September 13, 2016 (XXXIII:4) Jacques Tourneur: OUT OF THE PAST (1947, 97 min)

DIRECTED BY Jacques Tourneur WRITTEN BY Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay/novel, as Geoffrey Homes), James M. Cain (uncredited) and Frank Fenton (uncredited) PRODUCED BY Warren Duff MUSIC Roy Webb CINEMATOGRAPHY Nicholas Musuraca FILM EDITOR Samuel E. Beetley ART DIRECTION Albert S. D'Agostino and Jack Okey SET DECORATION Darrell Silvera COSTUME DESIGN Edward Stevenson VISUAL EFFECTS Linwood G. Dunn National Film Registry, 1991 CAST Robert Mitchum…Jeff Jane Greer…Kathie Kirk Douglas…Whit Rhonda Fleming…Meta Carson Richard Webb…Jim Steve Brodie…Fisher Virginia Huston…Ann Paul Valentine….Joe Dickie Moore…The Kid Ken Niles….Eels JACQUES TOURNEUR (b. November 12, 1904 in Paris—d. 19 December, 1977 in Bergerac, France) went to Hollywood in 1913 with his father, director Maurice Tourneur. Starting out as a script clerk and editor for his father, the younger Tourneur then graduated to such jobs as directing shorts (often with the pseudonym Jack Turner), both in France and America. He was hired to run the second unit for David O. Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities (1935) where he first met Val Lewton. In 1942, when Lewton was named to head the new horror unit at RKO, he asked Tourneur to be his first director. The result was the highly artistic (and commercially successful) Cat People (1942). Some consider the three low-budget films Jacques Tourneur made with iconic producer Lewton the greatest works of the B-movie genre, Tourneur went on to direct masterpieces in many

different genres, all showing a great command of mood and atmosphere.” In the 1950s and ‘60s he also did a significant amount of TV work on such series as “The Barbara Stanwyk Show,” “The Twilight Zone,” and “Bonanza.” Some of Tourneur’s other films are Wichita (1955), Berlin Express (1948), Days of Glory (1944) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). DANIEL MAINWARING (b. February 27, 1902 in Oakland, California—d. January 31, 1977 in Los Angeles, California) is a novelist who also scripted 45 Hollywood films, among them The George Raft Story (1961), Space Master X-7 (1958, aka Blood Ruse and Mutiny in Outer Space), Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958), Baby Face Nelson (1957), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Phoenix City Story (1955), This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), They Made Me a Killer (1946), Tokyo Rose (1946) and Secrets of the Underground (1942). JAMES M. CAIN (b. July 1, 1892, Annapolis, Maryland—d. October 27, 1977, University Park, Maryland) was a prolific novelist whose work was frequently made into major films, for example, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. Born and raised on the East Coast and trained as a journalist, Cain moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s,

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around the time his first book was published. He returned to the East Coast about 15 years later, but it was in Los Angeles, a place he had conflicting feelings about, that Cain had his greatest success. Cain was in high demand in Hollywood, but the relationship was fraught. A complete rewrite he did of the screenplay Out of the Past had to be rewritten again after he was done. NICHOLAS MUSURACA (b. October 25, 1892, Italy—d. September 3, 1985, Los Angeles, California) Italian-born Nicholas Musuraca's first job in the film business was as a chauffeur to early pioneering producer/director J. Stuart Blackton. Having a knack for photography, he worked behind the cameras in a variety of jobs before finally becoming a cinematographer (or, as they were called in those days, "lighting cameraman"). Musuraca spent most of his career at RKO Pictures, where he became known as a master of lighting--he was once admiringly described by a fellow cameraman as "a painter with light"--and was largely responsible for the gritty, moody camerawork that became that studio's signature. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on I Remember Mama (1948). After leaving RKO in the late '50s he worked for a short period at Warner Bros., but then joined Desilu Studios and spent the remainder of his career in television. Musuraca was cinematographer or d.p. on about 175 films, among them A Girl in Every Port, (1952), I Married a Communist (1950), I Remember Mama (1948), The Bachelor and the BobbySoxer (1947), Bedlam (1946), The Spiral Staircase (1946), Back to Bataan (1945), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), Bombardier (1943), Cat People (1942), Lady Scarface (1941), Golden Boy (1939), and On the Banks of the Wabash (1923). ROBERT MITCHUM (b. August 6, 1917 in Bridgeport, Connecticut—d. July 1, 1997 in Santa Barbara, California) is an underrated American leading man of enormous ability who sublimates his talents beneath an air of disinterest. Born to a railroad worker who died in a train accident when Robert was two, Mitchum and his siblings (including brother, John Mitchum, later also an actor) were raised by his mother and step-father (a British army major) in Connecticut, New York, and Delaware. An early contempt for authority led to discipline problems, and Mitchum spent good portions of his teen years adventuring on the open road. On one of these trips, at the age of 14, he was charged with vagrancy and sentenced to a Georgia chain gang, from which he escaped. Working a wide variety of jobs (including ghostwriter for astrologist Carroll Righter), Mitchum discovered acting in a Long Beach, California amateur theatre company. He worked at Lockheed Aircraft, where job

stress caused him to suffer temporary blindness. About this time, he began to obtain small roles in films, appearing in dozens within a very brief time. In 1945, he was cast as Lt. Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe, and received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. His star ascended rapidly, and he became an icon of ‘40s film noir, though equally adept at Westerns and romantic dramas. His apparently lazy style and seen-it-all demeanor proved highly attractive to men and women, and by the 1950s he was a true superstar. This despite a brief prison term for marijuana usage in 1949, which seemed to enhance rather than diminish his "bad boy" appeal. Though seemingly dismissive of "art", he worked in tremendously artistically thoughtful projects such as Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and even co-wrote and composed an oratorio produced at the Hollywood Bowl by Orson Welles. A master of accents and seemingly unconcerned about his star image, he played in both forgettable and unforgettable films with unswerving nonchalance, leading many to overlook the prodigious talent he could bring to a project which he found

compelling. He moved into television in the Eighties as his film opportunities diminished, winning new fans with "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance".” Some of his 130 films: Dead Man (1995), Cape Fear (1991), That Championship Season (1982), The Big Sleep (1978), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Longest Day (1962), Cape Fear (1962), Thunder Road (1958), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Not as a Stranger (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Track of the Cat (1954), River of No Return (1954), The

Lusty Men (1952), The Red Pony (1949), Rachel and the Stranger (1948), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943). He produced and wrote Thunder Road (1958), and wrote the film’s song, “Wippoorwill,” which became a hit record. JANE GREER (b. “Bettejane” Greer on September 9, 1924, in Washington, D.C.—d. August 20, 2001, Los Angeles). “If she'd never made another movie,” wrote Leonard Maltin, “this angelic brunette would rate an entry in this book for her portrayal of the icy, manipulative temptress who makes chumps of both Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas in the film noir classic Out of the Past.” As a baby, she was winning beauty contests; as a teenager, with good looks and an attractive contralto voice, she was singing with big bands (most notably Enric Madriguera's orchestra in Latin Club Del Rio in Washington, D.C.. She met Rudy Vallee, her first husband, on the radio where she also enjoyed a brief stint as a singer. At age 15, an attack of palsy left her face partially paralyzed. She claimed that it was through facial exercises to overcome the paralysis that she learned the efficacy of facial expression in conveying human emotion, a

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skill she was renowned for using in her acting. Howard Hughes became attracted to Greer and brought her to Hollywood after he saw her in Life magazine, modeling army uniforms for women. Deciding that Bettejane was too "ingenuish", she shortened her name to Jane for her billing in the film, Dick Tracy (1945). According to lore, Quickly married crooner Rudy Vallee after fleeing a possessed Howard Hughes, who kept her virtually a prisoner during her first few months. An enraged Hughes pressured her and ruined the marriage. She returned to Hughes and her contract. She acted in approximately 20 movies, among them Perfect Mate (1996), Against All Odds (1984), Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), and Sinbad the Sailor (1947). She also did a lot of TV series work—“Quincy,” Murder, She Wrote,” “Bonanza,” and, perhaps most notably, four episodes of “Twin Peaks” in 1990.

KIRK DOUGLAS (b. Issur Danielovitch Demsky on December 9, 1916 in Amsterdam, NY) was nominated for three best actor Oscars: for Champion (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1953), and Lust for Life (1957), but the only one he ever got was an Honorary Award in 1996. His ready grin, granite-chiseled features, cleft chin, and an approach to acting that made him equally convincing in both sympathetic and unsympathetic roles made Douglas one of the brightest stars of post-WWII Hollywood (and, later, the international arena as well). Born into immigrant poverty, he saw an acting scholarship as his ticket out of the ghetto. He secured small roles on Broadway before entering the Navy in the second World War, and afterward resumed his stage career. His old classmate Lauren Bacall suggested that producer Hal Wallis test him, resulting in his being cast in the lead role in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Douglas won excellent reviews, which encouraged him to remain in Hollywood, and in 1947 he made the classic noir Out of the Past, the film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), and the undernourished drama I Walk Alone (the first of several films with close friend Burt Lancaster). Douglas also had a key role in the A Letter to Three Wives (1949), then scored a knockout as the venal boxer Midge Kelly in that year's Champion (1949) a classic prizefighting drama that cemented his stardom and earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Now acknowledged to

be a top leading man, Douglas played a thinly disguised Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With a Horn (1950), the "gentleman caller" in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1950), a heartlessly ambitious reporter in Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival), a two-fisted cop in Detective Story (both 1951), a frontiersman in The Big Sky, a ruthless movie producer in The Bad and the Beautiful (both 1952, the latter Oscar nominated), an intrepid seaman in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954, in which he sang "A Whale of a Tale"), the title role in Ulysses (1955), a sharp-tongued cowpoke in Man Without a Star (1955), artist Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956, again, Oscar-nominated), gambler/gunfighter Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and a war-sickened colonel in Paths of Glory (both 1957). Douglas infused every role with passion, and his performances were often multilayered ones; he could bring sinister traits to sympathetic characters, and vice versa. Something in his eyes, in his voice, behind that toothy grin, suggested lurking menace in some characters and suppressed mirth in others. He formed his own production company, Bryna, in 1958; its initial venture was a big-scale adventure film, The Vikings (1958), followed by The Devil's Disciple (1959), which was a coproduction with Lancaster's company, and the sexy melodrama Strangers When We Meet (1960). That same year also saw the release of Douglas' most ambitious film, the epic drama of Roman Empire days, Spartacus, as its producer, he broke a long-standing Hollywood blacklist by insisting that scripter Dalton Trumbo (a member of the "Hollywood Ten") get proper screen credit for his contribution. Douglas remained busy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with a decided emphasis on Westerns and war films; among the more notable were Town Without Pity, The Last Sunset (both 1961), the cult "modern" Western Lonely Are the Brave, Two Weeks in Another Town (both 1962, the latter a semi-sequel to The Bad and the Beautiful), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), In Harm's Way (1965), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), The War Wagon (1967), The Brotherhood (1968), The Arrangement (1969), A Gunfight (1971), and two that he directed: Scalawag (1973) and Posse (1975). Thereafter he concentrated on character roles in such varied fare as Once Is Not Enough (also 1975), The Fury (1978), Home Movies (a hilarious turn as an egocentric star), The Villain (bravely mocking movie-Western villainy in a ham-fisted, cartoonish parody, both 1979), The Final Countdown (1980), The Man From Snowy River (1982, in a dual role for this Down-Under "Western"), and Tough Guys (1986, his last film with Lancaster). And though he abandoned the first Rambo film, First Blood early in its production, he eventually worked with star Sylvester Stallone in Oscar (1991). More recently he was cast as Michael J. Fox's crafty uncle in Greedy (1994). His autobiography, The Ragman's Son (1988), was a best-seller, and in recent years he has expanded his literary career to writing novels as well, most notably The Gift. RHONDA FLEMING (b. 10 August 1923, Hollywood) was in about 50 films, the most recent of them being the television Waiting for the Wind (1990), which reunited her with her former co-star, Robert Mitchum. Some of the others included The Nude Bomb (1980), The Big Circus (1959), Home Before Dark (1958), The Buster Keaton Story (1957), Gunfight at the O.K.

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Corral (1957), The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951), The Great Lover (1949), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), and Spellbound (1945). In addition to motion pictures, Miss Fleming starred in her Broadway debut in Clare Booth Luce's “The Women”, and in the role of Lalume in “Kismit” at the Los Angeles Music Center, and toured as Madame Dubonnet in “The Boyfriend”. She made her stage musical debut in Las Vegas at the opening of the new Tropicana Hotel's showroom. Later, she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl in a one-woman concert of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin compositions. She, Jane Russell, Connie Haines and Beryl Davis were once part of a traveling gospel quartet at their church called "The Four Girls" and made an album called "Make a Joyful Noise" that sold over a million copies. STEVE BRODIE (b. November 25, 1919 in El Dorado, Kansas–d. January 9, 1992 in Los Angeles, California) was primarily known as a "B" movie bad guy of hundreds of films. He broke into films after being spotted by an MGM talent scout in a Hollywood theatre production entitled "Money Girls". Loaned out for his first film, Universal's Ladies Courageous (1944), Brodie appeared in a few tough-guy bit parts in such MGM films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), The Clock (1945) and Anchors Aweigh (1945) before he was dropped. It wasn't long before he was signed by RKO and it was with studio that his reputation as a heavy in westerns grew, with such roles as notorious outlaws Bob Dalton in Badman's Territory (1946) and Cole Younger in Return of the Bad Men Cole (1948). In between those two pictures were strong roles in three film noir classics: Desperate (1947) as the leading good guy, and a supporting baddie in Crossfire (1947) and Out of the Past (1947). A hard-living, hard-drinking actor, Brodie married "B" actress Lois Andrews in 1946 but the couple divorced four years later, not long after appearing together in the western programmer Rustlers (1949). A familiar presence on 1950s and 1960s TV, he worked on such crime series as Public Defender (1954), Hawaiian Eye (1959), Perry Mason (1957), Burke's Law (1963) and such western series as The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955) (recurring part), The Lone Ranger (1949), Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951), Laramie (1959), Sugarfoot (1957), Maverick (1957), Rawhide (1959), Gunsmoke (1955) and comedies including The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952) and The Beverly Hillbillies (1962). JACQUES TOURNEUR from World Film Directors, V.I. Ed. John Wakeman. H.W. Wilson Co. NY 1987. Born in Paris, son of Maurice Thomas, better known as Maurice Tourneur. Originally an artist, the elder Tourneur adopted his pseudonym when he became a stage actor and director and retained it when he joined the film production company Eclair. His father was an aesthete and a solitary, cynical and sarcastic. . . .If he misbehaved , his parents “would put the maid in the cupboard and she used to jiggle a bowler hat while my parents would tell me: ‘That’s the terrible Thunderman.’” Tourneur believed that this grotesque punishment was the root of one of his cinematic

obsessions: “to suddenly introduce something inexplicable into the shot, such as, for instance, the hand on the balustrade. . . in Curse of the Demon; in the reverse shot the hand isn’t there any more.”

According to Jacques Tourneur, his father “was passionately interested in scientific, medical, and philosophical research. He had an incredible library and followed all the discoveries in psychoanalysis very closely. It is through him that I discovered Freud, Jung, Adler, Havelock Ellis. I never read novels, only essays, scientific works. They are much more exciting. I was already fascinated by the cinema and my father bought story ideas from me for ten dollars apiece. At that time he was a very important filmmaker in America.” Indeed, by the end of World War I, Maurice Tourneur was head of his own production company and generally regarded as the greatest aesthetician of the American cinema. In 1918 he moved his company to Hollywood, where the following year Jacques Tourneur became an American citizen. In 1922 Jacques appeared as an extra in Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche, and in 1924, finishing high school he went to MGM as a script clerk. He worked in the same capacity for his father in 1925-1926, but in the latter year Maurice Tourneur, whose Hollywood career was in decline, returned to Europe. He left his son a hundred dollar bill and the suggestion that he try and make it to Europe himself. Jacques Tourneur did not at first take advantage of this offer, instead finding odd jobs in Hollywood as an actor and usher. But in 1927 his father invited him to Germany to work on Das Schiff der verlorene Menschen

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(Ship of Lost Men), and this time he went. He served as his father’s editor and assistant on this film and then on a series of talkies made in Paris for Pathé-Nathan in 1929-1934. It was during this time that Jacques Tourneur directed his own first movies for the same company, beginning in 1931 with Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour (None of That’s Worth Love). In 1934 Tourneur broke away from his father and returned to Hollywood. Tourneur had worked with Val Lewton on the crowd scenes in A Tale of Two Cities, and in 1942 he began his seven-year association with RKO, where Lewton was then working as a producer. Their first movie grew out of a party conversation—a suggestion that “Cat People” was an oddly suggestive title from which a thriller could be derived. . . . Cat People has been called “the first monster film to refrain from showing us the monster.” . . .It did immensely well at the box office. Together with Lewton’s other low-budget thrillers and Hitchcock’s Suspicion, it saved the studio, which at that time was in great financial difficulty. Robin Wood says that “its packed, complex and suggestive” dream sequence “concisely embodies the film’s sense of life itself as a shadow-world in which nothing is certain, no issue is clear-cut, nothing is what it seems.” Woods calls Cat People “a small masterpiece—perhaps the most delicate poetic fantasy in the American cinema. “To show that, unconsciously, we all live in fear—that is genuine horror,” Tourneur wrote. Back at RKO, Tourneur made another film which—underrated at the time—has achieved the status of “a classic B-picture,” Out of the Past (1947). Since then, Out of the Past has come to be recognized as one of the best films noirs of the immediate postwar years, beautifully played by Mitchum and Greer, and lit and photographed to marvelous atmospheric effect by Nicholas Musuraca, who had been Tourneur’s camerman on all three of his films with Lewton. It has been called “one of Tourneur’s [visually] most elaborate works,” telling its story “through a camera which never

merely records but draws us implacably into a dark spider’s web of conflicting emotions.” Out of the Past shares the cynicism and downbeat sophistication of such contemporary thrillers as Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (and is almost as well-written as that film). Feminist critics have condemned its portrayal of Kathie Moffat as “a personification of the bitch goddess archetype,” and Stephen Farber has made the interesting suggestion that the frequency with which such anti-heroines appeared in the movies of the period “reflected the fantasies and fears of a wartime society, in which women had taken control of many of the positions customarily held by men.”

“I hate the expression ‘horror film,’” Jacques Tourneur said. “For me, I make films about the supernatural because I believe in it. I believe in the power of the dead, witches. None of Tourneur’s subsequent [after Curse of the Demon (1957)] films were of anything like the same quality, being ruined by poor scripts or interfering producers. He recognized this himself and made his last “very bad” picture in 1965. Before and after that he worked in television, a medium

he despised. His Positif interview with Bertrand Tavernier gives some useful insights into his working methods—his concern for realism in the way his actors spoke, moved, entered a room with which they were supposed to be familiar or unfamiliar; above all, the importance he attached to light. Tourneur said he had one basic principle he always imposed on his cameramen: “Only use natural, logical sources of light ( a window, a lamp) and you must be able to see this source in every single shot. The presence of the light must be very concrete, you should be able to feel it. Cameramen hate that kind of thing because they have to rack their brains trying to find new solutions every time” but “in this way I also obtain very heavy contrasts which often lend dignity and truth to the human relationships. . . .It also changes the acting. . . .For instance, a young woman in order to be able to read a letter, will go to the oil lamp or to the window. . . . Another actor will unconsciously lower his voice. . . .I look for a very strong visual unity by using a type of framing and camera movement that is very simple. Everything must come from inside. It mustn’t be superficial. I hate weird camera angles and distorting

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lenses.” For Robin Wood, Tourneur’s camera style, “which is the most distinctive feature of his heterogeneous oeuvre, has two chief characteristics, movement and distance. The fluid long takes that keep the characters in long shot within the shadowy environments, branches, and foliage obtruding darkly in the foreground, greatly enhance the haunting, sinister atmosphere of the suspense sequences; they also help to preserve the objectivity with which Tourneur customarily views his characters and on which the ambiguities of the horror movies depend.” He and his wife lived in a Hollywood duplex, furnished with “quiet but exquisite taste,” that once belonged to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. Chris Fujiwara. Foreword by Martin Scorsese. Johns Hopkins U Press, Baltimore.London 1998. Martin Scorsese’s foreword: Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is “established,” setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his movies boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadow, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment—the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different form other films. Bertrand Tavernier and Jean-Pierre Coursodon have noted that Tourneur tended to record dialogue at low levels, and he always encouraged his actors to underplay (which must be why he preferred to work with minimalists like Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews, or Victor Mature) and to move at a slightly slower pace than usual. Places, objects and atmospheres

are living presences in his work, while emotion and drama speak very softly, the better to show how deeply they are affected by the physical world around them—which is why I think the films have such a hypnotic quality. And there is also a suggestion of magic at the oddest moments in Tourneur’s work. Look at the scene in Out of the Past where Dickie Moore saves Robert Mitchum by hooking the arm of the man who’s trying to kill him with his fishing line and yanking him to his death. Tourneur films this scene in a unique way—where any other director would have pumped music into the background and cut to close-ups of a struggle, Tourneur lets us listen to the rushing water of the river below and shoots the action mostly in long shot, giving it a strange, dreamlike inevitability. He’s one of those directors whose work renews your enthusiasm for movies—whenever I look at one of his films on tape or on screen, I remember why I wanted to make movies in the first place. The craft, taste, and extraordinary fluid artistry of his cinema makes most other movies look bloated and synthetic. Tourneur said in 1977, the year of his death: “I always did what I wanted. I never turned down a script.” His refusal to acknowledge a contradiction between these two propositions suggests why the division between stylists and directors with a worldview, fundamental to Andrew Sarris’s auteur system, is irrelevant to Tourneur. The typical Tourneur narrative is full of confusion and ambiguity, signs that point in no clear direction, and messages that circle back on the sender. The director’s narrative and stylistic choices constantly underline absence and distance. Significant events take place offscreen or before the start of the film; exposition is omitted or, when needed, made empty or incomprehensible, so that the motives of characters, even the protagonists, remain mysterious to the audience. Tourneur’s films revolve around communications that are misunderstood or blocked: “The Incredible Stranger” and Out of the Past both feature mute characters. Tourneur loves situations that allow him to present characters and story ambiguously. Like Ford, Tourneur edited with the camera: “It’s an old editor’s habit. I always shoot so few shots that the producer can’t do anything other than what I filmed.” If Out of the Past seems in some ways like a typical film noir, this is only because Tourneur’s constant preoccupations—the unreliability of appearances, the helplessness of people to resist their obsessions and avoid

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becoming the victims of an apparently impersonal fate—are also those of the genre. Tourneur places these concerns within a context marked by his realism, humanism, and love for aesthetic fascination and mystery. The film constantly calls out attention to the ambiguity of external behavior, a strategy that causes us to perceive the characters as possessing greater depth and mystery than those of most films noirs; we sense that they have thoughts, feelings, and qualities that they hold in reserve. Let’s list the prototypically “noir” features of Out of the Past, without analyzing (since this task has been done exhaustively) the significance of the features to the genre or worrying whether they are rigorously described: 1) a first-person voice-over narration (for, at any rate, part of the film); (2) a sense of the inadequacy of American “normal life” and economic and social institutions to contain the threat, or compensate for the attractions, represented by the “noir” world of crime and passion; (3) a preponderance of scenes that take place at night and in cities; (4) the use of certain visual patterns, especially emphasizing the presence of dark areas in the frame; (5) a private detective as hero; (6) a femme fatale; and (7) the entrapment of the hero by a fate that finally destroys him. Out of the Past exhibits some of these features in what might be called their classical forms but uses them for artistic purposes. Others it turns against themselves. Regarding first-person voice-over narration, Out of the Past preserves the convention of having the hero recount past events—which are shown in flashback accompanied by his voice-over—to another character, in this case Ann, while the two are driving from Bridgeport to Lake Tahoe. Since Ann is Jeff’s girlfriend, and since the story he tells is concerned with his relation with another woman, addressing the narration to Ann has a certain shock, which the film does not mitigate, but rather consciously underlines by returning briefly to the car in the middle of the flashback, allowing us to see Ann’s reaction. . . . Some essential features of noir style, as defined by Place and Peterson, are either absent or deemphasized in Out of the Past. Tourneur and Musuraca never use the wide-angle lens for grotesque close-up effects, nor do they favor close-ups in general, particularly the “obtrusive and disturbing” choker close-ups often use in films noirs. Whereas many noir directors deprive the viewer of spatial orientation by avoiding establishing long shots, Tourneur (like Hawks and Walsh) almost invariably favors such shots and almost never resorts to the shock effect created by cutting between long shot and close-up. Finally, if Place and Peterson’s contention that “camera movements are used sparingly in most noir films” is granted as valid, Out of the Past must be counted a major exception (and so

must the films noirs of Preminger, Ophuls, and Welles). This film humanizes its femme fatale (the sixth noir feature). Ann could be speaking for Tourneur when she says about Kathie: “She can’t be all bad. No one is.” Jeff’s reply—“She comes the closest”—is characteristically hardboiled and at the same time revealing. Kathie approaches being “all bad.” The difference that remains, however small, is the measure of what in her is still human and irreducible to formulae like “femme fatale”; it is also the measure of Tourneur’s permanent refusal to judge his characters.

Roger Ebert on Out of the Past (18 July 2004): 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

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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 never seen it?" "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 smoke at each 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 knows and 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

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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 is still fascinated 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 novel Build My Gallows High by "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?

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2016 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXIII:

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Sept 27 Yasujiro Ozu Late Spring 1949

Oct 4 Joseph L. Mankiewicz All About Eve 1950 Oct 11 Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita 1960

Oct 18 Orson Welles Chimes at Midnight 1966 Oct 25 Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling The Drums of Winter 1977

Nov 1 Hal Ashby Being There 1979 Nov 8 Brian De Palma The Untouchables 1987

Nov 15 Norman Jewison Moonstruck 1987 Nov 22 Andrei Tarkovsky The Sacrifice 1986

Nov 29 Alfonso Arau Like Water for Chocolate 1992 Dec 6 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck The Tourist 2010

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with

support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.