Nightfall (1956, Jacques Tourneur) (Patreon)

74/100

Second viewing, last seen 1999. A movie I love even though there's arguably not that much to it, and despite a plot that pivots on hard-to-swallow idiocy both from the villains (who unaccountably don't make sure that both of their victims are actually dead, then grab the wrong bag) and from our hero (who loses the right bag but has no idea how that happened, as if he'd misplaced the sports section rather than $350K in cash). That stuff bothered me a little more this time, as did the insurance investigator's ultimate irrelevance—removing him from the film would change virtually nothing, and I can only assume that Goodis' novel uses him in a way that didn't readily translate. (Seems like they didn't cut him because doing so would leave the film with only four characters of any note whatsoever; it feels sparsely populated as is, even for noir.) But mood almost always trumps narrative in this genre, and Nightfall belies its title with a series of striking contrasts involving darkness and light, urban and rural, pragmatic and psychotic. Flashbacks usually annoy me, but Tourneur expertly shifts from the expected shadowy corners to Wyoming's bright, flat expanse and back again, as Sterling Silliphant (following Goodis' lead, from what I can gather) gradually fills deliberate gaps in our understanding of what the hell's going on. Aldo Ray's terse hoarseness has rarely been better utilized; Anne Bancroft test-drives the world-weariness she'd deploy against Dustin Hoffman a decade later; Brian Keith and Rudy Bond demonstrate that good cop/bad cop has absolutely nothing on bad guy/cheerfully insane guy. (Bond's perennial grin in this film is downright blood-curdling.) Plus the whole thing's brutally efficient, wrapping up almost before you've gotten your bearings. Serve up this much flavor at these "prices" (i.e. entertainment per minute) and I'll willingly overlook the lousy service (= plot holes).