The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 16-22
Nightfall (1957)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
A case of stolen money, a man on the run, a woman who unwittingly gets roped into the criminal intrigue—so far, so conventional. But then you hear the disarming sensitivity in Aldo Ray’s voice even as he delivers Stirling Silliphant’s hard-boiled dialogue (adapted from a novel by David Goodis), and you realize something rather different is going on. Nightfall isn’t the tale of a tough man punching and glowering his way through an uncaring world, but that of a virtuous man trying to maintain his decency in such a world. Nuances abound: Of the two bank robbers after James Vanning (Ray), one is a bit more humane than the other; the insurance investigator (Brian Keith) tailing Vanning believes in his prey’s innocence; Vanning’s love interest, Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), is no femme fatale, but a woman unlucky in love who finds herself attracted to his solidity. All of this builds to a finale in the snowy Wyoming plains that anticipates Fargo in its evocation of an icy moral reckoning, with a final image offering a devastating sense of wider perspective to all this wrestling over mere money. Kenji Fujishima (December 20, 4pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape”)
