Out of the Past

Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) is regarded by critics as a quintessential film noir. In my view, this genre designation, although useful as short- hand, is meaningless. The concept was invented by the French; in American parlance, it is apparently an artifact of Paul Schrader’s (and others’) ability to read Cahiers du Cinema in its original language. Unlike the western, no one set out to make a film noir. Studios didn’t produce films in this alleged genre intentionally. The term is applied to a certain kind of American crime melodrama, made during a certain period (1941 or 1946 to 1956 or later, depending on the writer)), shot in black and white on low-budget and typically derived from pulp thriller material – Hitchcock’s suspense thrillers in the fifties would be film noir, I suppose, but they are in color and made on big budgets and so, no one thinks of them as belonging to that category. And how would you characterize a film like The Manchurian Candidate, which meets almost all criteria for noir but isn’t identified with that genre? Or Roman Polanski’s Chinatown sometimes called neo-noir or, for that matter, a political thriller like Boss (reviewed above) or Alan Pakula’s Parallax View (with any number of paranoid thrillers shot in the late sixties and seventies – Coppola’s The Conversation, for instance). The point is that this genre category is so broad as to be essentially useless. In my view, genre should be regarded as defined by intent. John Ford intended to make films that were within the genre of the Western. Jacques Tourneur, when he directed Out of the Past, had no such intent – in fact, his model was probably something on the order of Raul Walsh’s High Sierra, the crime film with Humphrey Bogart that the movie, more or less, resembles. Out of the Past is mostly purely pleasurable. Mitchum is fantastic as the doomed gumshoe hero, trapped in a web of intrigue by the film’s femme fatale, Jane Greer. He narrates most of the story as an elaborate flashback, told to his virtuous girlfriend in the course of a long drive from Bridgeport, California to Lake Tahoe. Charleton Heston in an early role is effective as a sinister gangster; he lives in a big chateau overlooking Lake Tahoe that seems to have influenced Hitchcock in his design of the Frank Lloyd Wright-style mountain resort where James Mason and his henchmen plot mischief in North by Northwest. The film is exquisitely shot and lucidly staged – Tourneur is a master of moving his characters through rational, well-defined, but somehow, dreamlike spaces. All of the minor actors are pitch-perfect and everyone speaks a snappy epigrammatic free-verse – William Carlos Williams as a gangster, a form of short, elliptical demotic poetry. The plot is too intricate to make sense but the secret of success in a film of this kind – Hawks succeeded in the same way in The Big Sleep – is to make each sequence completely lucid, suspenseful, and rational. In this way, the audience is distracted from the fact that the story itself, viewed as a whole, doesn’t make much sense. Mitchum’s character is completely mysterious and his motives are wholly veiled – he has no past and no future. As an example, he seems to have a close relationship with a deaf kid, a symbolic figure that leads us into (and out of) the film –but why and how he knows the kid, and how he has learned sign-language so that he can communicate with the mute is enigmatic. The deaf kid’s silence embodies the film’s predominant motif – there are signs everywhere, big palisades of words defining people and places, but we can’t tell exactly what they mean. The signs are adrift, cut off from meaning, just as Mitchum’s weary tough-guy character is an icon that should signify something but which evades clear definition. Out of the Past is exceptionally well-made and entertaining. It’s weakness is that it derives from such tawdry, shabby stuff – paper-back sex and violence thrillers that entertained our grandparents – that there is really nothing behind the glitter and the lethal-looking glamour. Tourneur’s strength is to suggest that there is something deeper and more interesting behind the play of shadows and light, but, of course, that hidden depth is illusory – the surface suggests profundities that don’t exist.