Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Tarantula Baths in Shifting Sands

Timbuktu (1959)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix

Chronologically, Timbuktu comes closer to the end of Tourneur's career than any of his other directorial efforts I've seen, but only two years after Nightfall and Night of the Demon, both wonderful. So I won't make excuses, or argue some grand case about artistic decline. Timbuktu is convoluted, with a plot that involves a kidnapped Muslim cleric, independence from French Sudan, and Victor Mature as an expat gun runner in love with Yvonne De Carlo, wife of a French officer.

The "evil" emir who agitates for the future Republic of Mali is at odds with his cleric, a prop for colonial propaganda. The emir is played by John Dehner, every inch an American, and he brings out the boxes of spiders to torture his enemies with the zeal of countless Hollywood villains before him. Mature loses his shirt - he was famous for it - and navigates a series of convincingly exotic sets, shadowy doorways, and windblown caravans, without a doubt the highlights of the picture.

Tourneur takes the time to make the Emir's guards sympathetic and elevates De Carlo's character by putting her in the middle of a half-sincere love triangle staged to convince the enemy that Mature can be trusted. In one confrontation, she tells her husband frankly that she won't be able to resist Mature's charms forever; her husband, realizing he's lost her already, pushes her into her tightrope act of statesmanship with a kind of noble cruelty that is more emotional than the script deserves.

The image that stayed in my mind was one of a train of men through the sand. Tourneur employs a kind of floating reflector to illuminate the faces of the men on horseback, and it has the effect of a drifting will-o-the-wisp or guiding djinn. Or Tinker Bell! Deserts are under-utilized in movies today. There are things you can do with a field of stars and a campfire in the dark far creepier than faces in the sand.