Nightfall
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 4:00 P.M.
Dir. Jacques Tourneur. 1957, 78 mins. 35mm. With Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft. Ten years after Out of the Past, Tourneur returned to the theme of a man on the run from his past. Here, the protagonist hides out amid the blinking neon, cocktail lounges, and cheap rooming houses of L.A., where he is tracked down by a pair of bickering killers hunting a stash of money lost in the snowy mountains of Wyoming. Adapted from an early novel by David Goodis, Nightfall blends a mood of melancholy and simmering dread with glints of humor and dry-martini style. The result is like dusk, with its blur of uncertainty, caught between hope and loss.