Movie Review – Out of the Past

Out of the Past (1947)
Written by Daniel Mainwaring
Directed by Jacques Tourneur

RKO Pictures was once one of the big Hollywood studios, and now it’s gone. Radio businessman David Sarnoff and his company RCA merged with a theater chain and film booking company to form this all-in-one studio. They were always considered makers of low-budget fare, but that didn’t stop RKO from making its mark on cinema. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers’ song and dance career bloomed at the studio, and Katharine Hepburn saw her first screen success at RKO. The studio was the home of Val Lewton’s innovative horror experiments like Cat People. RKO’s most well-known productions are still King Kong and Citizen Kane, pictures that have created ripples through world cinema today. They produced It’s A Wonderful Life and even much of Walt Disney’s early work. After a series of takeovers and buyouts, the company’s body of work lies mainly under the control of Warner Discovery. Out of the Past is a standout of their many influential pictures due to its perfect encapsulation of so much of the film noir tropes. 

A man appears in the quiet town of Bridgeport, California, searching for Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum). Jeff is a relative newcomer to the town but has owned the local service station for a few years. His visitor is Joe, who tells Jeff he needs to head to Lake Tahoe to meet with “Whit.” Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann, is confused about what is happening, so he takes her for a ride one night to tell his story. Bailey’s real name is Markham, and he used to be a private investigator in New York City. 

Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a gambling kingpin, hires Jeff to track down his girl Kathie (Jane Greer), who just ran off with $40,000. Whit promises he doesn’t want to hurt her; he just wants to recover his money, but Jeff can see through that lie. He travels across the country and finds her hiding at a hotel in Acapulco. Jeff confronts Kathie about the money, but she convinces him to help her stay in hiding lest Whit kill her. She confesses that she shot Whit but never stole any money, and Jeff believes her. If you’ve ever seen or read a noir story, you know where this is likely headed.

Director Jacques Tourneur was an RKO stalwart, mainly as the director of Val Lewton’s horror pictures like Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. Those horror bonafides prove valuable in its cousin, the noir, as Tourneur brings brooding menace and looming shadows into this work. The monsters are not vile creatures emerging from the mire but human beings doing awful & brutal things to each other. Many critics consider Out of the Past the quintessential noir because of its bleak & cynical outlook on the human experience. The hero is a man who makes every wrong choice you could think of, wholly convinced it will work out somehow. He’s placed between a sadistic, wealthy man and a desperate, manipulative woman. There’s no winning in this scenario, and the story plays out with the sort of nihilism you might expect.

A staple of the noir genre is the flashback. Protagonists are often introduced at a point where their fates are already decided. All they can do now is look back and try to understand how they ended up at this point. Robert Mitchum’s hangdog face is perfect for this role, a guy who fell for tricks he should have seen through right away. Why does he make these dumb choices? He wants to imagine he can have a life different from just being a private eye, wallowing in the misery of people’s broken lives. We see this is the life he sets up for himself in Bridgeport. He’s running a service station, going to fish, dreaming of a life with his girl. But we don’t get happy endings in film noir, and Jeff will not be an exception. 

In this way, Jeff & Kathie feel like a fated pair. She’s a woman coming up in a period where women and their role in American society is dramatically shifting. During World War II, women started working outside the home more frequently as part of the war effort. For many women, this was a dramatic paradigm shift and was the sort of thing you couldn’t bottle back up. Kathie also likely suffered due to the Great Depression, which drives her hunger to grab what she can and hold on, even if that means lying and manipulating. In the minds of the writer and male audiences, Kathie loomed as their fear of what women were becoming. Today, we continue to see male insecurity when a woman is empowered in any way, revealing a belief that freedom & autonomy are finite resources in the minds of these men. Jeff is just as desperate to escape as Kathie, which makes her such a tempting person in the first place; they could run together and be happy. The wedge between them isn’t their genders but the crippling anxiety that comes with being poor and constantly struggling for scraps.

Kirk Douglas as Whit is a terrifying presence. He’s constantly smiling in a manner that projects a welcome hand and a desire to do harm. Douglas was only thirty-one years old, but he casts a gravitas far beyond that. He feels like someone very established, a man in control of many people with a lot of money. He uses friendliness in the same way Kathie uses her sexuality; they are methods to lure people in and trap them. When Jeff decides to betray Whit, you can’t help but feel your stomach sinking in dread. There is just no imaginable way this sociopath is going to let Jeff get away with taking his money. 

Out of the Past, like Double Indemnity, is a film entrenched in the most well-known aspects of noir. That doesn’t mean it comes off as cliche. Jacques Tourner and crew can add so much to the surface story through film technique. The psychological elements are at the forefront of Jeff’s journey down a road he knows will end in his destruction. How could it ever be any other way? He knows this, yet never tries to turn back, behaving like this was his destiny all along. He would always fall for someone who would sting him and be destroyed in the wake of it. This is the core thesis of all film noir: “Most of our lives aren’t even under our control, and the parts that are get fucked up by the poor decisions we make.”