The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (418 page)

Jacques Tourneur
(1904–77), b. Paris
1931:
Tous Ça Ne Vaut Pas l’Amour
. 1933:
Pour Être Aimé; Toto
. 1934:
Les Filles de la Concierge
. 1939:
They All Come Out; Nick Carter—Master Detective
. 1940:
Phantom Raiders
. 1941:
Doctors Don’t Tell
. 1943:
Cat People; I Walked With a Zombie; The Leopard Man
. 1944:
Days of Glory; Experiment Perilous
. 1946:
Canyon Passage
. 1947:
Out of the Past
. 1948:
Berlin Express
. 1949:
Easy Living
. 1950:
Stars in My Crown; The Flame and the Arrow
. 1951:
Circle of Danger; Anne of the Indies
. 1952:
Way of a Gaucho
. 1953:
Appointment in Honduras
. 1955:
Stranger on Horseback; Wichita
. 1956:
Great Day in the Morning; Nightfall
. 1957:
Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon
. 1958:
The Fearmakers; Timbuktu;
an episode from
Fury River
. 1959:
Frontier Rangers;
an episode from
Mission of Danger; La Battaglia di Maratona/The Giant of Marathon
. 1963:
The Comedy of Terrors
. 1965:
City Under the Sea
.

The son of director Maurice Tourneur, Jacques emigrated to America in 1913 with his father. He functioned as script clerk on many of his father’s films and acted small parts in
Scaramouche
(23, Rex Ingram);
The Fair Co-Ed
(27, Sam Wood);
Love
(27, Edmund Goulding); and
The Trail of ’98
(29, Clarence Brown). His slow apprenticeship was tied to his father’s return to Paris in 1929. Jacques went back too and was assistant and editor to Maurice until 1933. He made a few films of his own in France but then broke away and committed himself to America. He was second-unit director on
The Winning Ticket
(34, Charles Reisner) and on
A Tale of Two Cities
(35, Jack Conway), where he met Val Lewton.

From 1936–39 he directed some twenty shorts, principally for MGM. The delay in breaking into serious American direction is the odder in that Tourneur quickly proved himself an adroit director of action pictures with an exceptional visual sense. He remained basically a B-picture director, assigned to a series of projects and rarely asserting any creative personality, let alone consistency.

His reputation still refers initially to the sense of unrevealed horror within the everyday that he showed in the films made for Val Lewton—
Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie
, and
The Leopard Man
. But the same talent is evident in the British
Night of the Demon
, taken from an M. R. James story. Time and again in these films, it is the imaginative use of light, decor, space, and movement that makes the impact of the movie. There is nothing finer in Lewton’s work than the zoo sequences or the swimming-pool nightmare in
Cat People
, supreme vindications of the menacing nature of shadow, composition, and pace. Short of ideas, Tourneur is a classic instance of cinematic fluency, invaluable as a contrast to such opinionated drabs as Zinnemann, Kramer, or latter-day Stevens.

In addition to his horror pictures,
Experiment Perilous
is a first-class period thriller;
Out of the Past
a classic B picture and a major Robert Mitchum film;
Berlin Express
is a good “train” film;
Stars in My Crown
is a gentle Western about the relationship between Joel McCrea and Dean Stockwell;
The Flame and the Arrow
a cheerful attempt to make Burt Lancaster a Tuscan Robin Hood;
Way of the Gaucho
a very successful opening up of strange territory; and
Great Day in the Morning
another Western with unusual attention to atmosphere. There are duds, including
Circle of Danger
and most of the more recent films, which are lazy TV originals or tongue-in-cheek horror pictures. The director of B pictures always needed a prosperous industry: today, in TV, he has been rationalized into the ground. But from 1942 to 1955, for Lewton or RKO, Tourneur made modest, cheap, quick films that still radiate narrative imagination and visual invention.

I like Tourneur as much as I did in 1975. But something now makes me flinch from propositions that he was a genius with a unique vision. Tourneur, rather, was a functionary blessed with rare plastic … skills? No, skills is not enough. He had talent, grace even—there is so little in his work that comes close to being clumsy or awkward. But is it more? Could—or can—directors handling assignments be more?

Consider
Out of the Past
. That noir is a lasting joy—because of story structure, dialogue, the imagery, the playing. But isn’t it actually nonsensical as an idea, the old genre given one more wicked twist? And isn’t there a profound clash between Tourneur’s grace (which always aspires to intelligence and taste) and the cynical deadendedness of the project? So many of the allegedly great auteurs prompt this question.
Out of the Past
is terrific—and not good enough: it is like a brilliant palace made of matchsticks, by a prisoner on a life sentence.

Maurice Tourneur
(Maurice Tourneur Thomas) (1876–1961), b. Paris
1912:
Rouletabille
. 1913:
Le Dernier Pardon; Soeurette
. 1914:
Mother; The Man of the Hour; The Wishing Ring; The Pit
. 1915:
Alias Jimmy Valentine; The Cub; Trilby; The Ivory Snuff Box; A Butterfly on the Wheel
. 1916:
The Pawn of Fate; The Hand of Peril; The Closed Road; The Rail Rider; The Velvet Paw
. 1917:
A Girl’s Folly; The Whip; The Pride of the Clan; The Poor Little Rich Girl; The Undying Flame; The Law of the Land; Exile; Barbary Sheep; The Rise of Jennie Cushing
. 1918:
Rose of the World; A Doll’s House; The Blue Bird; Prunella; Sporting Life; Woman
. 1919:
Victory; The White Heather; The Broken Butterfly; The Life Line
. 1920:
My Lady’s Garter; Treasure Island; The Great Redeemer; The White Circle; Deep Waters; The Last of the Mohicans
(completed by Clarence Brown after Tourneur was injured). 1921:
The Bait; The Foolish Matrons
(codirected with Brown). 1922:
Lorna Doone
. 1923:
While Paris Sleeps
(filmed in 1920, but not released until 1923);
The Brass Bottle; The Christian; The Isle of Lost Ships; Jealous Husbands
. 1924:
Torment; The White Moth
. 1925:
Never the Twain Shall Meet; Clothes Make the Pirate; Sporting Life
. 1926:
Aloma of the South Seas; Old Loves and New
. 1927:
L’Equipage
. 1929:
The Mysterious Island
(codirected with Benjamin Christensen and Lucien Hubbard);
Das Schiff der Verlorenen Menschen
. 1930:
Accusée, Levez-Vous
. 1931:
Maison de Danses; Partir!
. 1932:
Au Nom de la Loi; Les Gaîtés de l’Escadron
. 1933:
Les Deux Orphelines; Obsession
. 1934:
Le Voleur
. 1935:
Justin de Marseille; Konigsmark
. 1936:
Samson; Avec le Sourire
. 1938:
Le Patriote; Katia
. 1940:
Volpone
. 1941:
Péchés de Jeunesse; Mam’zelle Bonaparte
. 1942:
La Main du Diable
. 1943:
La Val d’Enfer; Cécile Est Morte
. 1947:
Après l’Amour
. 1948:
L’Impasse des Deux Anges
.

Tourneur is one of the barely known pioneers of silent cinema. His reputation for pictorial invention, often touching on the fantastic, tends to be accepted, if only because he is the father of Jacques Tourneur, a proven adept at visual excitement. But this account given by Clarence Brown, Tourneur’s devoted assistant, has more than a hint of artiness: “He was a great believer in dark foregrounds. No matter where he set his camera up, he would always have a foreground. On exteriors, we used to carry branches and twigs around with us. If it was an interior, he always had a piece of the set cutting into the corner of the picture, in halftone, to give him depth. Whenever we saw a painting with an interesting lighting effect we’d copy it.” It should be added that in 1918—a year before
Caligari
—for
The Blue Bird
, Tourneur had used impressionistic painted backdrops. It is doubtful if even the archives could settle the question of his talent, but likely that he was an exponent of the sort of profuse prettiness to be seen in Victorian book illustrations.

He was a painter and an actor with André Antoine before he began directing for Eclair. In 1914, he went to America and eventually set up Maurice Tourneur Productions. An individualist, he quit Hollywood when MGM insisted that he have and pay heed to a producer on
The Mysterious Island
(27, later completed by and credited to Lucien Hubbard, 29). Thus he stands as an example of early, individualist cinema, in the age before Thalberg regularized production.

Back in Paris (with his son as assistant), he directed some of Harry Baur’s films—
Samson, Le Patriote
, and
Volpone
.

Robert Towne
(Robert Schwartz), b. Los Angeles, 1934
1982:
Personal Best
. 1988:
Tequila Sunrise
. 1998:
Without Limits
. 2006:
Ask the Dust
.

Three years in a row, in the 1970s, Towne was nominated for the best screenplay Oscar—for
The Last Detail
(83, Hal Ashby),
Chinatown
(74, Roman Polanski), for which he won, and
Shampoo
(75, Ashby). And those were just the movies he had his name on! Towne’s extraordinary prestige rested on the legend of how many other important movies he had helped silently, or doctored. Of course, people have written, rewritten, polished, and roughed up scripts without credit since the movies began. The practice was far more common—if not automatic—in the 1930s and 1940s. But Towne was the first man who made a reputation out of it (since Ben Hecht). On
Bonnie and Clyde
(67, Arthur Penn), he had had a “Special Consultant” credit, but his vital contribution to
The Godfather
(72, Francis Ford Coppola) was left to trust and rumor.

Towne is one of the picture business’s great talkers and wisest seers—yet, let it be said, he understands the business rather in the way of a hypochondriac who believes he is ahead of his own doctors. He is a fascinating contradiction: in many ways idealistic, sentimental, and very talented; in others, a devout compromiser, a delayer, so insecure that he can sometimes seem devious. The novelist John Fante, who hoped for years that Towne would write and make Fante’s novel
The Brotherhood of the Grape
, once called Towne “as tender as a kitten, and as crafty as a fox.”

Thus, he has two careers, above and below the credit line. It is safe to assume that Towne has been available to be talked to about most of the films of his circle—Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski, at least. This doesn’t mean he has doctored everything; that he wants to own up to every choice; or that he does not cannily leave some doubt. There is also the point that talkative writers do not always know just when or how they’ve had an influence. Sometimes, Towne has been in the air, like the scent of eucalyptus, or fluorine in the water. And, generally, he’s been as sweet and beneficial.

The official Towne worked on
The Last Woman on Earth
(61, Roger Corman) and
The Creature from the Haunted Sea
(61, Corman). He also acted in those films under the name Edward Wain. He helped write
The Tomb of Ligeia
(65, Corman);
Villa Rides
(68, Buzz Kulik); and
Drive, He Said
(72, Jack Nicholson), in which he also acted.

In addition, he did doctoring work on
A Time for Killing
(67, Phil Karlson),
Cisco Pike
(72, B. W. L. Norton), and
The New Centurions
(72, Richard Fleischer).

His three breakthrough scripts were all done for friends, and for two actors, Beatty and Nicholson. They show a deft command of narrative structure and natural dialogue in the service of a warm, untidy humanism and a special love of southern California.
Chinatown
was especially close to his heart, not just as a tribute to private-eye fiction, but as a magnificent portrait of Los Angeles as it came of age and as maybe the last of the great complicated story lines that movies dared. Even in the 1970s, Towne dreamed of carrying his hero, Jake Gittes, into the 1940s and 1950s as L.A.’s water problems turned into the story of gasoline and automobiles. We should add, however, that Polanski toughened up the ending of
Chinatown
. Towne meant for Evelyn Mulwray to get away with her daughter. Polanski guessed that the picture had to end badly for the paranoid mood of the seventies to be fulfilled.

Over the next few years, Towne was a largely uncredited writer:
The Yakuza
(75, Sydney Pollack), where he was credited;
Marathon Man
(76, John Schlesinger);
The Missouri Breaks
(76, Penn);
Orca … Killer Whale
(77, Michael Anderson);
Heaven Can Wait
(78, Beatty and Buck Henry); and
Reds
(81, Beatty).

He had worked years on the script of what became
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
(84, Hugh Hudson), researching Africa and the apes with fanatical care. The picture was finally taken from him and Towne took his credit as P. H. Vazak (the name of his dog). He had gotten himself in the predicament of needing to trade it away because of the way
Personal Best
had exceeded budget and schedule and led to a bitter conflict with producer David Geffen. Towne’s first film was odd and original, and it had a pioneering eye for athletic erotics. But it was softer and more clichéd than anything Towne had written for others.