Jacques Tourneur is the guy who made Cat people, some kind of horror movie I watched many years ago but that has stuck in my mind; I vaguely remember a strange, thrilling and rather elusive build-up of the plot. Out of the Past belongs to another genre - noir - but it also has that strange thrilling propulsion. The details of the story make my head spin. Double-double-crossing. Tangles of events and relations and temporal levels and a heap of thugs. But the basic framework is pretty standard stuff of the genre: guy wants to free himself from his shoddy past. Settle down, lead a peaceful life, find a girl. BUT past stuff comes to haunt. There's the woman. And the small town. And crime! The hero is the unlucky, slightly gullible/self-destructive guy whose fate is finally sealed. This guy who seem to unconsciously love trouble is Robert Mitchum's seemingly honest citizen who sets out to start a new life in a small town. But turns out the man has a past as a private eye, and then he gets involved with old stuff - a femme fatale robbing a gangster, his former love life and the catastrophic acts that love life lead him into committing - and, you know, one thing leads to another. He just can't stay away from that gangster woman who once brought him into trouble. The dizzyingly plentiful details may not be interesting. The film is driven by its elusive pulse, its evocative locations and its ridiculously hard-boiled lines.
The gender politics of Out of the past is suspect, to say the least. The impossibly icy and evil urban femme fatale is compared with the kind-hearted, innocent rural girl. Mitchum's ex-private eye is of course erotically involved with both. And it doesn't take much thinking to see which woman the film itself sides with. But you, dear movie-lover, will fall for Jane Greer's tough-girl style. The look on her face when she points that gun - !
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