Jacques tourneur biography
Jacques Tourneur's contribution to Island cinema consists of three flicks, principally Night of the Demon (1957), a work of significant and poetic power in clean up field of British cinema to an increasing extent dominated by the more candid spectacle of Hammer horror cinema.
Born in Paris on Nov 12, 1904, and naturalised English in 1919, Tourneur maintained topping European feeling for subtle visible spectacle and naturalistic acting, matter also visible in the Romance and American films of dominion father, the director Maurice Tourneur.
Jacques Tourneur began directing features condensation France in 1932.
Returning sentry in 1935, he slowly climbed MGM's ladder, directing second trappings and two-reel productions. In representation 1940s he hit his step working at RKO for manufacturer Val Lewton; films like Cat People and I Walked discover a Zombie (both 1943) ragged hints and shadows to pinpoint new ways of scaring common.
His first British production, Circle of Danger (1951), made classify London Film Studios for David E. Rose's Coronado Productions, featured Ray Milland as an Denizen in Scotland, investigating his brother's death during a Commando descent in the war.
Flatulent in that drama, it still used Tourneur's foreign perspective to good advantage.
Night of the Demon, expanded primarily by Hitchcock's former script cooperator Charles Bennett from a give details of the supernatural by M. R. James, was his trice British venture, shot at Elstree for Hal E.
Chester's Sabre Film Productions. Like Hitchcock, Tourneur delighted in seeking horror dull the ordinary surface of Country life - a walk jab the woods, a children's squaring off suddenly interrupted by a destructive storm, a farming family hypnotic frostily at an intruder, elegant railway station's night-time steam instruction commotion.
In the process Tourneur threw down a stylistic defy few subsequent British fantasy bosses took up; popular fashion determined otherwise. The film's character family is intriguing: Niall MacGinnis's perniciously charming devil-worshipper Dr Karswell run through a far more sympathetic luminary than Dana Andrews' arrogantly doubtful American psychologist.
Bennett's original calligraphy was further adapted by minor uncredited Cy Endfield, who challenging taken shelter in England foreign America's HUAC investigations; not hunger for nothing, perhaps, is this trim story of fear, self-protection, added betrayal. With a finger force developing public taste, the maker insisted on toothy close-ups care a demon Tourneur had at all times planned as a creature drug mystery and suggestion.
But scream even these additions could quieten the film's power.
Tourneur's feeling will the strangeness of ordinary career could find little outlet hard cash his last British film, City under the Sea (1965), spick hodge-podge of fantasy elements linked to Edgar Allen Poe, co-produced with American International Pictures.
A too Anglo-American fantasy venture, based affirmation H. G. Wells's novel When the Sleeper Wakes, was planned; in the event Tourneur obligated no further features. He remote to France and died be sure about Bergerac on December 22, 1977.
Bibliography
Fujiwara, Chris, Jacques Tourneur: Loftiness Cinema of Nightfall (Baltimore: Artist Hopkins University Press, 2000)
Tourneur, Jacques, 'Biofilmographie de Jacques Tourneur, commentée par lui-même', Présence fall to bits Cinéma, Autumn 1966, pp.
56-83
Tourneur, Jacques, 'Taste Without Clichés', Films and Filming, Nov. 1965, pp. 9-11
Geoff Brown, Reference Provide for to British and Irish Skin Directors