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The Upturned Glass 1947
Though it starts like a weepie, with brilliant but lonely piano-playing brain surgeon James Mason falling for the mother of a little girl he alone has been able to save, this takes a turn into narrative rug-pulling and noir fatalism very like that of Fritz Lang. Mason’s real-life wife Pamela Kellino co-stars and co-writes. This was Mason’s last British film before he went to the United States.
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The Bitter Stems 1956
Nocturnal, sweaty, doomy and torqued with flashbacks, The Bitter Stems is Argentinian arch-noir. It’s gorgeously shot and includes a jaded reporter, a raft of nightclubs and their b-girls and even a surrealist dream sequence. Though it won awards on release in 1957, this was a lost film until 2014.
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Night Tide 1961
Though it’s overstretched and the narrative falls to bits before the end, Night Tide is a fantastically atmospheric mood piece filmed in Venice Beach. It recalls Lewton in its suspicion of foreign women and Lovecraft in its fear of sealife. Dennis Hopper’s sailor could be out of Kenneth Anger, and that other near-contemporary indie Carnival of Souls is a twin film.
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Night of the Demon 1957
Well, I love the Demon. There are those who suggest that it was added in post-production, cheapening Tourneur’s intended ambiguity of whether Karswell’s curse was just in the mind of his victims or authentically supernatural. This makes no sense to me, as the whole thrust of the narrative is the sceptical Holden slowly coming round to what everyone else around him knows to be true. If you leave the question open, you’re left with a story in which the entirety of the cast are credulous fools.
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