I don't know if I've stopped paying attention at the crucial moment of every film noir I've ever seen, or if the films really are plotted too complexly for my little brain to follow, but I've finally seen a prototypical film noir where I actually knew what was going on.
Now, I've seen a number of noirs for this series that I don't consider prototypical noirs, where the story was no problem. But as soon as one person starts double-crossing another person who's already double-crossing another person, my brain sort of shuts off.
That's how Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was structured, but you know what? I could follow it. I could figure it out. I could stay oriented within the story.
Maybe there's hope for me after all.
Or maybe there's hope for film noir.
If I had to surmise why this is, I'd suggest it might have something to do with the presence of familiar faces. Sure, Humphrey Bogart is a familiar face, and there have been similarly familiar faces in other films I've seen. But the two male co-stars of this 1947 film, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, were both still working well into my career as a cinephile. Heck, Douglas only just died last year. So in some real ways they feel like my stars, not hand-me-downs from a previous generation, and I guess that makes them somehow more relatable.
So with a little bit of investment in the stars, and a little bit of kindness from screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (adapting his own novel Build My Gallows High), I finally got everything I want from noir in one tidy, 97-minute package: star wattage, clear and present noir tropes, and a story that didn't make my head ache.
There's definitely some narrative finesse going on here, but I do think this story is also less complicated than my shining example of noir narrative confusion, that being The Big Sleep. Because I'm accustomed to giving you a little plot synopsis here, let's get on with that.
Mitchum's character (Jeff Bailey, later Jeff Markam) is living an idyllic life in small-town California outside of Lake Tahoe when his old life catches up with him. (In fact, I think David Cronenberg's A History of Violence must have drawn some inspiration from this.) He's involved in a chaste romance with a local woman (Virginia Huston) and runs a local service station. But what he used to do was work as a private investigator, and he took a job tracking the girlfriend of a crime boss (Douglas) from New York to Mexico. She fled after shooting him and taking off with $40,000 of his money (or so he tells Jeff), and Jeff has accepted the contract to bring her back. Only, when he finds the woman, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), he falls for her, and they devise plans for a new life together.
That of course goes awry, which we know for several reasons, one of which is that Jeff is telling this story to his current girlfriend (Ann by name) in flashback as he goes to meet Whit Sterling (Douglas) a second time, years after the original story. This can't end well for Jeff.
The other reason we know it went awry is that Kathie Moffat is pretty much the femme fatale to end all femme fatales. Her powers of seduction over Jeff and over the audience are clear. During the section of the film set in Acapulco, I conveniently forgot that she was wanted for two serious crimes (attempted murder and theft) and wondered if Out of the Past was not going to turn out more like a sweeping romance than a film noir. See, that's the thing about a good femme fatale -- you are powerless to resist her suggestions because she's just so enchanting. And so was I enchanted by Greer's Kathie, I suppose.
I didn't take a lot of notes on Out of the Past but I did take down one choice bit of dialogue that Jeff uses to describe Ann, during one of the moments when her spell on him is broken. He says to her "You're like a leaf floating from one gutter to another," which is kind of a perfect description -- it not only encapsulates her beauty (I think we think of a leaf as something beautiful) but also her changeability, her willingness to sell out one side to the other depending on what is in her best interests. But wherever she lands, it's a gutter.
The film has a number of twists and turns from there that I don't need to get into here. But, as I said previously, I was able to follow them, and that was just a dynamite feeling.
I liked the cast quite a bit beyond Mitchum, Douglas and Greer, but since I've already spent a few words on her, I owe them the same. There's an interesting switcheroo here between those two, in my experience of them as performers. Douglas is usually the dashing hero -- think Spartacus -- while Mitchum is the creepy figure of menace -- think Night of the Hunter. Here they're reversed, and they both do the thing the other one is known for quite well. Of course, both of those films were still distant on the horizon at this point. It's kind of hard to believe that Douglas wouldn't make Spartacus for another 13 years, as I think of him as being fully in his prime on that film, while he's already supposed to be a person of power and influence here. It's kind of hard to believe he's only 31 here and would be 44 in Spartacus.
The thing I liked about Mitchum is that, although you can rely on him for some quippy retorts, he's not the type of remote, inaccessible figure that I find most noir heroes to be. He shows some soul here, some moments of world weary frailty, not just sneer and snark.
Technically speaking, Out of the Past makes for an interesting noir entry because while it does hew closely to noir tropes, it doesn't spend much time at all in urban environments. There are scenes in both New York and San Francisco, but rural Mexican and Lake Tahoe adjacent locations are more the norm. However, Tourneur cleverly uses the noir trope of shadows on characters' faces quite effectively, only he uses more rustic shadow-throwing shapes when the nearest venetian blinds are hundreds of miles away. One memorable scene between Jeff and Ann occurs in the woods, with the moon throwing the shadows of tree branches on their faces.
In fact, the use of lighting is extremely compelling overall in this film. I can think of a number of shots where the light falls on a character's face in just such a way, illuminating one of the two speakers while throwing the other in the dark. Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography is just one of this film's exceptional technical elements.
I think I could go on with Out of the Past, but I also think this is a good place to stop.
However, I will say that noir never fails to be consummately noir. Even though I mostly followed it, I did read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterward, just in case.
Four more installments of this series, and still plenty of choices left, so we'll see where I go from here in September.
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