Film review: Nightfall (1956)

 [Except where indicated, this review is by Jami, because Simon is supposed to be writing a book.]

This is a strange movie. If you consider appearances only, it's very attractive: the city and (later) mountainscapes are beautiful to look at.  But the dialog is forced and the lead actor's delivery is just odd: old Twilight Zone shows had better actors.  What is extra odd is that, aside from the main character, the rest of the actors are really famous. It just goes to show that famous faces don't ensure a high quality product. [I have to object!  Yes, the script is stilted in places, but in the time honored people-don't-actually-talk-like-that Noir way.  And the film is directed by the great Jacques Tourneur, of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and most illustriously, Out of the Past fame.  In fact, he made this movie right before he directed the all-time-classic Night of the Demon.  But he had to go to England to make that, so maybe this was the end of the road for him in Hollywood.]

The movie starts as all these sorts of movies do, in a gritty, down and out, part of Los Angeles late at night. The only people milling around are the lonely hearts looking for alcohol and a warm bed with a soft pillow.  And so we meet our two protagonists: Jim and Marie [ANNE BANCROFT!].  (Good Biblical names, that's how you know they are the protagonists.) Marie starts the conversation by asking Jim for $5.  She claims she had been stood up by a "girlfriend" and, bizarrely, didn't bring one thin penny with her.  Yet, she has been throwing back the martinis for hours. Jim makes some painfully awkward small talk (yikes) and, surprisingly, this works and she is instantly attracted to him.  He gives her a $5 bill and she pays for her tab, which only comes to 70 cents!  So why did she ask for $5 instead of $1, or simply 70 cents?  He doesn't mind.  Throwing more good money after bad, he offers to buy her dinner, which involves smoking a lot of cigarettes. He reveals he's an artist (for advertising, not the flaky kind--all protagonists in 1950s movies work in advertizing or for the U.N.--it's a fact) and she tells him she's a model. They were called "mannequins" then and they modeled clothing for women who would then ask the designer to craft a version of that dress or swimsuit or whatever for themselves.  This really did happen and people I know were mannequins for a living, too, right up to a few months before I was born.

Wait, why is the evil Senator from The Manchurian Candidate in this movie?  Because he's a too-good-to-be-true agent for an insurance company named Ben and he'd rather find the $350,000 stolen from a bank in Seattle by two goons than see his company take the financial hit. (Are we REALLY supposed to care about an insurance company "losing"money that they will simply shift onto their customers by raising their policy rates??)  Since Wyoming police decided that Jim is wanted for the robbery (wait--what?  when did that happen? hold your horses...) Ben has been watching Jim for months but still "can't figure him out."

Finally, after Jim heads to his apartment and goes to sleep (about 2 am) Ben heads home and pours out all his troubles to his ridiculously tolerant wife.  Clearly she knows everything (is that even legal?) and they've had a version of this conversation dozens of times before. She also has no problem with him coming home at 2 am, sleeping for 90 minutes and then getting up again to mull over the puzzles. If Jim stole $350,000, why does he live in a shitty apartment, work his ass off for an advertising company?  Why does he eat cheap diner meals and wear off the rack suits?  So many puzzles...

Given that everyone talks about how hot is is, they sure are heavily dressed all the time, like when they wear full pajamas and thick robes.

Next day: [no it wasn't!  It's very important that this happens right as Jim and Marie walk out of the restaurant.  Marie is revealed to have been helping the goons, which is very much a turn-off for Jim.  She scuttles off before...] Things take a dark turn as Jim is abducted off the street (where is Ben when this is happening?) by two goons, John (the brains [played by the nice dad in the original Parent Trap]) and Red (the brawn with the itchy trigger finger) who drag Jim out to an oil rig (they still had those in the city when we lived in LA) [I would say it's an oil derrick] and made clear how easy it would be to remove one of Jim's legs below the knee by simply laying it down under the nodding donkey part of the rig.  Jim gets the point, but he insists that he doesn't know where "it" is.  But what is "it"?  We don't know but it's likely that $350,000 Ben talked about endlessly with his wife the night before.

Finally we get some back story:  Some time ago in relatively recent history, Jim and "Doc" (appropriately nicknamed because he's a doctor) are camping outside Moose, Wyoming (a real place), having the time of their lives--eating butter breaded fried fish, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze  beside a campfire, when out of nowhere a car comes racing along and smashes into a fence just up the road near the turnoff to their campsite.  Doc and Jim race to see what happened and meet John and Red for the first time--we know they are evil, but Jim and Doc don't realize it yet and if they had, perhaps Doc would have tied that tourniquet on John's arm a lot more tightly. John and Red inform them that, after they kill both, they are going to steal their car.  Why all the gum flapping?  Why not just get the job done?  Well, there is a reason these two hapless idiots never get the big score.

Doc and Jim are trying to buy time, but this is not going to end well. Red's idea is this: Red will shoot Doc with Jim's rifle and then force Jim to turn the gun onto himself--an obvious murder/suicide sort of arrangement. Fortunately, just seconds before John and Jim showed up, they had been sort of talking about in a very indirect way that John loved Doc's much younger wife [actually she came on to him and he honorably resisted].  So, unbeknownst to our killers, a ready-made motive for this otherwise ridiculous event exists.  

With Doc quickly out of the way, it's Jim's turn.  He's given the rifle and told to kill himself.  Didn't anyone notice that the rifle is too damned long to be used to blow one's brains out?  Doesn't everyone know that if you are going to blow your brains out while "cleaning your rifle" you have to take your shoes off and fire the thing with your toes?  This is basic stuff American kids are taught in grade school. Yet here we are, Jim is wearing heavy early winter clothing and his hunting boots and trying to decide how not to shoot himself in the head when it's actually physically impossible...stupid.

Well, Jim flat out refuses.  Wise choice--what can they do, shoot him with a handgun? Yeah, that's precisely what Red does.  Now our two goons really have a mess on their hands because this is no "murder/suicide".  So John and Red race off, driving recklessly and swerving and sliding all over the road (just like they were when they caused the car crash that created this whole mess--why were they doing that since the Seattle robbery was at least 900 miles behind them?) as they make their getaway.  BUT....moron that Red is, he grabbed the Doc's medical bag rather than their bag of money (which conveniently looks exactly the same).  Can Jim really be dead?  Of course not--Red is so stupid he didn't even manage to shoot Jim when Jim was firing the rifle at him, but instead Red hit a rock that ricocheted into Jim's head and knocked him senseless.  But can't Red tell that Jim is alive and breathing with no bullet holes in him? By this point it's clear that Red is too stupid to be allowed to live.

Ok, now fast forward to back to the oil rig.  AGAIN Jim manages to get away from these two bozos--and John's arm isn't even in a sling! Yes, they got a few punches in but they didn't sheer off one of his feet. Jim knows he can't go back to his place (but does he? [actually, that's not it - he's mad at Marie, but also curious about her connection to the goons]) so he goes to Marie's place at 4 am.  She's not too happy to see him--she has a big modeling gig tomorrow.  At first he accuses her of working for the goons but she says she knows they are the police and that he's a robber.  Amazingly quickly, all misunderstandings are resolved.  He informs her that she can't stay there because (bozo that he is), the two goons took the piece of paper with her address written on it from his pocket while they were rolling around, fighting near the oil rig. So he tells her to pack up all her things as from now on, she lives on the run.  And she agrees!!  [She does say that her therapist told her she has terrible taste in men.]

Then the two head back to his place--but wait, I thought he couldn't go to his place!?! [See previous note.  The reason the goons had to use Marie to lure him was because they didn't know where he lived.]  So the goons know her address but not his? How did they find him in LA when they kidnapped him off the street and took him to an oil rig? It makes no sense!  More excruciatingly awkward small talk and then both fall  into a peaceful sleep, him on the floor and her on the couch/bed--very proper.  

Would you go to sleep if two goons had found you and just threatened to slice off your foot using an oil rig?  Wouldn't you get moving asap?  No, you wouldn't, because  Marie insists on doing her modeling gig while Jim buys "supplies" and bus tickets for two for Moose, WY.--back to the scene of the crime.  Well, the second crime--not the bank robbery and not the oil rig which is the first crime we learned about in the movie. [Also, as Jim explains when Marie asks why they don't go on the run immediately, he's been waiting all this time for the roads in Wyoming to be cleared of snow, which apparently happens on a very specific date, which he has circled on his calendar, and which is TOMORROW.]

But last night our two goons DID go to Marie's apartment and found her modeling portfolio and so knew what company she worked for--and from there, they knew exactly where she'd be modeling the next day!  (Really?  That seems incredibly unlikely...)  But wait--how did they get to her apartment from the oil rig--Jim stole their car from after knocking them out!  (Why didn't he stick THEIR legs into the oil rig?  Things would have been must simpler if he had.) Then, seconds from the end of her modeling gig, the goons show up to smirk at Marie while she models an evening gown!  (Wait--if they didn't know who she was or where she lived or where she worked until AFTER Jim met her, how did they hire her to ensnare Jim???)  She sees the goons and makes a very slow beeline (her dress is ridiculously tight down to her ankles and she's wearing stilleto heels) for Jim who is also there, waiting to take her to the bus station.  

And they make it to the station and onto the bus without any incident at all.  And lo and behold, here is Ben showing up at a rest stop bathroom just to give Jim a jolt of nerves.  Ben is a little too friendly and a little too knowing and it doesn't take Jim long to realize something is up [particularly as they'd already met - before Jim went into the restaurant/bar where he met Marie he was standing out on the street and Ben went up and asked for a light.  Presumably he wanted to look his quarry in the face and read his character]. But what?

Now we see our heroes waking up on the bus in Wyoming, just 10 minutes from Moose, fully refreshed and ready to hunt for a bag of money. (Having taken a Greyhound from Phoenix to Yellowstone I can attest that that is at least a 3 day ride with a LOT of stops at all hours. It'd be even longer and more miserable going north from LA and then over through Nevada or, worse, Idaho. Nobody wakes up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.)  

And here is Ben again!  But this time, he lays his cards on the table. And so does Jim!  And now they are best friends with common enemies, the two goons!  So our duo becomes a trio and all three head out to the campsite in search of the damned bag of money.

But wait--John and Red got their first!  HOW??  And if they were going to do that, why didn't they just do that right from the start save everyone--including themselves--a lot of grief?

And the movie ends as the story began, with Red and John with guns with a plan to kill our hapless trio.  But, as always happens with goons, after having been like conjoined twins for over a year, they really, really hate each other and John now has the itchy trigger finger and desperately wants to be free of Red.  But then Red kills John! I actually did not see that coming...But Jim has plans for Red and again we have another fistfight only this time instead of an oil rig waiting to cut off limbs we have a very very slow snowplow headed right for the cabin in which Ben and Marie lay tied up, very quietly and calmly waiting for someone to untie them.

SOMEONE is certainly going to die by snowplow.  But who?  And when?  And where is the money????

And what is Ben's wife doing all this time?  [Hey, he's got enough money for a new LIFE, let alone wife.  As soon as he bumps off Jim and Marie...]