A stark chase film beginning in dark city streets and climaxing in the snowbound American countryside, Nightfall is considered by many critics the best film of Jacques Tourneur. At a recent screening in Paris, one French critic observed that Nightfall presents a “dramatic itinerary which has inspired Tourneur, from I Walked With a Zombie to The Fearmakers, his best films. An ordinary individual, a middle-American industrial designer, is wrenched from his surroundings and habits by a chance circumstance, and thrown into an adventure for which he has no predisposition, but during which he discovers a subterranean world or parallel universe which he never even knew existed. But he has no aptitude for playing the hero: with his assumed name, his smile which hides his terror, and especially his enormous lassitude, James Vanning (Aldo Ray) wants only to be forgotten, and to find again the peace and quiet of his former life. In his very free adaptation of Goodis' urban thriller, suffocating as a New York summer, screenwriter Sterling Silliphant resituates it at the opposite end of the continent, in landscape settings of rare poetry. Stripping Goodis' writing of its pathos and ‘noir' rhetoric, Tourneur infuses it with his own sad nonchalance and observes his characters with a sympathy which makes him seem to forget, at times, the plot of his thriller. As he follows them through the city night into the cold clarity of the mountains, he privileges those empty moments, the inbetween hours, as in the long fixed shot of the conversation between two hunters, the duration of which fills us with an indefinable anxiety.”