The mystery of Tourneur’s films comes not only from the complex, clouded plots that his protagonists seek to unravel but also from the unexpressed motives and unresolved interior conflicts of the protagonists themselves. Betsy, the nurse-heroine of I Walked with a Zombie, may unconsciously want her patient to die.
They say they built the train tracks over the Alps between Vienna and Venice before there was a train that could make the trip. They built it anyway. They knew one day the train would come. Any arbitrary turning along the way, and I would be elsewhere, I would be different.