amount of the American population returns home shattered, unable to reintegrate into the society they ostensibly fought for yet are expected to fulfill a new suburban dream meant to work in perfect opposition to their rejuvenated Soviet enemies. It’s the impossibility of post-war American culture, a psychotic tension that a whole country was trapped in.
The 1958 film The Fearmakers—a job Tourneur picked up the pieces apparently as a favor to one of his favorite leading men, Dana Andrews—is about a Korean War vet (Dana Andrews), who underwent brainwashing while held as a POW, coming back to the States only to find that the co-founder of his PR firm was dead and the company was sold off. He starts co-operating with a Senate investigation into the matter, finding that his old group had been infiltrated and was spreading propaganda meant to insight mass-hysteria by playing into people’s prejudices and fears. It’s a surprisingly honest assessment of mass media in the Cold War era, with the exception that the firm was taken over by Moscow-supported communists, when in actuality the mass-media hysteria in the 1950s was caused by right-wing nationalist forces within the American government.
This is a perfect example of Tourneur’s structural dichotomy: the emotional truth of the conspiratorial hysteria against the flaccid acceptability of the anti-communist message. Within the narrative confines of what the machine wants to produce (anti-Soviet message film), an adept—ostensible journeyman—like Tourneur can get between the lines the system makes for itself. This is how many of the best in Hollywood were able to show their chops, running from prestige and hiding in the apparent confines of genre, although those confines were ultimately what was liberating for their honest storytelling. Ford always joked that “he made Westerns” rather than being one of the most accoladed drama directors in the Golden Age. The test of time proved him right, and many of his greatest works of poetry were hiding away in popular cinema all along. Tourneur is equal to any of the other Hollywood genre hounds often cited (Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, etc.), but with his narrative constructions often rougher around the edges he’s not as immediately recognizable as those contemporaries. His films, although immediate, require active participation to find their undercurrents. You have to look at the full depths of the storytelling, much like how you have to follow the whole of the screen to understand pick apart the details of his mise-en-scene, to really get the brilliance of the picture. It makes his films as rewarding to intellectualize as they are to simply experience in motion.