The Brattle’s year long film noir retrospective settles into the summer with a focus on female screen villains. Most of the film noir category contains some necessary femme who, if not fatal, is at the least quite dangerous, and so this series boasts some of the greatest hits. Opening this section is Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). The title alone serves to both transport us into the b-movie renaissance of RKO Pictures and as a cryptic signifier of the fatalism of the noir genre. One can never escape one’s past and it’s darker tendencies always lurk in the prodigious shadows.
Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, a former hoodlum freelancer trying to make an honest living and settle down with an honest girl (Virginia Huston). The redemptive romance subplot quickly becomes only a minor distraction. Bailey ran afoul of a gangster named Whit Sterling, played with simmering intensity by Kirk Douglas, in a botched private eye job. Bailey also ran off with Sterling’s girl Kathie, Jane Greer acting angelic or insouciant but thoroughly cunning and treacherous. Also Kathie shot Whit which he’s sore about, also $40,000 was stolen, and then there’s tax fraud and extortion and blackmail and murder and so a lot of the noir boxes get checked. But the plot is a taut and playful series of false moves and betrayals and that’s most of the fun. That and watching the principles trade coolly tossed-off barbs and dress each other down with effortless verbosity. Mitchum’s almost somnambulant indifference against Douglas’ clutching, grasping control both buffeting Greer’s feigned helplessness.
Tourneur and cinematographer Nichlas Musuraca set the story amidst deep pools of darkness and hard-edged brilliance. While Out of the Past flirts with the light and dark moralizing it also posits and more ambivalent attitude. While the film certainly sympathizes with Bailey’s desire to leave crime it also sabotages this expectation. As Bailey tells Kathie at one point, “You’re no good and neither am I, that’s why we deserve each other.” It doesn’t get much more fatal than that.
Out of the Past
1947
dir. Jacques Tourneur
97 min.
Screens 7/11 and 7/12 – Click here for showtimes and ticket info
Part of the ongoing series: 75 Years of Film Noir, Part 6: Femmes Fatale
Double feature with Angel Face (1953) dir. Otto Preminger
