Not just one of the greatest noirs – one of the greatest movies, period.
Author: bmacv from Western New York
2 August 2004
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
As one of the most emotionally shaded, unforgettable instalments of the noir cycle, Jacques Tourneur's Out Of The Past opens deceptively – not in the neon-lit tenderloin of a big city some rainy night but up in the thin, cool air of the High Sierras, in a little town whose Main and only street boasts an open-kitchen beanery on one side and a gas station on the other. The sign on the station tells that it belongs to Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), and when a stranger drops into the diner looking for his old pal Bailey, the waitress remarks `Small world.'
`Or big sign,' the out-of-towner cryptically replies.
Of course it's not a casual call to catch up on times past, because Mitchum has a past, a heavy one that's about to catch up with him, a past that he lived under another name. The visitor to the mountains is an emissary from silky operator Kirk Douglas, for whom Mitchum, with his partner in the private-eye racket Steve Brodie, has worked before, with fateful results. Mitchum senses that his particular jig may be up, and, before answering his summons from Douglas to meet him at Lake Tahoe, tells his story, in flashback, to his girl (Virgina Huston).
A woman (Jane Greer) had shot Douglas and absconded with his $40,000. Douglas engaged Mitchum to play bounty-hunter, to track her down and bring her and the loot back. His search led him to Mexico and a little bar called La Mar Azul, where she appeared `out of the sunlight,' elusive but radiant, and stole his heart. A few days later she reappeared, this time `out of the moonlight,' and under that subtropical moon they walked on the beach and then to her cozy bungalow, where a sudden deluge drenched them to the skin and blew open the door to their passion. Here, Tourneur establishes himself as the Great Romantic of the noir cycle – it's a charged and rapturous idyll.
But even illicit honeymoons must end. Greer and Mitchum came back to the States, lying low in the North Beach district of San Francisco, until the industrious Brodie, in Douglas' pocket, spotted them at a racetrack. They lay even lower, thinking they've finally eluded him, but he turned up one night at their mountain cabin, where Greer coldly shot him dead. Even more startled than Brodie was Mitchum, who saw Greer in a new light that neither sun nor moon provided – with the wrenching realization that she wasn't the innocent victim of bad men and worse circumstances that she'd sold herself to him as. She clinched the point by high-tailing off, leaving him to dispose of the body (and forgetfully leaving her bankbook, showing a deposit of the $40-grand that she'd lied about never taking).
So much for the past; the present now beckons, as does Douglas. He claims to harbor no ill will for Mitchum. And why should he? As Mitchum joins him for breakfast on the terrace, Greer is there, too, eating grapefruit as though nothing had happened. The past holds no claims on her; she lives the for next advantage the future can offer. But Douglas has a job for Mitchum, involving a shady lawyer and some compromising papers back in San Francisco.
Here the movie takes its most audacious turn (Daniel Mainwaring wrote the script from his novel Build My Gallows High – as Geoffrey Homes – and James M. Cain and Frank Fenton had their hands in it as well). Right in the middle of Out Of The Past we embark on something close to a movie-within-a-movie, a mini-Maltese Falcon, with a new set of characters and even a new femme fatale (Rhonda Fleming). The conventional look of film noir – taxicabs and elevators, penthouse apartments at night with the Coit Tower looming in the distance – finally gets full rein. But then into this murky scheme – a frame-up, really – emerges Greer, this time out of pitch darkness. The plots within plots begin to converge....
Out Of The Past was a pivotal picture for its three principals. It was only Douglas' second film, but he started big – in a supporting role but a meaty one, as in his debut the previous year in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (they're two of the best roles he would ever take). Mitchum had spent years in the galleys but finally got a leading role that let him unleash his distinctive persona – the fearless and nimble intelligence behind the nonchalant eyes, the world-weary retorts mumbled from behind the cigarette drooping from his lip (it's Mitchum's own appropriation of what Humphrey Bogart had started).
The best of his many great lines he aims at Greer, calling her a `leaf that the wind blows from gutter to gutter.' And Greer, who made far fewer movies than her acting (graceful and natural) and her looks (like a less literal Jayne Meadows) would augur, takes her most emblematic credit and plays it to the hilt. Hers is perhaps the slowest transformation in the noir cycle and the most breathtakingly brutal. When, for her final scene, she shows up in a snood, it's clear that, for Mitchum, good times are no longer in store.
The talent that went into Out Of The Past is manifold. Both director of photography Nicholas Musuraca and Roy Webb, who wrote the responsive score, were old comrades of Tourneur from his earlier days in Val Lewton's B-movie unit at RKO. The credentials for the screenplay, as above, were impeccable, resulting in chiseled, quotable dialogue, right down to Paul Valentine (as one of Douglas' strong-arms) advising Greer, about to place a long-distance call, that `those dames listen in.'
But the most prestigious palm must go to Tourneur. He had less of a distinctive style to him – less of a `look,' less of a formula – than most of the top-flight noir directors; he was a chameleon, who used his talents less to make his own statement as to bring out the best in the scripts he was given. He was born in France and he died in France, but when in Hollywood he brought neither technical innovation nor rigorous theory to his work.
Rather he looked for the human element that underlies and informs art – and he relished its complexity. (The movie, for instance, opens and closes on Dickie Moore, as a teenaged deaf mute in Mitchum's employ, and whose function in the story is far from a merely sentimental fillip.) Tourneur took film noir as close to tragic poetry as it would ever come, and Out Of The Past, his masterwork, raised the standards of the noir cycle as far as they would ever go. It's not just one of the greatest noirs, it's one of the greatest movies, period.
