Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Claudio Carvalho The artist James "Jim" Vanning (Aldo Ray) meets the model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft) in a bar and they have dinner together. When they leave the restaurant, Marie gives her address but the gangsters John (Brian Keith) and Red (Rudy Bond) abduct Jim and Marie goes home. They want information about a wallet with US$ 350,000 and Jim tells that he does not know where it is. They torture Jim, but he escapes and drives to Marie's apartment. He tells that she is in danger and he explains that he was camping in the snow in Moose with his friend Dr. Edward Gurston (Frank Albertson) when they see a car driving off the road. They go to the spot to help the victims but they are subdued by John and Red that kills the doctor and shots him. The criminals believe they are both dead and Red mistakenly takes the doctor's wallet leaving the money behind. When Jim awakes, he flees with the wallet with money but looses it in the snow. Now the criminals are hunting him down while he is also wanted by the police. Meanwhile the insurance investigator Ben Fraser (James Gregory) is also on the track of Jim and curious with his behavior without spending the stolen money and having a simple life. Will Jim prove his innocence?"Nightfall" is a film-noir with a story of coincidences and bad luck. It is an entertaining film with a good villain despite the flaws. The screenplay is intriguing and the viewer only knows the truth after the initial scenes. How could Ben, Jim and Maries go after the killers without a weapon? My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Maleta Fatídica" ("The Fateful Wallet")

Harlan Ames As a longtime fan of Out of the Past I was disappointed when I finally saw Tourneur's "other" noir film. Despite excellent cinematography and several good scenes, the movie is sunk by a poor leading man and a hopelessly flawed story. For the latter you can't blame Stirling Silliphant. His script is unusually faithful to the source novel, and therein lies the problem.Noir novelist David Goodis wrote a handful of bleak, pulpy novels published mostly during the 1950s. "Dark Passage" and "Shoot the Piano Player" are two other Goodis movie adaptations. Goodis' novels are tough, fatalistic, and violent with interesting premises and oddball characters, especially the bad guys. His problems, which worsened over time, were a reliance on outrageous coincidence and a tendency to have characters suddenly act in bizarre ways to make the story work out. These flaws lay at the heart of Nightfall's problems.Ordinary guy Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) and his doctor friend (Frank Albertson) are out hunting when they witness an auto crash. They run to help only to discover two robbers fleeing a bank job. The crooks let the doctor patch them up, then kill him. But instead of shooting Vanning too, they concoct the preposterous notion of handing him a loaded rifle and ordering him to kill himself to set up an apparent murder-suicide. Naturally this gives Vanning a fighting chance. Unfortunately it doesn't pan out. Vanning is shot anyway. As the robbers escape in his car they pull the hoariest stunt in the book: they pick up the doctor's bag instead of the bag containing the loot. Vanning recovers (not dead, just stunned) and flees with the money. But somewhere in his flight he loses the bag. The crooks return to find Vanning and the money gone. The chase is on.The premise is appealing: the crooks hound Vanning to tell them where the money is but he really doesn't know. However the episodic narrative is strung together by coincidences and lapses of logic, beginning with the woman Vanning picks up in a bar (Anne Bancroft), who throws in with him for no discernible reason other than to provide someone for the crooks to menace. The crooks themselves (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) have interesting conflicting personalities, but their disagreements always seem to arise just in time to save Vanning's neck. An interesting subplot involves an insurance investigator (James Gregory) who has been secretly shadowing Vanning. We learn more about his character than that of anyone else in the cast, but he ends up having little to do with the story's outcome.The final strike against Nightfall is delivered by Aldo Ray. As written Jim Vanning is basically an ordinary guy in way over his head, so scared that he jumps when a newsie suddenly turns on the lights of his newsstand. Vanning tells us he's frightened and weary. Unfortunately Aldo Ray is beefy and tough-looking. His raspy voice, which seems to get even more gravelly in flashbacks, combines with his features to give the impression he could tie the robbers into pretzels without breaking a sweat. Alas, appearance is all in movies, and Ray lacks the acting chops to make us believe this bruiser is an underdog.In conclusion I would recommend Nightfall as a technical exercise--it sure looks good--but there isn't enough substance to make a satisfying movie.

Patryk Czekaj The intensity of the action, superb direction, astonishing juxtaposition of the city sequences and scenes in the tranquil, snow-filled countryside, and - probably most of all - the many hardboiled dialogues present Nightfall as a truly expressive film noir. Through a clever use of retrospectives the film introduces the audience to James Vanning (Aldo Ray), whose life story is as tragic as it is suspenseful. James wanders around town anxiously, looking as though he's waiting for someone the whole time. After his meeting with a lovely lady named Marie (Anne Bancroft) turns into a gritty kidnapping intrigue, all the pieces of the puzzle soon start to fit right in. A pair of thugs is after him, because they think that he hid the money (350,000 dollars to be exact), which they stole during a bank raid. In order to get the information out of him they try torturing him, but James ultimately manages to escape. As he returns to meet the lady, who supposedly gave him away to the criminals, brief retrospections appear on the screen, and entangle us in the whole obscure and dramatic affair. When James and his friend Dr. Gurston (Frank Albertson) were in the middle of a hunting trip they encountered a car crash and quickly realize that they the guys, whom they wanted to help, are nothing but a couple of violent robbers. They kill Dr. for their great amusement, but leave James only unconscious. When he wakes up, he realizes that what they also left behind was a bag with the cash. Soon a thrilling and fast-paced game of cat-and- mouse begins, as both the thugs and a private investigator Fraser (James Gregory) are on his trail. With the help of the previously met lady, James decides to stop the killers and retrieve the money-filled bag, which he left somewhere in the snowy country...Nightfall is an enormously moody, sombre, and hard-hitting crime drama, which achieves high level of aesthetics through the sudden yet suitable changes of scenery, overcoming some of its screenplay-related faults in the process. The shootout in the secluded, wild place is a great advantage of the film, giving it a totally different perspective than other films in the genre have. It's a low-budget, extremely economical yet successful adaptation of a 1947 novel of the same name.

viaggio1 Someday, this taut little noir will be acknowledged as the blueprint --- unconscious or not --- for Alfred Hitchcock's and Ernie Lehman's "North by Northwest." NxNW, released 2 years after Nightfall, features a number of strange similarities to Nightfall, too many to be considered coincidental.For starters --- 1.) Both films have protagonists who are "kidnapped" by hoods, and it appears that there are cases of mistaken identity or misunderstood information in both situations.2.) Both protagonists fight off the hoods and escape in a car.3.) Both protagonists appear to have been set up at some point by a beautiful femme fatale.4.) Both protagonists return to the femme fatale to demand an explanation.All right, perhaps one could argue that these 4 similarities are merely coincidental, or "standard thriller fodder." But wait -- there's more ! Both films also feature: 5.) An older, paternal "watchdog" or "shadow" who is aware of the problems of the hero, watches from afar, and yet eventually becomes involved in the chase process.6.) A shaving scene in a public washroom --- played for tension and then comic effect in NxNW, but as an opportunity for the older "shadow" to chat with the hero in Nightfall.7.) A scene in which the hero buys a ticket (bus in Nightfall, train in NxNW) in order to get to the bottom of the mystery.In both scenes, the whereabouts or destination of the hero is revealed to the pertinent authorities who are present at the stations. Also in both scenes --- we see the hero mostly head-on, to the left of the scene, while we see the ticket clerk mostly from the back, to the right part of the scene.8.) Romance and smooching between the hero and the femme fatale during a cross-country trip --- by train in NxNW, and by bus in Nightfall.9.) Chicago plays a major role in both movies.....and perhaps most revealing of all......10.) A very public scene in which both the hero and the purported femme fatale are placed in danger with the bad guys. Tension and comedy both are played out in each scene. There is even a "voice-over" in each scene --- the voice of the auctioneer in NxNW, and the voice of the fashion show emcee in Nightfall. IMDb poster hisgrandmogulhighness has uncovered these other similarities, some present in the original book Nightfall, by David Goodis, and some present in the movie Nightfall as well --- 11.) Hero in Nightfall is named Vanning; villain in NxNW is named VanDamm.12.) Both men, Vanning and Thornhill, through widely different circumstances, are wanted for murder . . . both, indirectly, cause the death of the victims . . . both, for whatever reason, leave the murder weapon at the scene of the crime, and, most conveniently for law enforcement, leave their fingerprints all over the murder weapon . . .13.) (In the book Nightfall and in the movie NxNW): Both men, Vanning & Thornhill, have a liquid forced down their respective throats in the houses the thugs have taken them.14.) (In the book Nightfall and in the movie NxNW): Both Vanning and Thornhill are in hotel rooms they're not registered for . . .While leaving the hotels, both are followed out by thugs, or a thug . . .Both are in taxicabs looking at the back of the head of the taxi driver . .15.) In the book "Nightfall," James Vanning is already using an alias, "Rayburn." In NxNW Thornhill takes on the trappings of the non-existent "Kaplan." 16.) . . . trout shows up in both works . . .Once you've watched both movies, these numerous plot similarities will become evident. The sheer number of plot similarities indicates that it is likely that Sir Alfred and / or Ernie Lehman used Nightfall as a skeleton, onto which they fashioned their masterpiece, NxNW. The fact that Nightfall has been out of the public eye for 40 years or so may explain why no one has yet caught up with one of the main sources of NxNW.Enjoy !(AJD)