Nightfall (1956)

James Vanning (Aldo Ray) has been on the run for some time now. The police is looking for him as their main suspect in the murder of a friend, while a duo of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who actually killed the man – and nearly murdered Jim as well – believe he has run off with their ill-gotten gains. For reasons best known to himself, our protagonist doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them the story of what actually happened, though in noir, unspoken war trauma is always a good guess.

There’s also an insurance investigator (James Gregory) on his trail. Things begin to come to a head on a night Jim meet-cutes model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), and has an encounter with the robbers, as well as – unbeknownst to him – with the investigator.

For a film that’s generally seen as a noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall does certain things rather differently. Sure, there’s a plot involving mistaken identities, gangsters, and a man on the run, but the femme isn’t fatale, the only on-screen authority figure is actually trustworthy, and our hero’s genuinely innocent – running away with the money like the robbers believe he did never seems to even have crossed his mind.

Instead of the shadows of the titular nightfall, the film’s tensest scenes take place in broadest daylight and comparatively wide open spaces – and it’s not even the desert but rather a lot of snow. All of which makes for a much nicer film than you usual find in the non-genre, the sort of film where love is a real and strengthening thing instead an object of dark obsession and method of manipulation, and where the protagonist is a very decent man whose only flaw is acting a bit stupid. Nihilism, this certainly ain’t.

Curiously enough, giving up on the darkness of the noir worldview doesn’t feel like a cop out for the film at all, but just as natural as the noir’s typical darkness comes to other films of the genre.

As Ray plays him, Jim is closer to Hitchcock’s traditional thriller protagonist, an everyman getting in over his head. Though most Hitchcock protagonists of this style do not project the sense of genuine vulnerability Ray displays here, wonderfully going against what his physique of bullneck and bulk would suggest. This is a 50s man not afraid to show his fears and genuine emotions to the woman he falls for, and consequently, Marie falling for him this quickly feels much less contrived than is typical for this sort of thing.

This compassionate eye for the softer side of the characters – see also the interactions between the insurance investigator and his wife – is not a thing you typically get in any movie seen as a noir, but for Nightfall, the feeling of watching basically decent, large-as-life people involved in a thriller plot seems central.

This being a Tourneur film, that thriller plot is realized with great care, economy and style, full of genuine tension. Nearly every scene is filled with the kind of detail that’s either telling about the characters or helps create the texture of the film’s world as an actual place.

In a way, all of this is very low key, but it’s also perfectly of a piece, and utterly convincing.