Counting Down the Greatest Crime Films of All-Time: # 8

Otto Penzler ranks, analyzes, & celebrates the 106 greatest crime films of all-time. Catch up on the series and find new installments daily here.

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Out of the Past (1947)

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TYPE OF FILM: Noir

STUDIO: RKO

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Robert Sparks

PRODUCER: Warren Duff

DIRECTOR: Jacques Tourneur

SCREENWRITER: Geoffrey Homes (pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring)

SOURCE: Build My Gallows High, novel by Geoffrey Homes

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

PRINCIPAL PLAYERS:

Robert Mitchum………………………………………………………………Jeff Markham/Bailey

Jane Greer…………………………………………………………………..………Kathie Moffett

Kirk Douglas…………………………………………………………………………Whit Sterling

Rhonda Fleming………………………………………………………………………Meta Carson

Richard Webb……………………………………………………………………………………Jim

Steve Brodie……………………………………………………………….……………Jack Fisher

Virginia Huston…………………………………………………………………………………Ann

Paul Valentine………………………………………………………………………….Joe Stefanos

Dickie Moore………………………………………………………………..………deaf-mute boy

Ken Niles……………………………………………………………………………………..…Els

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DID YOU KNOW?

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Robert Mitchum became RKO’s biggest male star with his role as the laconic private eye in Out of the Past, but he almost didn’t get the part. It had been offered to Humphrey Bogart, the actor who Daniel Mainwaring, the screenwriter, had in mind while adapting his book for the screen. But Bogart, who was enthusiastic about the film, was under contract to Warner Brothers, who wouldn’t agree to loan him out to RKO.  The role was next offered to John Garfield, who turned it down, as did Dick Powell, whose career was on the rise after he switched from singing to becoming a tough guy in Murder, My Sweet (1944). Mitchum, under contract to RKO, had played supporting and starring roles in numerous films, notably in The Story of G.I. Joe, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and another noir classic, Crossfire (1947), but this role catapulted him to stardom.

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THE STORY

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Private detective Jeff Markham is hired by gangster Whit Sterling to find his girlfriend, Kathie Moffett, who has fled, taking $40,000 of his money with her. Jeff tracks her down in Mexico and falls for her. While he sends telegrams to White informing him that he can’t find her, he and Kathie begin a torrid affair and he believes her when she swears she didn’t steal the money. They leave for San Francisco to begin a new life, but they have the bad luck to be spotted at a racetrack by his former partner in the detective agency, now hunting him and Kathie for Whit.

They try to shake Fisher, the detective, but he follows Kathie to a mountain cabin and attempts to blackmail them for a cut of the $40,000. Kathie icily and needlessly shoots him, fleeing to leave the corpse and the blame on her lover.

Jeff moves to a small town and opens a gas station under the assumed name of Bailey and he gets engaged to a schoolteacher, Ann. One of Whit’s henchmen finds him and summons him to meet the boss. As Ann drives him to the meeting, he tells her the sordid tale of his past and vows to put it all behind him and come back to her.

When he arrives at Whit’s place, Kathie is there and White gives Jeff the chance to make up for his double dealing. Steal some tax records from Whit’s former accountant, who has threatened to go the Feds, and they’ll be square, Whit assures him. Jeff senses a double cross and learns that Kathie has signed an affidavit pinning the murder of Fisher on him. He steals the tax papers, finding the accountant dead as he is set up for the murder, but he gets away and offers to trade the incriminating documents for the affidavit. When Jeff shows up for the switch, he finds Whit dead, shot by Kathie. “You can’t make deals with a dead man, Jeff,” she tells him. “Don’t you see, you’ve only me to deal with now.” “Then build my gallows high, baby,” he replies. As they drive together, a police roadblock confronts them and Kathie realizes that Jeff had turned her in. She shoots him, and a hail of police machine gun fire kills her as the car crashes through the roadblock.

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If any one film could be said to epitomize the term film noir, Out of the Past would be it. The tough hero who is doomed for love of the wrong woman; the treacherous femme fatale who double-crosses every man she meets; the inevitability of the past resurfacing to assure violent death; the night, when everything seems to happen so commonly that daylight seems an intrusion; gangsters; nightclubs; jazz; bright lights; deep shadows; a good woman lost; dialogue that sounds like pulp poetry—all of it and more can be found in Out of the Past.

The author of the screenplay, Daniel Mainwaring, using the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes, adapted his own novel, Build My Gallows High (the title under which the film was released in England), and little changed except the ending, in which Whit’s henchmen do the killing. After the first draft had been completed, Mainwaring went on to another project and the producer decided to spiff up the script and gave the rewrite job to James M. Cain, who was paid $20,000 or $30,000 for his work. Instead of doing a rewrite, however, he threw out the entire script and wrote a different story entirely. Mainwaring was then called back to polish the initial script.

Jane Greer, the worst bad girl in all of film noir, was known as the girl with the Mona Lisa smile, because her face was set in a perpetual gentle smile—the result of a bout with Bell’s palsy when she was young.

The scene to watch is set in Mexico, as Mitchum sits in a little cantina, and Greer strides in out of the sunlight, through shadows. She is wearing an off-white dress and big straw hat to match. Mitchum sees her, and he (and the viewer) knows he is doomed.

The 1984 remake was titled Against All Odds starring Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward, which was more explicitly steamy than the original. As remakes go, it was pretty good, though without Ward it probably would have been a flop.

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BEST LINE

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Jeff/Bailey, speaking to Kathie Moffett, the girl who has inevitably caused his doom: “You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.”