Out of the Past

            This week’s movie is Out of the Past, a 1947 RKO release starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, and directed by Jacques Tourneur. I’d be willing to bet that if you managed to get 100 experts to list the 10 best noir films, Out of the Past would be on practically every list, and probably in the top 5 on most of them.

            The title, like so many noir titles, conveys an attitude, a philosophy. Here we have Robert Mitchum trying to just mind his own business, running a little gas station in a small town and romancing an extremely nice and respectable local girl, when a car pulls out and some city guy in a black coat and hat gets out. So much for Mitchum’s idyllic rural existence of peace and quiet, because the hand of retribution reaches exactly “out of the past” and pulls him back into a deadly morass of betrayal and violence. Incidentally, this beginning closely echoes that of another famous film noir of the previous year, The Killers, in which it was poor Burt Lancaster, also working at a little country gas station, who got recognized by some associate from older and guiltier days. But the fact that a familiar noir situation has been seen before doesn’t make it stale or weak—on the contrary, it reinforces that sense of fateful determinism, that inescapable repetition of bad outcomes, that’s central to the noir mood. Behind the facade of Mitchum’s innocence, there’s a whole messy, complicated and dangerous history. And in this way the movie is asserting two very noir principles: first, that what looks simple and innocent probably isn’t because things are always more complex and disturbing than they appear, and second, that you can never feel secure no matter how straight and good you try to be.

            And this isn’t the only development in the movie that recalls other noir films. We get to see the past through an extensive flashback—almost the entire first half of the movie—and that flashback is accompanied by another of those world-weary voice-over narrations. Extensive flashbacks, and, even more, voice-over narrations, are pretty rare in Hollywood movies overall, but there are lots and lots of them in film noir. Again, they convey a sense of determinism and hopelessness—you can’t escape the past, what’s done is done and its consequences are unchangeable—and also an intensely subjective viewpoint on the action which emphasizes the perceptions and emotions of a single individual, where the perceptions are mistaken and the emotions are catastrophic.

            What Mitchum’s past contains is a career as a somewhat grimy private eye who falls in love with the female object of his search—and again, this is the opposite of new in private eye movies of the 40s. The woman is one of the most memorable creatures in the whole of film noir—a fabulous performance by the radiant 22-year-old Jane Greer, whose limited career lasted barely a decade but who makes a deep and indelible mark in this film. She stands somewhere very near the head of the long and impressive lineup of dangerous beautiful women in film noir, so striking that she can be taken as a model for the whole type. Once more the infatuated male is drawn into a scenario of treachery and crime through his powerful attraction to this woman. Robert Mitchum in this movie is no pushover—in fact he’s as smart and calculating as any detective hero—but he simply gets swept away by the proximity of Greer, and it’s not at all hard to see why. Mitchum too gives one of his best performances ever—his slow movements and blank, heavy drawl make him more sultry and provocative than any of the women, and his delivery of the screenplay’s wonderful baroque hardboiled dialogue is faultless.

            The film moves from the purity of a natural setting to the labyrinthine darkness of the city, from the innocence of the present to the guilt of the past. These antitypes exemplify the romantic polarization of the world in film noir, where good and evil may be inextricably intertwined in the hero’s actions and motives, but where the opposing poles of salvation and damnation, pure love and sensual obsession, light and shadow are as schematically visible as they are in that noir forerunner German Expressionism. Mitchum must try to get away from Greer and towards the perfectly good and selfless Virginia Huston, away from the shadows and deceptions of the city and towards the purity of mountains and lakes and pine trees. But of course this is film noir, and you can’t just do that.

            Out of the Past is a kind of little miracle of craftsmanship. I’ve already mentioned the screenplay, which was adapted under a pseudonym by Daniel Mainwaring from his own novel. Scene after scene is crammed with dialogue of the most inventive and memorable stamp, and no movie ever had better wisecracks. The photography is by Nicholas Musuraca, one the the most accomplished and stylish of noir cinematographers. The range of locations is handled with beautiful visual variety, from the baking heat and tropical downpours of Mexico, where Mitchum and Greer meet, to the intensely noir-looking nighttime city scenes later in the movie. The director, Jacques Tourneur, is a minor master whose work included the most stylish of the Val Lewton-produced horror movies at Universal in the 30s and a scattering of fine little films across a variety of genres. Out of the Past qualifies as his masterpiece, I would say.

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            What makes Out of the Past such a compelling movie? It’s not perfect, that’s for sure. I’d even say it has one very serious flaw—or at least I think of it as a flaw, even though others might feel it’s absolutely essential to the movie. I’m talking about the way the film turns around on the character of Kathie Moffett. By the time the end of the movie has arrived, she’s evil through and through, double-crossing and triple-crossing, manipulating and killing without the slightest scruple and on the lowest motives of avarice and self-aggrandisement. But this is the woman our hero has fallen madly in love with despite good evidence that she isn’t a girl scout, and then lives in complete bliss with in a little room in San Francisco for years before his former partner spots them. If she’s so grasping and mercenary what’s she doing in the low-rent district with a seedy private eye who’s just scraping by for all that time? It can only be because she’s in love with him, and that her love is bigger than her materialism. When she’s with the Kirk Douglas character she gets mink coats and jewelry and chances to steal $40,000. A real operator would never be content just in a furnished room with Mitchum, hunk though he be.

            In fact the movie tries up to a point to give a complex portrait of her. She is venal and selfish, and she has a deep vein of unscrupulousness. She does plug Whit and steal his money. She does kill Jeff’s partner because she thinks he’s too soft to do it. She does go back to Whit out of a combination of fear and avarice. But the totality of her character has to make room for the woman we see in Mexico and living with Mitchum in San Francisco. That woman just disappears for the last half of the movie, in the whole stretch of action that takes place in the present. There, she’s presented as the predatory spider-woman without a single redeeming feature. No insult is too low for her—the movie gets practically hysterical in its contrast between her and the virtuous and perfect small-town girl Ann.

            In perpetrating this inconsistency the movie is covering up another one—namely, the way it arranges things to excuse the Mitchum character. In Mexico, Kathie assures him she didn’t steal Whit’s money. “You do believe me, don’t you?” she asks. “Baby, I don’t care,” replies Jeff, and you absolutely believe him. She’s lying, but he just doesn’t care. He’s responsible for his own predicament, she didn’t make him do anything. Later on, though, the movie wants to stick her with the blame for his downfall: “Build my gallows high, baby,” he says, enunciating the title of Mainwaring’s original novel.

            The turning-point occurs in the scene where Kathie shoots Jeff’s partner—so sudden, and so compellingly staged, that you don’t stop to think how senseless the act is, especially from somebody who’s supposed to be such a cold-hearted calculator. She kills him so he won’t reveal their whereabouts to Whit—and then goes straight back to Whit, leaving behind her bankbook with its entry for $40,000 that she evidently never touched during her whole time with Jeff. Then, when she reappears, it’s as a completely treacherous, poisonous monster, whose evil is so total that it puts all of Jeff’s questionable behaviour completely in the shade, especially as he’s now found a really good woman. You see what I mean? The movie’s pulling a turnaround here.

            But of course what’s fundamentally going on is an expression of profound male ambivalence towards the whole idea of female sexuality. The hero isn’t just attracted by the woman’s beauty and manner, but also—crucially—by the sense of danger that she brings with her, the transgressiveness that’s expressed by her air of unscrupulousness, of sexual availability, of sensuality rather than spirituality. Then, having succumbed to that transgressive allure, he needs to disavow it because it’s not safe, it’s not right. Enter, simultaneously, the murderous predatory Kathie and the totally noble, understanding, forgiving, untransgressive Ann—and the hero goes to his doom at the hands of the former with his virtuous thoughts filled with the latter. So the movie can be intoxicated with Kathie and everything she represents while finally evading the rap for doing so. And the viewer can eat his cake (and I do mean his cake) in a besotted appreciation of this dazzling creature and then turn around and have it by blaming her for the transgressive nature of his feelings.

            What finally makes the movie so compelling, though, is its absolute mastery of touch in the portrayal of this exotic and dangerous scenario. In particular all of Jeff’s machinations in the last third of the movie, with the corpse and the briefcase and Kathie on the phone, are presented with such a total appreciation for mood and tone, and in such a total evocation of that aroma of the noir world, that the movie works like a spell on any viewer with an appreciation for these things. There isn’t a more potent example of the style of film noir anywhere than this, and the enthusiasm that devotees of the form consume it with is like the enthusiasm of a conoisseur for a fabulous wine, or a fine painting, or anything else that produces a strong, but refined and complex taste. Certainly when the story was remade in 1984 under the title Against All Odds, most of that essential flavour was missing. But if you like film noir, you’ve got to love Out of the Past.