Out of the Past (RKO, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched three movies in a row on Turner Classic Movies, all of which have more or less acquired classic status even though I found all of them flawed, in one way or another, and hardly the stuff of “perfect” moviemaking as at least one of them was advertised by an imdb.com listmaker. The first one was the 1947 film noir Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and the young Kirk Douglas (in only his third film), though Mitchum and Greer are billed above the title and Douglas is the first on a miscellaneous cast list below it. The screenplay and the source novel, Build My Gallows High (which was used for the film’s British release and I think is a much better name for the movie than Out of the Past!), are both credited to “Geoffrey Homes” but that’s a pseudonym for Daniel Mainwaring – who would later write the script for Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, which I think is a much better movie than Out of the Past, as well as for the first – and by far the best – film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first true fusion of science fiction and film noir.

TCM showed this as part of their “Essentials” series featuring host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve previously described as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) and modern-day director Brad Bird (whose credits include both Incredibles movies, The Iron Giant, the Pixar film Ratatouille – which I actually quite liked – and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) in what are being acclaimed as the greatest movies of all time. They quoted TCM’s “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller as saying Out of the Past is the quintessential film noir – with which I strongly disagree; it’s hard to classify a film as the ultimate noir when so much of it takes place outdoors in daylight, and in spectacular countryside at that (though I still think director Robert Montgomery and screenwriter Steve Fisher made a huge mistake when they filmed Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and didn’t include any scenes taking place at the lake, especially since that meant eliminating honest county sheriff Patton, whom Chandler meant as a counterpoint and contrast to the corrupt city cop Degarmo).

Out of the Past is quite a good movie of its type but it also seems to be trying too hard: Mainwaring seemed to be looking for clever wisecracks he could throw into the dialogue whether they advanced either the plot or the characterizations or not; Tourneur seemed more interested in the glorious countryside surrounding Lake Tahoe, where the minions of bad-guy gambler and clubowner Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) trace fugitive former private detective Jeff Bailey nèe Markham (Robert Mitchum) to find out what happened between him and femme fatale Cathy Moffitt (Jane Greer). Bailey runs a gas station in Bridgeport, a town on the border between California and Nevada in the Lake Tahoe area – in the iconography of a 1930’s or 1940’s movie selling gas is an indication of honest proletarianism and we’re supposed to see it here as Bailey forsaking the noir world for a life of honest if ill-paying work and the love of a decent woman, Ann (Virginia Huston), even though her former boyfriend is jealous of him and figures he’s trying to hide something. He is: years earlier he and a partner were private detectives in New York when Whit hired them to find Cathy, who had just attempted to kill him by firing four rounds with a pistol, only one of which hit. Jeff and his partner naturally wonder just why Whit wants her back – for reconciliation or revenge – but Jeff traces her to Acapulco, only she comes on to him (literally – Tourneur offers plenty of shots of her walking towards him as if the sheer power of her approach will be enough to seduce him) and within a couple of scenes, narrated by Jeff as he drives Ann to his final confrontation with Whit now that he and his minions have come “out of the past” to challenge him, they are lovers and he is in her snare.

Only Jeff’s partner double-crosses him and reports to Whit that they found Cathy so he can get his share of Whit’s reward money, and the scene shifts from Mexico to San Francisco, where Whit tells Jeff he’ll let him off the hook for seducing his girlfriend if he’ll recover some papers he left with a corrupt accountant, Leonard Eels (radio announcer Ken Niles). The MacGuffin is a leather folder full of papers documenting that Whit paid Eels to falsify his tax records so he wouldn’t have to pay his taxes. Only Eels gets killed and Jeff realizes that the killer is framing him as the fall guy for the crime. In a final confrontation Jeff drives Cathy to the showdown with Whit, only during the drive she shoots him and wounds him enough it’s hard for him to make it to the final meeting – and at the end she shoots both Whit and Jeff, while Jeff gets enough bullets out on his own to wound her fatally. I remember when I first watched Out of the Past (at my father’s house in the early 1970’s) I found the movie so dull I turned it off in mid-stream; I’ve watched it at least once since then and it’s one I respect more than I actually like. If forced to pick just one film noir that to me encompasses the genre it would be the 1944 Murder, My Sweet, a much richer and more atmospheric film than this one and with an even better femme fatale, Claire Trevor, than Jane Greer. Greer was a highly talented actress who seemed destined for major stardom when Howard Hughes bought RKO in 1948 and promptly sabotaged Greer’s career when she wouldn’t have sex with him (once again, class, Harvey Weinstein’s sleazy antics were nothing new in the movie business!), and she’s certainly an electrifying screen presence here, while Mitchum – two years after he’d risen from contract player to star in the film The Story of G.I. Joe – is his usual archetypal self, quiet, understated and menacing but also convincing as a basically decent man caught up in the noir underworld.

But for me the acting honors here are taken by Kirk Douglas, who had begun his career as a weak-willed pawn of his ambitious wife (Barbara Stanwyck) in her bid for small-town (and ultimately big-time) political power in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Douglas played villains in quite a few of his early films – those two as well as Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole and William Wyler’s Detective Story (also from 1951, which cast Douglas as a cop but a morally, if not legally, corrupt one) – but, like his close friend Burt Lancaster, quickly got to be too big a star to be cast as anything but heroes. It’s a pity, because Douglas is superb as Whit; he positively oozes sinister amorality in the part and he’s utterly convincing as a man you’ll love to hate (even though you feel a bit sorry for him if only because Cathy has her hooks into him, too, to the extent that he’s willing to take her back even after she’s tried to kill him). In the 1980’s this film got a semi-remake under the title Against All Odds, but I’ve never seen it; apparently it altered the ending so all three of the principals live instead of dying (a big mistake since the sense of doom that hangs so heavily over this film can only be resolved by the deaths of the lead characters) and the only thing I remember about it is that Phil Collins did a theme song for it that was one of the biggest hits he ever had. It’s not that Out of the Past is a bad movie; it’s just that I can think of quite a few noirs that are considerably better, including the 1941 Maltese Falcon, the 1943 Double Indemnity, the 1944 Murder, My Sweet (the definitive film adaptations of works by their authors – Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, respectively), and if Murder, My Sweet isn’t the quintessential film noir I’d gave that honor to Orson Welles’ terrific The Lady from Shanghai, with Rita Hayworth playing an even icier femme fatale than Claire Trevor, Jane Greer or Rita herself in the better-known Gilda.