Out of the Past

1947 was the year “film noir” took over cinema screens, and the greatest of all ’47 noirs (sorry Orson) is Jacques Tourneur’s pessimistically romantic, cold-fever-dream Out of the Past. Robert Mitchum stars as Jeff Markham, a private eye hired by a high-powered gambler named Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas playing through a wicked smile that’s both sexy and unnerving) to track down a woman who stole the gambler's money and shot him four times with his own gun. Jane Greer plays the runaway femme fatal, and she’s such a knockout we get the feeling Sterling isn’t out for revenge, he just wants his girlfriend back. But once Jeff gets a look at this dame, he’s not so sure he wants to see his job through.

That’s the basic story, but it takes a long time to make itself understood. In fact, it’s easy to watch this picture without being able to follow its narrative at all. Yet you still fall for Out of the Past even if you can’t make heads or tales of it. When we meet Mitchum, he’s not a big city private eye at all; he runs a gas station in a rural town and seems happy working there and keeping company with a pretty young woman named Ann (Virginia Huston). When a hood from out of his past named Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine) shows up, Jeff decides to come clean and tell Ann all about the life he led before crossing paths with her.

Out of the Past was hardly the first noir to use flashbacks and voiceover narration (I mean, there’s Double Indemnity for cryin’ out loud). It’s also not the first noir to tell a story so convoluted that even the filmmakers and cast couldn’t entirely connect all the script's dots (the prior year’s The Big Sleep takes that honor). But Out of the Past is the first film noir to use its flashbacks to so effectively muddle the story that it plays out like a kind of dream narrative. Even after multiple viewings, it can be difficult to place the chronology of events. Two-thirds of the film are told in flashback, and it’s difficult to discern these scenes from those set in the present day, even though the transitions are clearly delineated by Mitchum’s narration. But this disorientation is not a flaw; it’s the picture's greatest feature.

Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca overlay many hypnotic qualities onto the already dreamlike screenplay by journalist turned mystery writer Daniel Mainwaring (who also wrote the source novel Build My Gallows High). Tourneur and Musuraca came up together at RKO working for Val Lewton on the iconic producer’s legendary string of low-budget atmospheric horror pictures. Tourneur directed the wonderful Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man for Lewton before going on to make more A-list fare like Berlin Express, The Flame and the Arrow, and Night of the Demon. Musuraca shot Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and The Ghost Ship for Lewton, as well as lensing terrific noirs like Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase and John Brahm’s The Locket. In addition to Out of the Past, Mainwaring secured his place in film history by penning the screenplay for the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

All that high-powered talent behind the camera is equalled by those we see on screen. This was only Kirk Douglas’s second picture, after the previous year’s noir-adjacent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, but his screen persona is fully formed. He’s a small, still, but menacing presence who comes across as dangerously friendly and at ease with himself. His handsome face and muscular physique make for a harsh contrast to Mitchum’s lanky, hangdog masculinity. This was only one of two movies these iconic and outspoken leading men made together —the other being the forgettable wagon train western The Way West in 1967. The two up-and-coming stars were clearly competitive, as evidenced by behaviour that can be read either as their characters trying to intimate each other or as the actors trying to upstage each other (Douglas’s coin flipping feels like the latter). Both men are known for their prominent chin clefts, which makes Out of the Past a downright chin-cleft-fest—no projectionist could ever be wanting of something on which to check focus registration with all the close-ups of these rugged but clean-shaven mugs.

In Kathie Moffat, Jane Greer creates one of the all-time great femme fatales and Tourneur gives her a memorably cinematic entrance in the picture. In the first flashback that shows Jeff staking out Acapulco, the place Witt believes Kathie has run off to, we watch Mitchum sitting at a table in a bar across the street from a movie theater with a tinny piano. We are lulled along with him into a kind of drunken haze as we listen to the cheesy music and his laconic voiceover while he sits stagnantly, smoking cigarette after cigarette waiting for her. Suddenly, she’s there, and Jeff’s destiny is sealed. 

Mitchum’s smoking is an inseparable part of his acting in Out of the Past, which is arguably his best work. If this picture doesn’t feature his greatest performance—many would argue that his latter-day roles in films like Ryan's Daughter and The Friends of Eddie Coyle prove false his own assessment that he didn’t take his craft seriously—it is his most "Mitchum-esque". Jeff Markham embodies everything distinctive about the actor. He moves through this picture with a kind of seeming disinterest and disconnection to everything he’s involved in. It’s as if he’s indifferent to things as trivial as love and hate, life and death, the future and the past. But we know better. We can just make out that his cynical attitude and uncaring demeanour are fronts with which he attempts to shield himself against the inevitable disappointments life has in store for him.

In one fateful scene in which Greer attempts to convince Jeff that she’s an innocent victim of circumstance, Mitchum utters the film’s key line, “Baby, I don’t care.” This simple bit of dialogue can be read in multiple ways. Does he not care if she’s lying? Does he not care that she’s lying because he wants her so badly? Does he not care that falling for her will end badly for him? Does he not care about anything? Or is he trying to convince himself that he doesn’t care because he knows that caring could get him killed? All interpretations fit this character and this actor, and the film is all the more compelling for them.