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THE PARALLEL WORLDS OF JACQUES TOURNEUR. BY GEOFFREY O'BRIEN
Jacques Tourneur could figure as a testcase for auteurism. A director who said that he never turned down a screenplay-"I did my best with whatever they gave me"-Tourneur produced a succession of films of which almost every one belongs to a clearly defined, often formulaic genre: the Western, the horror movie, the noir thriller, the pirate movie, the spy movie, the medieval adventure movie, the jungle movie, all the way down (as the studio system collapses around him) to Timbuktu (59), with Victor Mature lending able-bodied support to French colonialism in the Sahara, and The Giant of Marathon (59), with Steve Reeves fending off hordes of invading Persians. His filmography suggests the workaday artisan, an identity Tourneur was happy to claim for himself. When a French critic asked him what place he thought his films would occupy in the history of cinema, he replied: "None." To find profundity among the frames of Appointment in Honduras (53) and Great Day in the Morning (56) might strike some as the ultimate expression of auteurism as mystical cult, perceiving revelation in what to the unreceptive looks very much like standard industrial product, more or less pleasing but singularly devoid of any obvious ambition. The spectator's question becomes: Is there really something there at all, or am I imagining this? That question, as it happens, leads directly into the heart of a lifework that, however unassuming, has over time surrendered none of its power to fascinate. Can there be a durable will-o'-the-wisp, a monumental glimmer? Maybe only in the movies, and most particularly in the movies of Jacques Tourneur.
If the classical Hollywood film can embody a science of manipulation, Tourneur's films stand out by their refusal to dictate a reading. This is not to be confused with vagueness, even if Tourneur's films elicit the same words over and over from a range of commentators: hypnotic, elusive, enigmatic, uncertain, mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent. His French admirer Louis Skorecki wrote an essay entitled "Tourneur Does Not Exist." Sometimes it's possible to feel that his films don't exist, especially when they've eluded you for years. I can remember seeing The Fearmakers (58) for the first time on late-night television in the mid--...