| Sumario: | As the director of "Cat People", "I Walked with a Zombie", and "Night of the Demon", Jacques Tourneur crafted three horror classics which, decades later, have lost none of their power to frighten audiences. His 1947 film "Out of the Past" is still acknowledged as the quintessential "film noir". Yet Tourneur himself remains under-appreciated and his contribution to cinema history much neglected. Many of his films, however, reveal a fluid artistry absent from the routine studio fare of the era. Working in a variety of genres, from Westerns ("Canyon Passage") and spy films ("Berlin Express") to swashbucklers ("The Flame and the Arrow") and melodramas ("Experiment Perilous"), Tourneur imposed a personal cinematic vision that emphasized mystery and sensuality. In this in-depth exploration of Tourneur's entire career, Chris Fujiwara offers a detailed film-by-film analysis of this influential director's work. Review: "Jacques Tourneur has long been a favorite of horror fans, French critics, and a few sensible American observers like Manny Farber... Fans who have wished to better understand Tourneur have had to cobble together a biography, production histories, and analysis from widely scattered sources -- obscure academic journals like Film and Psychoanalysis, zines like FilmFax and Photon, French-language studies for those who can read them, and one of the several books devoted to Val Lewton. The Edinburgh Film Festival issued an anthology of essays in English devoted entirely to Tourneur, but that book was aimed squarely at academics. It's Chris Fujiwara's book, which straddles the academic and popular, that will likely be the standard reference in English for the foreseeable future...
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