漩涡之外

Title: Out of the Past

Year: 1947

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Screenwriter: Daniel Mainwaring, based on his own novel

Music: Roy Webb

Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca

Editing: Samuel E. Beetley

Cast:

Robert Mitchum

Jane Greer

Kirk Douglas

Virginia Huston

Ronda Fleming

Paul Valentine

Steve Brodie

Richard Webb

Dickie Moore

John Kellogg

Frank Wilcox

Ken Niles

Mary Field

Theresa Harris

Rating: 7.6/10

Mitchum plays Jeff with a very pleasurable air of insouciance, self-assurance and inscrutability, his towering, barrel-chested figure looms as a mountain of untouchable, hard-boiled masculinity, but against the grain, Jeff is not a trigger-happy aggressor (he doesn’t even carry a gun in his precarious line of work), in fact, in OUT OF THE PAST’s cobwebs of schemes, betrayals and murders, Jeff barely hurts an ant, the only time he resorts to physical violence, it is a mano-a-mano brawl with his acquisitive former partner Jack Fisher (Brodie).

So the dirty work is carried out by others, and prominently by our top-line femme fatale Kathie Moffat (Greer), the moll of gambling kingpin Whit Sterling (Douglas, in his second film role, playing a civilized second fiddler with adequate charm). Kathie is a glamour puss who doesn’t flaunt her sexual allure, in the scenes where she and Jeff meets for the first time, she ekes out an affable knowingness that can drive a man crazy, she can be seeming deadly sincere like a fool in love, but the fool is Jeff from the very start, he is her chance to start anew, with a tough guy like Jeff, she can feel secure. Kathie never look vicious, even in her deadly action, she is well-poised, rational, acting nothing is the matter. She is also adept in playing the helpless and the vulnerable, imploring and wheedling Jeff to save her skin. Greer imbues Kathie a refreshing ambiguity, not about her personality (she is “cold around her heart”, using Jeff’s own words), but her exterior impression, she is the dame worth dying for, that’s exactly the case of Jeff, and audience can sympathize with both.

If the plot doesn’t fittingly cohere, as in most film-noir confections, there are full of sheer coincidences and schematic occurrences, the second half is pretty discombobulating and one incident involving a fishing-line does beggar belief, Tourneur is a virtuoso in building up the look of a tautly structured drama with seedy, double-crossing goings-on. Still, the most tectonic legacy of OUT OF THE PAST is Mitchum’s rakish, unflinching, impenetrable persona, defining a type of supreme masculinity that would hold sway for decades and whose vestigial trace we can still get a whiff of today.

referential entries: Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE (1942, 7.0/10); Charles Vidor’s GILDA (1946, 7.3/10).