“Out of the Past” Movie Review, Live Streaming & Download

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
neverseenit?”

“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 smokeateach 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 knowsand
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 isstillfascinated 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?

“Out of the Past” Movie Review, Live Streaming & Download Source