Out of the Past
Jacques Tourneur
Initial release: November 25, 1947 (USA)
Alternate
title: Build My Gallows High (UK)
While the 1950s are commonly considered the heyday of film noir, there
is pretty conclusive evidence that the genre's golden age was in the 1940s.
Several of the most famous films noir were produced during or just
after the war, with much of their visual language defined by wartime blackouts
and electrical rationing. If you were to put these films on a list, you would
find such greats as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, and the incredible Robert Mitchum vehicle Out of the Past.
Jacques Tourneur was a multi-talented filmmaker with a penchant for atmospheric pieces; with Cat People he invented the jump scare (though you could make a case for Orson Welles' infamous screaming bird in Citizen Kane) and establishing folk horror as a concrete film genre with 1957's Night of the Demon. While Out of the Past doesn't really reinvent the wheel as far as movies like this go, it's an archetypal noir film in the best way.
Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, née Jeff Markham, a onetime private investigator who ran off with Kathie,
the woman he was supposed to find for his client. Five years later he's alone
again, running a gas station in a little town near Lake Tahoe. After being tracked down by
Whit, the gambling kingpin who had hired him (played with sinister
aplomb by none other than Kirk Douglas in an early role) Jeff confesses to his
new girlfriend Ann the sordid details of his past, a past that he can't seem
to get away from, all the while Whit, Kathie, and Jim (a local who has a thing for Ann)
all seem to have their own private conspiracies going.
Out of the Past is a tour-de-force of noir. It's got it
all: sharp dialogue, moody voiceover, stark lighting, hard-bitten
protagonists, murky pasts and bad decisions, mostly involving the
femme fatale Kathie (played by Jane Greer.) There's even a little jazz,
a rarity in noir despite genre stereotypes. A nearly fetal
Mitchum is the perfect noir hero, his hangdog good looks and
cynical slyness making him almost archetypal. Across him is Kirk Douglas, and perhaps more than Mitchum and Greer is Mitchum and Douglas, their scenes electric and full of menace, hanging over the scene like the clouds of cigarette smoke the cast constantly emits. While the plot kind of gets a
little complicated towards the end, the film never lets go of its uneasy
energy from start to finish. There's even a deaf character, who helps tie the
whole thing together and is some of the best disabled representation I've seen
in a film this old.
Film noir has a long history, but if there's a figure who most embodies the genre in that uncertain post-war era, it's Robert Mitchum, and Out of the Past is his magnum opus.