Out of the Past - all the reviews (1947 Jacques Tourneur)

Delicious dialogue like in roulette scene:

"Is there a way to win?"
"Well there's a way to lose more slowly" -

and "You're like a leaf that blows from one gutter to another" -

and the definitive "Baby, I don't care" (which is the title of Lee Server's Mitchum autobiography).

The downbeat outcome is most welcome and appropriate.

Child actor Dickie Moore was not deaf and dumb. He's also in Heaven Can Wait as the fifteen year old version of Don Ameche. And he had the distinction of giving Shirley Temple her first on-screen kiss in Miss Annie Rooney in 1942. He also wrote a book, 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (but don’t have sex or take the car)', in which he interviewed other child actors, including Natalie Wood and Peggy Ann Garner, about their experiences. His favourite actor was Barbara Stanwyck in So Big, but the actor most of the kids responded well to was Spencer Tracy.

Theresa Harris (Baby Face and IWWAZ) and Caleb Peterson

27 May 2023:

Don Macpherson in 'Time Out': 'Superbly crafted pulp is revealed at every level: in the intricate script by Daniel Mainwaring (whose credits for Phenix City Story and Invasion of the Body Snatchers need no further recommendation), the almost abstract lighting patterns of Nick Musuraca (previously perfected in Cat People and The Spiral Staircase), and the downbeat otherworldliness of Jacques Tourneur (only equalled in his I Walked With a Zombie). All these B movie poets were under contract to RKO in the winter of 1946, and produced the best movie of everyone involved...'.

Which is nicely put, but not quite the whole story. Mainwaring adapted his own novel 'Build My Gallows High', which then James M. Cain rewrote, simplifying the flashback structure and 'removing every last shred of lovability from the femme fatale'; Tourneur then had suggestions, and RKO script doctor Frank Fenton finally removed some of Cain's excesses and polished the whole thing, writing new dialogue for nearly every scene (I trust Lee Server's impressively researched book on Mitchum for this material).

Which also provides interesting stuff about Musuraca, who had found that if he was overlighting a scene, it was because one initial light was badly placed or adjusted, and once you'd fixed that, you could then take lights away and simplify everything. "It was so dark on the set, "said Jane Greer, "you didn't know who else was there half the time".

Anyway, despite not being a critical or commercial hit at the time, it's still fabulous. With Mitchum (who Tourneur loved for his ability to listen) are Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Paul Valentine (good as hood), Virginia Huston (nice GF), Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb (nice guy back home), Steve Brodie (partner), Dickie Moore really good as deaf kid, Ken Niles (Eels).

Mitchum listening and thinking, in long take with Kirk Douglas

I love this lighting because I'm not sure how it was done. Is it really that match flame?

6 August 2020:

Classic noir, serpentine and dangerous as a snake in a bad mood.

It begins with the camera in the back of the seat - three years before Gun Crazy - just saying. (I seem to be a bit fascinated by this - see this post, for example.)

Daniel Mainwaring's other screen credits include The Big Steal, This Woman Is Dangerous, The Phenix City Story and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Funnily enough, like Restless, our preceding film, it's about someone who's been keeping low for years but then is found and drawn back into the past.

Shot by Nicholas Musuraca, music by Roy Webb, nice direction of mood by Tourneur.

With great moments of tension, Hopperish lighting and snappy dialogue it's a perfect alignment of talents.

I don't know if it had a higher budget than some of the RKO features but it does move around artfully all over the place - San Francisco and Acapulco are stock shots, of course, but we do seem to be in Tahoe, Nevada, Reno, Sierra Nevada Mountains. But in fact it's clever location filming: it was actually just filmed around Bridgeport in the Sierras and back at RKO.

Now I've another thing to study next time - Eddie Muller points out that Musaraca is not lighting in total chiaroscuro but using fill lights to detail some of the interior backgrounds - have to look out for that. Doesn't apply to his Hopper touches, above, of course. It is beautifully shot.