Noir: He didn’t even blink when he heard the sirens, although he knew they were coming toward him and toward no one else. (NIGHTFALL by David Goodis)

Aldo Ray displays his infamously narrow acting range as James Vanning, a commercial artist on the run from the police for a crime he didn’t commit and from the guys who actually did the crime. They think that Vanning has the three hundred grand that they liberated from a financial institution. Also on Vanning’s case is insurance investigator Ben Fraser (James Gregory). He’s made something of a career of following Vanning’s every move and watching him from the apartment across the way. At the end of his days he goes home to his wife (Jocelyn Brando) where he tries to make sense of Vanning’s “innocent act.” Little does anyone know that Vanning isn’t kidding around when he says he dropped the money and can’t remember where it is. 

In Goodis’s book, Vanning’s relationship with Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft) is more fleshed out and slightly more nebulous, as Vanning is lead to believe on two occasions that Marie is actually an agent of the nefarious John (Brian Keith), rather than a truly virtuous girl who falls for Vanning almost at first sight. On the night that Vanning and Marie meet, they’re happened upon by John and his partner, Red (Rudy Bond). They end the date by taking Vanning away and working him over. In Tourneur’s film, they take Vanning to some incongruous oil fields and threaten to tear his head off with one of the giant pumps. This is just one of the odd locations of the film. Known more for his other noir work, OUT OF THE PAST, this Jacques Tourneur film stands as one of the most sun-drenched and airy noirs around with its great swaths of Western winter snowfields. 

Adapted by Stirling Silliphant, NIGHTFALL suffers from the miscasting of Ray and Keith (they would have been better off switching roles), the addition of Vanning’s hunting buddy Doc (Frank Albertson), and the expansion of Marie’s background to include her life as a fashion model. Too often this take on David Goodis’s second book feels like a lukewarm television drama rather than a taut film noir. If anything, NIGHTFALL is most notable for being one of the few Goodis books to have a happy ending.