Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.3 Jacques Tourneur
Born in Paris in 1904, Jacques Tourneur was aged only ten when he moved to the
United States with his father, Maurice Tourneur. While both came back to France to
produce the film The Mysterious Island (1925), Jacques returned to the States having taken
American citizenship in 1919. He decided to sign a contract with MGM with whom he
stayed until 1941. Acclaimed for his several low-budget horror films, including Cat
People, I Walked with a Zombie (both from 1942) and The Leopard Man (1943) – analysed
in Part II, p. 129 - Tourneur soon got promoted to the A-list of directors at RKO. This is
when his career in noir got started with three major productions: Out of the Past (1947),
Berlin Express (1948), and Nightfall (1957). These three noir films form the core of my
analysis in this chapter, with a particular emphasis on Out of the Past which, in my view,
for its many merits represents one of the key works of film noir.
Yet, it was still in 1944 that Tourneur directed his first RKO noir film called
Experiment Perilous. Based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, this production is
reminiscent of Gaslight. As I have described above, these female-centred Gothic
melodramas were a major part of Hollywood studio production schedules during the
forties. They would normally be box-office successes, not only because they were assigned
to highly reputed directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Orson Welles and
Jacques Tourneur, but because they also cast the leading female stars of the day (Ingrid
Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Fontaine, and Olivia de Havilland).
Experiment Perilous starred George Brent (the killer from The Spiral Staircase)
and Hedy Lamarr. As Anthony Barker has pointed out, some of these “actresses were put
under exclusive personal contracts, like Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine (...) and Jennifer
Jones”. Barker also writes about David Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca arguing
that:
Selznick championed the feminised film, the film that was artfully arranged around
“female brightness,” in recognition of the fact that his audiences were
predominantly female. (...) The vulnerable and embattled female was the
protagonist of choice for the 1940s, as represented in Scarlett O’Hara, Mrs
Miniver, Mildred Pierce and numberless others. (Barker 2004:51)
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