Crankenstein requested another old movie tonight and I selected Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, a quintessential noir she hadn’t seen before. There’s not much need to get into its plot, which exemplifies the genre. The title gives you the gist of it: Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Markham, a former gumshoe who got mixed up with the wrong dame, can’t leave the past alone. By the end, a steep price has been paid by many.
As Kathie Moffat, Jane Greer is one of the great femmes fatales. We know — and Jeff knows — that Kathie’s rotten from the start, but who doesn’t like a challenge?
When the golden age of the screwball comedy came to an end in the mid-to-late ’40s, your snappier noirs picked up a lot of conversational slack. Mitchum excelled at the genre for many reasons, including those sleepy eyes and how nicely he filled out a suit. But above all else, he could banter with a concrete wall.
If I wanted to be buried, “Baby, I don’t care” — Jeff’s cynical reply when Kathie asks if he believes her — would make as good an epigraph as any. Most who know me away from the Internet would tell you I have a serviceable bullshit detector, but the balderdash that I’ve believed from “very difficult girls” over the last 25 years or so tells a different story.
If I’m ever a parent, one of the first things I’m teaching any kid on the cusp of puberty is “Avoid entanglements with anyone who romanticizes the gutter.” That’s a tough one to learn from experience.
We might as well cue up Tango in the Night, because you want her to lie to you. The beauty of Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography here is breathtaking. He also collaborated with Tourneur on Cat People.
“Build my gallows high, baby” is almost as good as “Baby, I don’t care.” It’s also a decent way to propose.