I can’t get enough film noir
and when I read about the film “Out of the past” I left my desk went to the
family room and watched it. How could I not? Film historians consider Out of
the Past a superb example of film noir due to its complex, fatalistic
storyline, dark cinematography, and classic femme fatale. The film's
cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca also shot Tourneur's Cat People. In 1991, Out
of the Past was added to the United States National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant."
But with all that taken into mind,
I felt the film hasn’t held up with time. The actors seem to be taken with
their lines they run over each other’s lines in delivering them, this holds
especially true for the actor Paul Valentine. I know very little about acting,
but I do know what’s annoying to watch on film and someone should have told this guy
to slow it down, he’ll get his turn. Also the dialogue between Valentine and Robert
Mitchum is much to snappy. No one, in film or real-life thinks and talks that
fast.
As for the storyline, to call it complex is
to be kind. You really, really, have to pay attention in this one. Kirk Douglas is brilliant in this
film.
Here’s a review of the film by Roger
Ebert from July 18, 2004
Most crime movies begin in the
present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero
is doomed before the story begins -- by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed
character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is
never good, just kidding himself, living in ignorance of his dark side until
events demonstrate it to him.
"Out of the Past"
(1947) is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries
to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a town, with a
new job and a new girl. The movie stars Robert Mitchum, whose weary eyes and
laconic voice, whose very presence as a violent man wrapped in indifference,
made him an archetypal noir actor. The story opens before we've even seen him,
as trouble comes to town looking for him. A man from his past has seen him
pumping gas, and now his old life reaches out and pulls him back.
Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, whose
name was Jeff Markham when he was working as a private eye out of New York. In
those days he was hired by a gangster named Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas,
electrifying in an early role) to track down a woman named Kathie Moffat (Jane
Greer, irresistibly mixing sexiness and treachery). Kathie shot Sterling four
times, hitting him once, and supposedly left with $40,000 of his money.
Sterling wants Jeff to bring her back. It's not, he says, that he wants
revenge: "I just want her back. When you see her, you'll understand
better."
That whole story, and a lot more,
is told in a flashback. When we meet Jeff at the beginning of the film, it's in
an idyllic setting by a lake in the Sierras, where he has his arm around the
woman he loves, Ann (Virginia Huston). He bends over to kiss her when they're
interrupted by Jimmy (Dickie Moore), the deaf and mute kid who works for him at
the station. Jimmy uses sign language to say a stranger is at the station,
asking for him. This man is Sterling's hired gun, named Joe Stephanos (Paul
Valentine), and he tells Jeff that Sterling wants to see him in his lodge on
Lake Tahoe.
Jeff takes Ann along on the
all-night drive to Tahoe, using the trip to tell her his story -- his real
name, his real past, how he tracked Kathie Moffat to Mexico and fell in love
with her. ("And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit
didn't care about that 40 grand.") He tells Ann more, too: How he lied to
Sterling about finding Kathie, how he and Kathie slipped away to San Francisco
and thought they could live free of the past, how they were spotted by Fisher
(Steve Brodie), Jeff's former partner. Fisher followed them to a remote cabin,
where Kathie shot him dead, leaving Jeff behind with the body and a bank book
revealing she indeed had stolen the $40,000.
The story takes Jeff all night to
tell, and lasts 40 minutes into the film. Then we're back in the present again,
at the gates of Sterling's lodge. Ann drives away and Jeff walks up the drive
to square with his past. In the lodge, not really to his surprise, he finds
that Kathie is once again with Sterling. This Sterling is a piece of work. Not
only has he taken Kathie back after she shot him, he wants to hire Jeff again
after he betrayed him. This time he needs him to deal with Leonard Eels, an
accountant in San Francisco who keeps Sterling's books, and is blackmailing him
with threats involving the IRS.
The meeting between Mitchum and
Douglas opens on a note of humor so quiet, it may pass unnoticed.
"Cigarette?" offers Douglas. "Smoking," said Mitchum,
holding up his hand with a cigarette in it. Something about that moment has
always struck me as odd, as somehow outside the movie, and I asked Mitchum
about it after a screening of "Out of the Past" at the Virginia Film
Festival.
"Did you guys have any idea
of doing a running gag involving cigarette smoking?" I asked him.
"No, no."
"Because there's more
cigarette smoking in this movie than in any other movie I've ever seen."
"We never thought about it.
We just smoked. And I'm not impressed by that because I don't, honest to God,
know that I've ever actually seen the film."
"You've never seen it?"
"I'm sure I have, but it's
been so long that I don't know."
That was Mitchum for you, a
superb actor who affected a weary indifference to his work.
There is a lot of smoking in
"Out of the Past." There is a lot of smoking in all noirs, even the
modern ones, because it goes with the territory. Good health, for noir
characters, starts with not getting killed. But few movies use smoking as well
as this one; in their scenes together, it would be fair to say that Mitchum and
Douglas smoke at each other, in a sublimated form of fencing. The director is
Jacques Tourneur, a master of dark drama at RKO, also famous for "Cat
People" (1942) and "I Walked with a Zombie" (1943). He is
working here for the third time with the cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, a
master of shadow but also of light, and Musuraca throws light into the empty
space between the two actors, so that when they exhale, the smoke is visible as
bright white clouds.
Mitchum and Douglas think the
story involves a contest of wills between them, when in fact, they're both the
instruments of corrupt women. Kathie betrays both men more than once, and there
is also Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming), the sultry "secretary" of Eels
the accountant. What's fascinating is the way Jeff, the Mitchum character, goes
ahead, despite knowing what's being done to him. How he gets involved once
again with Sterling and Kathie, despite all their history together, and how he
agrees when Meta suggests a meeting with Eels, even though he knows and even
says "I think I'm in a frame," and points out that he's been given a
drink so that his prints will be on the glass.
The scenes in San Francisco, involving
the murder of Eels, the whereabouts of the tax records and the double-dealing
of Meta Carson, are so labyrinthine, it's remarkable even the characters can
figure out who is being double-crossed, and why. The details don't matter. What
matters is the way that Jeff, a street-wise tough guy, gets involved in the
face of all common sense, senses a trap, thinks he can walk through it, and is still
fascinated by Kathie Moffat.
He first reveals his obsession in
Mexico, when Kathie claims she didn't take the 40 grand.
"But I didn't take anything.
I didn't, Jeff. Don't you believe me?"
"Baby, I don't care."
And later, although he tells her,
"You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another,"
he is attracted to her, lured as men sometimes are to what they know is wrong
and dangerous.
Film noir is known for its
wise-guy dialogue, but the screenplay for "Out of the Past" reads
like an anthology of one-liners. It was based on the 1946 novelBuild My Gallows
Highby "Geoffrey Homes," a pseudonym for the blacklisted Daniel
Mainwaring, and the screenplay credit goes to Mainwaring, reportedly with extra
dialogue by James M. Cain.
But the critic Jeff Schwager read
all versions of the screenplay for a 1990 Film Comment article, and writes me:
"Mainwaring's script was not very good, and in one draft featured awful
voice-over narration by the deaf-mute. Cain's script was a total rewrite and
even worse; it was totally discarded. The great dialogue was actually the work
of Frank Fenton, a B-movie writer whose best known credit was John Ford's
'Wings of Eagles.'"
Listen to the contempt with which
Sterling silences his hired gun, Stephanos: "Smoke a cigarette, Joe."
And "Think of a number, Joe." Listen to Joe tell Jeff how he found
his gas station: "It's a small world." Jeff: "Yeah. Or a big
sign." Kathie saying "I hate him. I'm sorry he didn't die."
Jeff: "Give him time." Jeff's friend the cab driver, assigned to tail
Meta Carson: "I lost her." Jeff: "She's worth losing." Jeff
to Kathie: "Just get out, will you? I have to sleep in this room."
Kathie to Jeff: "You're no good, and neither am I. That's why we deserve
each other." And in the movie's most famous exchange, Kathie telling him,
"I don't want to die." Jeff: "Neither do I, baby, but if I have
to, I'm going to die last."
The movie's final scene, between
the hometown girl Ann and Jimmy, Jeff's hired kid at the gas station, reflects
the moral murkiness of the film with its quiet ambiguity. I won't reveal the
details, but as Jimmy answers Ann's question, is he telling her what he
believes, what he thinks she wants to believe, or what he thinks it will be
best for her to believe?