Hello, my name is Justin the Clueh, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening to the important cinema club.

And today, we're going to get a little dark, because we're getting into the cinema of Jacques Tournard.

That's right. We're talking about the director of Out of the Past, Cat People. I walked with a zombie,

The Leopard Man, many other Hollywood genre classics. And I wanted to talk about Twitter because

I feel like I've always had a hard time getting a handle on him as an artist. Really? I feel

that that kind of reaction to his work is reflected in the way that he's discussed a lot when his movies come up, which is often that his name is pushed to the side to make way for other people like, ah, yes, Val Luton's cat people, or, you know, Robert Mitchum's great performance and out of the past. And if you look up like Jacques Tournard as a filmmaker or anuteur, what you'll find is a lot of like, yeah, and then he did a bunch of other things. And let's move on from that. Well, it is very true that he has been heavily overshadowed by Val Luton. And it's possible we have some listeners who don't know who Val Luton is. He was the

producer of a string of black and white horror films for RKO in the 1940s, which had the

incredible innovation while Universal was doing all of its monster movies, Frankenstein,

Dracula, the Wolfman. RKO and Val Luton said, we don't have monsters. We have the dark. We have suggestion.

We have fear itself that is our main antagonist. And so Cat People is the most famous example

of that. And so for some of Ternour's most famous movies, there's a question of authorship.

To what extent is that signature style Val Luton,

and to what extent is it Jacques Tourner? I mean, you just have to watch the other Tournard

films to see that that style has been prevalent through all of his motion pictures. So it's not

that hard to kind of like pinpoint as he was a collaborative element in the making of those motion pictures.

If he had just done those valutin pictures and then disappeared, that would be one thing

or just made anonymous films.

But when you watch anything that came after, like I walked as a zombie or the leopard man,

they still have that same style, even though that Luton isn't behind him.

And he is tackling all sorts of properties.

But I think that what we will surmise, you know, throughout this is that one of the reasons he doesn't get talked about so much is that he did do so many things and that he would just take whatever job came his way.

And a lot of those were just Westerns or dramas. or there was even a medieval action film starring Burt Lancaster, The Flame in the Arrow. And they just don't get talked about that much or overshadowed by bigger films. Well, I said that I had trouble getting a handle on him as an artist. And I think I have a better handle on him after this week, but it is still a bit tricky.

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