Out of the Past (1947)

Director: Jacques Tourneur                              Writer: Daniel Mainwaring
Film Score: Roy Webb                                    Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas and Virginia Huston

This classic noir film is based on the novel Build My Gallows High by Daniel Mainwaring--writing as Geoffrey Homes--and it’s a pretty good title for the story it contains. Mainwaring also wrote the screenplay and by the time it hit the theaters it was called Out of the Past, which emphasizes a different aspect of the film. And the story does revolve around these two themes, the first being Mitchum’s own complicity in his demise, his obsession with a woman that drives him to disregard reason and plunge headlong into his own demise. The second theme is the cliché of never being able to leave the mob, when the past comes back to reclaim Mitchum. As much as he’d like to be “out of the past,” to his dismay he realizes he was never really gone at all.

The film begins with Paul Valentine rolling into a sleepy little Northern California town and stopping at a gas station owned by Robert Mitchum. Mitchum, meanwhile, is fishing with Virginia Huston and telling her how he’d like to marry her and settle down. Mitchum had changed his name, and now that Valentine has found him he says that crime boss Kirk Douglas wants to see him. It’s a request he can’t refuse, but he takes Huston along to tell her all about his past. The flashback begins with Mitchum being hired to find Douglas’s girlfriend, Jane Greer, and to bring her back along with the forty thousand dollars she stole from him. It’s a good paying job, so Mitchum agrees. But when he finds her in Mexico he suddenly has no desire to bring her back and instead tries to think of a way the two of them can disappear together. It works for a while, but when Greer vanishes for good Mitchum decides to do the same and buys a gas station.

And that’s when the real noir begins. Like most films of the genre, it’s “nasty, brutish and short,” but packs an emotional punch that few other genres can match, which no doubt accounts for its continuing success with audiences. This is a classic RKO outing with Jacques Tourneur at the helm, setting up all kinds of great shots, like the one on the beach in Mexico with Mitchum symbolically caught in the fishing nets behind he and Greer. The script is terrific, full of wisecracks and witty dialogue provided by Daniel Mainwaring and uncredited help from none other than James M. Cain, and a plot that continues to leisurely tighten down to the breaking point. House composer Roy Webb provides an appropriate, if unmemorable, score for the picture and all the actors acquit themselves well, especially Kirk Douglas in only his second film role after The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck.

Stephanie Zacharek’s essay in The B List is wonderful, exactly what a film analysis should be. She is not compelled, like most reviewers, to fully detail the plot for the reader, instead assuming that they’ve already seen the film or will after reading her essay. She takes the view that the femme fatale role is reversed in the film, a view that is clearly antithetical to the story on the surface, but she makes it work in her explanation. In this theory Greer is so nakedly opportunistic that she is actually the “honest” female, while Huston is the one attempting to get Mitchum in her clutches by marrying him in order to get what she wants. It’s thin, but it works, and is incredibly admirable in the attempt. The most obvious thematic element to explore is that of doubling, something that the remake, Against All Odds, brings even more to the fore in the story. Out of the Past could be the quintessential film noir, a beautifully written and photographed film that cries out for even more interpretation that it has already received, and still seems able to be mined for much, much more.