Jacques Tourneur

  • The Leopard Man (1943)

    The Leopard Man (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I won’t try to pretend that Jacques Tourneur is a forgotten director, but he does seem consistently undervalued, especially given the strength of his filmography. The early-1940s horror films he made for producer Val Lewton seem particularly influential, bridging the atmosphere of gothic horror with the tricks that would soon end up in film noir (including Tourneur’s own classic Out for the Past). Compared to other horror movies of the era, Tourneur was more restrained, more thematically-minded and far less exploitative—qualities that have helped his work survive well into the twenty-first century. The Leopard Man initially seems to have strong ties to the previous year’s Cat People, but that ends up being clever misdirection, as the feline menace suggested by the title ends up being a masquerade for an unusually dark (for the time) thriller about what’s now known as a serial killer. There are plenty of chills and thrills, distasteful deaths (even when suggested), a New Mexico atmosphere and a great use of shadows and sounds in creating an atmosphere more disturbing than the images. It’s handled quite well, and manages to impress even today. The Leopard Man is clearly not of the same calibre as some of Tourneur’s most celebrated works, but it still works.

  • Cat People (1942)

    Cat People (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) One of the particularities of investigating horror films of classic Hollywood is appreciating how some of them could do much with very little—using atmosphere, cinematography, and subtlety to achieve interest without buckets of blood and gore. The Hays Code prohibited such overt material, and some producers found ways around the restrictions. Writer-producer Val Lewton was one of the best at it, and he found in director Jacques Tourneur a kindred spirit. Cat People was their first collaboration, and it shows an interesting intent to play on a semi-psychological register, with a woman (Simone Simon, convincingly feline) convinced that she turns into a panther when aroused. The romance that follows with a man skeptical of the claim is punctuated by strange events and (predictably) doesn’t end well. I won’t try to exaggerate the subtlety of the film—not when some of the dialogue is on-the-nose to the point of obviousness. Some of the material is simply weird (who stuffs a cat in a box?), but the black-and-white cinematography is quite nice and the plotting is devoid of nonsense enough to fit in 73 minutes. There are layers to it all, though—a take on female sexuality that was good enough to be remade more permissive decades later, some oneiric symbolism and direction that’s not entirely figurative. I quite liked Cat People, but keep in mind that I watched it with a cat on my lap.

  • I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

    I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2018) Our post-Romero definition of a zombie is significantly different from the classical old-voodoo-school zombie, so don’t be misled by I Walked With a Zombie’s title: This is about Caribbean drugs-and-maybe-magic zombies rather than the living dead. But it goes a little bit farther than that—sometimes described as “West Indian Jane Eyre”, the film turns out to be far more interested in family conflict than jump scares, with a nicely textured result that’s equally psychological horror and foreign xenophobia. The atmosphere of the film remains quite unusual, and it does have a notable dramatic engine underlying the horror component. There are also a few cute surprises in the opening segment: A script by noted SF&F writer Curt Siodmak; a disclaimer about persons “living, dead or possessed”; and an opening scene “set” in my native Ottawa, with snow falling outside the window to set the plot in motion as a Canadian nurse (Frances Dee, looking good) is sent to the Caribbean to take care of an invalid patient. The film has aged well except when it hasn’t—as you can suspect from the production year of the film and the Caribbean/voodoo premise, there’s quite a bit of racism in the way the black characters (some of them eating what looks suspiciously like fried chicken) are portrayed—although, by the same token, they are shown as having some agency and power, even if it’s scary-to-white-people power. Overall, though, even those issues make I Walked With a Zombie interesting in its own right. Director Jacques Tourneur keeps things moving and imbues the production with a quality that was not a given under producer Val Lewton’s supervision. It could have been much, much worse, as a look at most contemporary horror films would show.