Broken Promises

On Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum, Jacques Tourneur, and a notion of film noir

Out of the Past usually shows up near the top of “best noir films” and is held as one of the key movies of the cycle. It is certainly among my favorite movies made anywhere, anytime. A quick confession: I don’t like to use the term “noir” much; I usually avoid it as much as I can, often opting instead for the more open “post-war crime thriller.” It is not even as much because it is an after the fact critical category (I’m very fine with screwball comedy, for instance), but because of how much it feels nowadays as an industry packaging term: throw the label “noir” in front of any movie regardless of quality and pedigree, and you can present them to an unsuspecting audience who wants the cheap thrills with some vague respectability. A weird proposition, as some of the best things about these movies, at least the original recipe, are that there is very little that is respectful about them. Anyway, Out of the Past is a great movie; if you never get around to it, you should.

One thing that stands out is how superficially at least it hits a lot of the usual checklist. Very fatalistic atmosphere, very complicated plot, a sense of exploitation, and few options available for everyone, Jane Greer plays a devious woman whose schemes doom every guy she meets, and Robert Mitchum’s private eye is so hopeless around her that it barely qualifies as a spoiler to say this movie has a bleak ending. Yet, I never feel like Out of the Past fits the label quite in the way that, let’s say, Double Indemnity does. It is too strange and ethereal, less fatalistic as it is taken by an idea of loss; the studio came out with the title, and it makes sense as the movie remains haunted by every past action. Mitchum is a guy who would like to do right but seems stuck in a moral murk; the world around him is either too corrupt or too easy to allow for a moral instance.

In some ways the most important character in the movie is the most boring one: Mitchum’s girlfriend, played by Virginia Huston. She is the audience for Mitchum’s backstory in the first part of the movie when we learn how he originally got involved with Greer’s gangster lover, and she comes back to the two scenes that bookend the violent climax, first to ask him about how he really feels about Greer (Mitchum’s delivery of “well, she comes the closest” after her claim that no one can be that bad is the movie’s most noirish moment) and then in the epilogue when she again wants reassurance about what had been his intentions. She is there as an appeal to normalcy that the movie hopes to achieve even if it is constantly denied. The large ellipsis when Mitchum rebuilds his life as a small-town business owner is where its heart remains. It doesn’t really play into it as any sort of idyll; there is always something off about the town, but an imperfect escape is still a desirable outcome. Mitchum is the reverse of the audience, a movie character who desires boredom.

The movie is famously hard to follow, but it is arguably straightforward. It is a two-part narrative that is quick started both times by Mitchum getting recruited by gangster Kirk Douglas; first he has to retrieve his girlfriend, and in the second, some documents. He falls in love with the girlfriend in the first part and quickly understands he is there to be framed in the second one. Lots of things happen offscreen, and characters’ motivations can be hard to read, which adds to the sense that it’s a labyrinth, but the main thrust of the narrative is clear: Douglas and Greer are there to tempt Mitchum, who would really rather do the right thing but has a hard time saying no.

Greer’s Kathie is a wonderful character. She is written very much in the female fatale mode, calculated and scheming sex appeal, but her performance has very little to do with Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. There is no removal in her work, quite the opposite. Greer plays the part like she is an actual romantic lead, and that makes the difference. The first part depends on the idea that Douglas wants her back despite her shooting him and stealing 40k, and it mostly earns us going along with the idea of men being willing to do that for her and not because they are just idiots. She is much less famous than her costars, so one tends to associate her with Out of the Past, and she is in many ways the movie’s most memorable figure. Director Jacques Tourneur was always good with faces for secondary roles, and Out of the Past is packed with those, especially the mute boy who is the keeper of Mitchum’s motivations.

In Chris Fujiwara’s great book on Tourneur, “The Cinema of Nightfall,” he talks about how RKO nearly did the movie with Dick Powell and how Humphrey Bogart tried to get Warner to loan him for the part and concludes about how it is impossible to imagine the movie with anyone but Mitchum. Fujiwara has a nice quote from Tourneur about how Mitchum was the rare actor who knew how to listen to his co-stars without seeming like he is just hanging there. Given that this is a movie about a very passive guy who is pushed forward by others, that certainly helps. Mitchum is known as one of Hollywood’s great tough guy action stars; he could be very scary when cast in villain roles but also had a sad dignity to him that was perfect for a movie like this. There is a forgotten movie he did in the early 70s called Going Home that I often think about in which he plays a wife killer who gets released from jail, His son makes clear he should just drop dead for what he did, and Mitchum just goes along, creating some resemblance of life without asking the audience for any sympathy, a bad man who did bad things who, regardless, has to go on with his life. He is perfect in that part, and he is perfect in Out of the Past, for a lot of the same reasons.

Tourneur was a great visual stylist, and he and cinematographer Nicholas Masuraca make Out of the Past look very beautiful. It has little of the expressionist idea most people have about noir; it is not a movie about heavy shadows or evil surfaces. Instead, we get very expressive grays, a seductive world in which it is very easy to get lost in the murk. Movies rarely exist in a vacuum; a couple years later, RKO reunited Mitchum and Greer in a crime romp called The Big Steal. It is a long chase inside Mexico that has nothing in its head besides some action scenes and romantic banter. A young Don Siegel directed that one, and it is pretty fun, I do find it very amusing how the movie keeps playing with the audience’s expectations that Greer will turn out to be very bad when she isn’t. It is pure Hollywood fluff, which does highlight Out of the Past’s more charged exploration of morality.

Jacques Tourneur’s career is split in two parts. He was a contract director at RKO in the 40s and a freelancer in the 50s. He is usually described as a B-movie filmmaker, but that isn’t exactly true, at least not in the late 40s when Out of the Past was made. Although his budget did go down a lot throughout the 50s. A paradox of Tourneur’s career is that the two movies he is most famous for, this one and the original Cat People (1942), are associated less with him but with film noir and producer Val Lewton’s early 40s horror cycle, respectively. In my experience the Tourneur hardcore fans often prefer his 50s movies, although I’d say that save for Stars in My Crown (1950), my personal fave, and Annie of the Indies (1951), I think his best work was for RKO, the two famous ones, plus I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Canyon Passage (1946). I’ve seen Out of the Past get dismissed from time to time by the Tourneur faithful. Probably because it doesn’t quite belong to them. It is a shame, because it is such a hauntingly filmed burial that only Tourneur could have made.

Indeed, there is a 1980s remake called Against All Odds, and it is not good. I imagine that director Taylor Hackford loved the movie, and he had just made the extremely successful An Officer and a Gentleman and had carte blanche to do what he wanted, but the movie ended up in development hell. It is grotesque and defanged, and one can see every script note coming from the Columbia executives to make sure it would go down easy. Even more than The Big Steal, it feels the reverse of Out of the Past; it doesn’t even have a past for the main character to try to escape from. That movie remains in the popular imagination only because of the Phil Collins title song, one of those things that never left the radio, and the movie’s one sort of good scene is the final one, when Jeff Bridges in the Mitchum role (no one dies in this version, of course) watches the woman he is in love with from a distance while the Collins song kicks in; there is a sense of desperate, unachievable romantic longing in it that does resemble Out of the Past. It is a feeling that exists parallel to noir fatalism, a promised romantic future that Mitchum’s character seeks and knows can only be denied. The movie’s tragedy is his own understanding of that reality. “There’s a way to lose more slowly.” He says things like this quite often, through it, a paradise that was wanted and forever refused.