OK. The jury has more or less decided that "The Revenger's Tragedy" is not by Cyril Tourneur after all, but by Thomas Middleton. This is on strictly scholarly grounds. Either way, it scarcely matters, as this play is strictly sui generis. It's like nothing else either Tourneur or Middleton ever wrote.

The best way to think of it is as standing in a relation to the classic Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster and Middleton sort of like the way Quentin Tarantino's early films stand in relation to previous Hollywood classics. Whoever wrote this, they were Taking The P*ss. The play starts in next-to-top gear, and accelerates into warp speed fairly quickly. Few other plays of the era (this is roughly contemporaneous with "King Lear", to give you an idea) are so ruthlessly efficient. The basic plot is put in motion by two brothers, Vindice and Hippolito, who are a bit cheesed off because the egregious Duke (of wherever) killed Vindice's wife cause she wouldn't put out. From here proceeds a bizarre and increasingly unlikely series of revenges, climaxing in a frankly chortlesome mass slaying. Vindice is the juiciest role - a bit like Shakespeare's Richard III, he guides the audience through the action, but with far greater economy and far less wrangling of conscience, not that Crookback Dick is noted for his remorse.

By the end, the stage is littered with bodies, and Vindice and Hippolito cheerfully go off to execution, with barely a qualm in sight. This is truly the most cynical and the funniest of all Jacobean tragedies. Whoever wrote it, be it Cyril or Tom, was thinking along the same lines Howard Hawks was on when he (Hawks) turned "Rio Bravo" from a Western into a chamber comedy. It's all thoroughly reprehensible, and great fun. You want depth, try John Webster.

There aren't many four-hundred-year-old plays that I laugh aloud at whilst reading, but this is one of them. Pace the opinion below, it couldn't have less to do with Jonson's careful layering of reality if it tried. It's a brisk, bleak, savage cartoon. Full marks, whoever you were.

PreShakespeare, but a lot of fun to read! I enjoyed it very much--- has to do with a man who is carrying around a murdered girlfriend for almost ten years-- he is planning revenge on the king...

This dark tragi-comedy resonates with the dramatic potential of Hamlet, but and edge particular to Jacobean Drama. A play which is still relevant today (many students related it to "The Godfather"), and brimming with cinematic violence, lust, deception, vengence, and, with all this, communicated through beautiful poetry.

Jacques Tourneur was a uniquely talented director with a string of distinctive films to his credit, including Cat People, Canyon Passage, I Walked With a Zombie and Out of the Past. Tourneur's best films look and sound like no one else's, stylish, subtle and strangely...quiet. At last there is an intelligent, discerning book on the subject of the talented Frenchman. Perhaps a bit more background on the making of the films would have been appreciated, otherwise this is an excellent and eye-opening bit of original film scholarship.

Chris Fujiwara is one of the world's best film critics. (Look for his soon-to-be-published work on Otto Preminger.) "The Cinema of Nightfall" is specifically about the great(and vastly underrated) Jacques Tourneur, but it is much more than that. It is one of the best books ever written about how to see and experience movies. Fujiwara goes inside the process of just how a film creates meaning, using Tourneur's very subtle genius as his base. The chapters on the more famous works("Cat People", "I Walked with a Zombie" and the immortal "Out of the Past") are the best analyses ever written on those titles. However, perhaps the most impressive part of Fujiwara achievement is his coverage of the more obscure Tourneurs: "Stars in My Crown", "Canyon Passage", "Berlin Express", the shorts. (His chapter on "Nightfall" is worth the price of admission -- a whole film theology in miniature.) "Cinema of Nightfall" is a model of film understanding and film love.