Out of The Past Aka Build My Gallows High [DVD]
Curious tale of a private eye who is hired by a villain to find his homicidal girlfriend. But the story takes a twist when he tracks her down and promptly falls in love with her.”Build my gallows high, baby”–just one of the quintessentially noir sentiments expressed by Robert Mitchum in this classic of the genre. Mitchum, in absolute prime, sleepy-eyed form, relates a complicated flashback about getting hired by gangster Kirk Douglas to find femme fatale Jane Greer. The chain of film noir elements–love, money, lies–drags Mitchum into the lower depths. Director Jacques Tourneur gets the edgy negotiations between men and women as exactly right as he gets the inky shadows of the noir landscape (even the sunlit exteriors are fraught with doubt). This is Mitchum in excelsis, with his usual laid-back cool laced with great dialogue and tragic foreshadowing. As for his co-star, James Agee immortally opined that Jane Greer “can best be described, in an ancient idiom, as a hot number.” Remade in 1984, unhappily, as Against All Odds (with Greer in a supporting role). –Robert Horton
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The past is always with us,
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Jacques Tourneur is the director of “Out of the Past” (originally released in the UK as “Build My Gallows High”). A French emigre whose first films were early talkies made in Paris, he’s another director who shows the influence of European Cinema on Film Noir. The quiet petrol pump attendant with the past could just as easily have been Jean Gabin as Robert Mitchum. Prior to these movies he made very superior low-budget horror – Cat People The Cat People/The Curse of the Cat People [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], I Walked with a Zombie I Walked With a Zombie/The Body Snatcher [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], and The Leopard Man. From “Cat People” he brought the great cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who also worked on “The Spiral Staircase”) and there is something of the horror genre about the filming of this convoluted tale, where you never know what you will find behind the door when you open it.
The plot is extraordinarily complicated, and at the core of it are two questions – who do you really love? Who do you really trust? Mitchum’s tragedy is that these are not the same person, but he goes with the love, and it is the death of him.
This was the making of Mitchum, but it has to be said that this is more than anything else Jane Greer’s film. I don’t think there is another film noir where we feel the hero’s love, pain and confusion about the “heroine” so much as in “Out of the Past”. She makes us believe what she says, we want to believe her, because we believe her back story. There’s a bar in Acapulco where they play American music “I go there sometimes” she says, wearily, and we immediately imagine her there, lonely, alluring. We wonder what else she does – she hints at much, much worse. The face is extraordinary: black, black eyes, a full mouth that has done its share of dirty doing. She is above all Knowing, and in the movie it is her business to know things and find them out. Good girl – bad girl, the eternal dilemma. And Greer is way, WAY bad. She was only 23 when she made this movie, but she knows how to indicate that she’s been round the block and back.
Mitchum inhabits this, his first real major starring vehicle, with the world-weary charm which became his trademark, which I think he found for this role for the first time. We know from the start, when the past returns, that he will be trapped and there is no way out for him. The one moment when he has second thoughts, when he pretends he can’t start the car to escape, Greer overrides him and starts it herself. She is literally a femme fatale, and she WILL take him down with her. Because love is always dangerous and doomed.
There are so many good lines here: “A woman with a gun is like a man with a knitting needle”. (To Greer, in a bad moment) “Get out of this room, I have to sleep here”. “I don’t want to die – Neither do I, but if I have to, I’ll die last.”
If Greer and Mitchum are perfect, Kirk Douglas in his first role as the villain Whit Sterling is less so. He smiles and smiles, but he seems to lack the ferocity necessary to the part. Besides Greer he is pale and uninteresting in his villainy, and tax evasion has never been the most glamorous of crimes.
Greer and Mitchum were teamed again in “The Big Steal”, in which she shines and he doesn’t. She was a unique talent and a feisty girl (defying Howard Hughes to marry a man 20 years her senior), and she deserved better from subsequent films. But this is a wonderful memorial.
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|One of the best film noir,
Finally available on DVD, I saw this on BBC2 a few months ago when they ran a season of late night b/w noir films.
Although not one of the best known this is easily one of the very best noir films. Robert Mitchum is perfect as the weather beaten anti-hero and he seems to really relish his slouchy role, which I think is a big influence on the Bruce Willis character in last year’s Sin City.
If you liked The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly etc. then this one is definitely for you. I’ve ordered and am looking forward to a chance to see the great film again…
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|Classic Mitchum, classic noir,
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Robert Mitchum was made for black and white movies and the noir genre. Here, the lighting captures his features mesmerically, like the extraordinary shadowed beauty of a moonscape. And then there’s the voice, slow as sarsaparilla, deep as a honey jar … just as smooth, but 140 proof! Mitchum’s is a very physical presence, a very physical style of acting, but unforgettable.
Told in flashback – hence the title – there is plenty of opportunity for Mitchum to narrate the story, using that voice to carry you along. For a film actor, he has a voice which would have made him a radio star. Director Tourneur clearly understands this and builds on the visual and audio strengths of the production.
Geoff Bailey (Mitchum) is fleeing his past by hiding in a small town, miles from nowhere. His past, in the form of Kirk Douglas, catches up with him. His past also takes on the shape of the femme fatale, Kathy (Jane Greer). Douglas is wonderfully malevolent – there is a dual of the dimpled chins as he and Mitchum indulge in confrontational banter.
It starts out as a simple story, maybe even a love story, then twists like a trenchcoat belt. Mitchum chainsmokes his way through. Will he get the girl, the homespun Anne, the small town girl next door who is so enamoured of him, or will his past suck him back down?
Mitchum is built for a trenchcoat – he wears it in precisely the way Columbo can’t. The story hangs about his central character in much the same way. It fits his acting and his presence perfectly. A superb example of the noir genre, a film you can watch and watch.
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