The Cinema of Nightfall: The Films of Jacques Tourneur - Page 2

Son of French silent film director Maurice Tourneur, Jacques Tourneur is best remembered for the trio of atmospheric low-budget horror films he made with Producer Val Lewton at RKO, and for the quintessential film noir "Out of the Past". He began in France, then came to Hollywood and made B picture programmers at MGM before joining Lewton at RKO. He was promoted to A pictures at RKO, then went Freelance in the 1950s and made very high quality genre pictures. As Hollywood changed, Tourneur fell out of favor, and ended his motion picture career at American International Pictures doing Vincent Price horror movies. He then worked successfully in Television, most notably on the Ricard Matheson scripted episode "Night Call" on The Twilight Zone. A wonderful visual stylist, Tourneur was in large part responsible for creating what became the RKO style; the Lewton films, "Out of the Past ", and "Night Of the Demon" are models of how to make quality films with limited resources.