Out of the Past / Build My Gallows High (1947 Jacques Tourneur)

As tense a film noir as you'd expect from the director of Cat People (e.g. great scene in Acapulco when Douglas suddenly turns up), in which honest private eye turned garage owner Robert Mitchum is invited to go back to the past by muscle Paul Valentine. Flashback told to girlfriend Virginia Huston relates how former employer and crook Kirk Douglas hired him to locate girlfriend Jane Greer, who skipped with forty K after trying to kill him. Mitchum follows her to Acapulco and falls for her on Nick Musuraca's day-for-night beach, where she claims not to have taken the money...

Great terse, sardonic dialogue (one of the film's major assets) and twisty, inexorable (a word that is just right for noir) story by Geoffrey Homes from his own novel (also the film's alternative title, above), underscored by the prolific Roy Webb, in which the deaf and dumb kid Dickie Moore proves undeniably useful and delivers the film's last great lie.

Also with Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie.

My May 2012 review says that Musuraca shoots San Francisco exteriors like Hopper - I wish I'd read that before this screening as I completely missed it! Good tonal range in exteriors.

I don't really know Greer though she was reteamed with Mitchum in The Big Steal, and in later life appeared in the film's 80s remake Against All Odds, and Twin Peaks. She lies at every turn and is without any redeeming features - our archetypal film noir anti-heroine, in fact.