Thank you Jeff! ♥️

Well, that was a hoot! Here’s Heather McAdams and Chris Ligon introducing their extravaganza.

@musicboxtheatre.bsky.social

Tourneur made films to be savored and get lost in, and the gorgeous tinted 35mm print of Alias Jimmy Valentine from the Library of Congress shows Tourneur's art in full flower.

Tourneur's films were complete aesthetic experiences using all of the tools of an increasingly popular art, inclusive of their color tints and their intertitles. Many are lost, and several that do survive today provide, at best, only a frail approximation of the full impact they had when new.

This is a pioneering gangster film, but it's a wispy and lyrical one. Indeed, Jimmy's great criminal specialty is not his trigger finger, but his sensitivity to the world around him.

…the French director who made his mark during a formative period of American silent cinema. While other filmmakers were working out the narrative grammar that we still recognize today, Tourneur was aiming for something more ethereal and delicate--a glorious, unhurried private world.