Entertainment
HBO Max Officially Has This 10/10 Film Noir Starring an American Movie Icon
During the heyday of the film noir genre in 1947, Out of the Past was released in the United States, but it may have been difficult to parse it out from the litany of other films revolving around hard-boiled protagonists and murder mysteries in the wake of The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. Emerging from the end of World War II, the subgenre reflected the American postwar malaise and rotten core of the nation amid the patriotic celebration of the defeat of the Axis Powers.
No noir embodies the sense of disillusionment and general melancholy simmering beneath the surface quite like Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur‘s movie that cemented the iconography of a noir legend, Robert Mitchum. Now available to stream on HBO Max, this cult classic will hook any genre neophyte into a noir obsessive, with its moody atmosphere, striking photography, and inventive use of genre tropes.
Robert Mitchum Became a Noir Icon in ‘Out of the Past’
Based on the novel Build My Gallows High, Out of the Past tells the story of Jeff Bailey (Mitchum), a gas station owner whose troubled past returns when his old enemy, gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), reemerges with his femme fatale mistress, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). With the energy of a thriller and the mood of a ghost story, Out of the Past represents the pinnacle of Jacques Tourneur, renowned for suspense films like Cat People and The Leopard Man.
The studio, RKO Pictures, struck gold with the casting of the relative newcomer Robert Mitchum, an actor seemingly born to play a tired private eye. His hangdog expression and sleepy eyes characterize the wear and tear of noir protagonists in over their heads and yearning for a better life down the road. Mitchum’s recognizable attributes seen in Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear are at their most raw as Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past, whose gaze alone enhances the film’s rich dramatic tension. Despite its potentially irresponsible portrait, no one has ever looked better with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth than Mitchum, prompting Roger Ebert to honor the film as “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Puffs of cigarette smoke create a dusty, shadowy aura and convey the gloomy psychological state of its characters.
‘Out of the Past’ Cemented the Trademarks of the Film Noir Genre
A noir with the emotional tenor of a melodrama, Out of the Past is a swooning portrait of lost dreams, love, and the agony of regret. Classic noirs antagonized the American city as a den of sin and violence, especially Jeff’s former stomping ground of New York City. However, the film wisely doesn’t glorify that quaint beauty of Jeff’s current hiding spot in this rural town, as the same daunting, haunted energy that clouds each room in a typical noir looms large, signaling that the days of innocence are long gone for Jeff and the country at large. Jeff’s tortured past as a private eye entangled in the wrong case reflected the American mindset following WWII’s conclusion, with many families moving away from cities and into the idyllic suburbs. Despite the veneer of starting over with a brand-new life, Jeff can’t escape the horrors of his past.
Beautifully crafted interior and exterior locations and richly acted by Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and the relatively unknown Kirk Douglas at the time, Out of the Past is the quintessential noir, and its roots can be traced in future classic noirs of the ’50s like The Big Heat and modern neo-noirs like Shutter Island. While its contemporaries of the genre were deeply cynical, Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece has a heart of gold, but much like its protagonist, it’s been worn down by the punishing outside circumstances. Whether it’s the canted angles, clouds of smoke, or sultry femme fatales, indulging in noir tropes is always an immersive experience, but Out of the Past‘s sympathy for Jeff makes you wish that he could escape the confines of this movie and settle down.
Out of the Past is also a calling card movie for Robert Mitchum, a classic Hollywood icon often overshadowed by peers such as Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, and Burt Lancaster. Equally cool and disturbed, Mitchum’s performance as the haunted gas station owner who paid the price by being a dutiful private eye is stripped of all the theatrical conventions of classic Hollywood acting, but without the self-conscious rule-breaking of method acting. Despite its successors heavily cribbing from it, the film always feels inventive, raw, and unbridled.
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