Out of the Past

This is one of the best film-noirs ever made and I think I should have seen it before. Sometime last year in Chicago a double bill of Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, both directed by the same Jacques Tourneur, played at the music box theatre which I missed. I am going to hunt them down now. I hope they are available on DVD. Though a movie so moody and atmospheric like Out of the Past should only be seen on big screen. This is really a fantastic film.

Robert Mitchum plays the archetypical hero with such effortless abandon that it seems that he is sleepwalking through his role. His trademark droopy eyes (look at the picture above) and his lethargic, laid-back persona were made for playing these kinds of roles. Kirk Douglas, the other hyper-masculine long-nosed hero, is electrifying too. He doesn't have much of a role, it was only his second film, but the way he delivers those crackling trade-mark noir dialogues just sizzles on screen. And of course the best of the lot is Jane Greer in what must be the greatest femme fatale ever in a noir. Just look at how the poster maker has painted her in the portrait. I don't think it is from the movie but it captures her personality so well, specially the way she is holding the gun and the way she is looking. In my opinion, she handsomely beats Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. She is unbelievably beautiful and so alluring is her persona, that you think perhaps doom is all worth it!

Very entertaining and not only that, it is the kind of film which carries with it an entire world-view, a way of looking at the world, and convinces you that it is indeed the right way to look at it. Rent the DVD today if you haven't already seen it. I think it is much better than Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon or even some other top-notch noirs. I still have to see a lot of films from that period though.

P.S. A Deluxe edition DVD of Double Indemnity is out this week. Enthusiastic thumbs up from Green Cine and some qualified praise from New York Times:

Wilder, who had as little interest in visual expressiveness as Jackson Pollock had in figure painting, remained a literary filmmaker to the end of his career, relying on such stock techniques here as endlessly repeated lines and situations (how many times will MacMurray light Robinson's cigar for him before the gesture has a dramatic payoff?) and a condescending approach to his audience that led him to spell out everything in large capital letters (compare Stanwyck's blatant, vulgar sexuality in Double Indemnity to Jane Greer's elusive femme fatality in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past).