Artist Out Of The Past
A collective of B-movie stalwarts—director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People), writer Daniel Mainwaring (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), and unproven leading man Robert Mitchum—were thrown together in perfect alchemy for 1947’s affecting film noir Out Of The Past. Drawing on his own troubled, persistently self-destructive history, Mitchum plays the owner of a small-town gas-station whose attempts to stake out a new life fail when his past comes back to haunt him. When he’s summoned by Kirk Douglas, a menacing gambler with an old score to settle, Mitchum recalls his days as a private eye, when Douglas hired him to track down mistress Jane Greer, a cool seductress who shot him and ran off to Mexico with $40,000. The film’s gorgeously melancholic tone owes much to Mitchum’s smoldering persona, but it’s also distinguished by the complexity of Greer’s femme fatale, who both ensnares the hero with her wiles and is herself tragically ensnared by fate.
Updated 10/21/2009
