Exploring Jacques Tourneur’s special takes on genre filmmaking
Genre cinema isn’t often heralded as the playground of the auteur. However, Jacques Tourneur took a completely different route from many of his filmmaking countrymen by not only carving out a career in Hollywood but doing so in noir and horror. These two mediums were hardly synonymous with the French in the post-war years leading up to the dawn of the ‘New Wave’.
His father, Maurice, was a filmmaker and an admirer of D. W. Griffith, which may have informed his son’s trajectory, whether intentionally or subconsciously. He moved to the United States at the age of ten and eventually became a naturalised citizen, with his rise beginning in the early 1930s when he signed a contract with MGM.
After making his feature-length American debut with the 1939 crime story They All Come Out, Tourneur was eventually released from his deal two years later. He was swiftly picked up by Val Newton and RKO Studios, which set the stage for the most fruitful and influential period of his entire career.
During this time, Tourneur experimented with multiple different genres. These ranged from the seminal supernatural horror of Cat People and the undead antics of I Walked with a Zombie to creature feature The Leopard Man, war drama Days of Glory, the melodramatic stylings of Experiment Perilous, and frontier-set Western Canyon Passage.
Happy to try his hand at almost anything, Tourneur’s choice of projects was eclectic, but it allowed him to hone his distinctive style and display just how malleable it was. Noir and horror are arguably where he delivered his best work, but the way he approached cinema at large illustrated that he didn’t view them as all that different, either aesthetically or thematically, but equally reflective of himself as a filmmaker.
Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie used dark shadows and subtle hints to instil the audience with fear of what could be lurking just around every corner, while Night of the Demon gained a reputation as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, extracting the maximum amount of terror and tension from the horrors prevalent in everyday life. In this instance, an American professor arrives in London for a conference and discovers a hidden underworld of devil-worshipping cults and occult forces just under the surface of society.
Night of the Demon and Cat People may have unfolded under completely different storytelling circumstances. In the latter’s case, a curse that may or may not transform Simone Simon’s Irena Dubrova into a feline during the throes of passion. Still, each helped shape the direction of horror in their own way, and it’s a path the genre continues walking to this day.
Atmosphere was integral to his vision, but there were also jarring bursts of excessive and effective scenes that forced viewers to pay undivided attention and remain on their guard throughout. Treating the supernatural or otherworldly threat as being ambiguous in nature was hardly par for the course at the time Tourneur was operating at the peak of his powers, but the unsaid and unseen are often a lot more frightening.
It sounds obvious, given that there are decades of modern horror flicks to have run that exact playbook, but Tourneur was making these movies in the period after Universal’s classic stable of monsters enjoyed their peak and long before subtlety became a widely accepted part of the genre. The threats – whether they were real or existential – were never explicitly spelt out, and that desire to have the audience draw their own conclusion was pivotal to the way Tourneur approached scary stories.
Even when he was working in noir, the filmmaker maintained that air of mystery. Out of the Past may have been a hard-boiled crime story at the end of the day, but it’s not a coincidence that it was the single biggest influence on Martin Scorsese and Shutter Island, which is much more of an off-kilter and horror-tinged film than Tourneur’s. Regardless, his mastery of all things terrifying filtered into the rest of his filmography, even when there was no place for things going bump in the night, and his fingerprints remain all over the genre.
