Out of the Past (1947)

Many reviewers declare the 1947 Robert Mitchum film, Out of the Past, to be the definitive example of American film noir. Though I enjoyed the film, I felt it was too lighthearted and contrived to earn the title.

Maybe I'm just not a Robert Mitchum fan. Rather than being tough or cunning, Mitchum's laconic style presents a character who is more weary than driven. The cynic in me believes that he was cast because his bedroom eyes would make the female members of the audience swoon when he kisses the girls. I prefer my films to be hard-boiled, not harlequin romances, thank you.

By far, my favorite aspect of this film is the cinematography. The opening is shot on location is Bridgeport, California, a small town in the eastern Sierras. I've stopped in Bridgeport many times on backpacking trips, and it's the real deal. Many of the buildings seen in this film are still standing. We are also treated to scenes in the back country, as well as south Lake Tahoe.

Contrasting the beauty of the Sierras are the night scenes in San Francisco, which are wonderfully dark and ominous. But my favorite scenes were shot in Acapulco. Clearly, this film had a solid budget.

The budget was used not only for travel and locations, but for the cast. In addition to Mitchum and Greer, we are treated to Kirk Douglas as an obsessed and crooked magnate, Rhonda Fleming as a con woman, and Virginia Huston as the innocent "good girl."

The acting is solid, but somehow I didn't buy the some of the key decisions by the characters. In the substantial back story, detective Jeff Bailey (Mitchum) is hired by Whit Sterling (Douglas) to track down "his" girl, Kathie Moffat (Greer.) Jeff finds Kathie in Acapulco and falls in love. Rather than complete his job, Jeff throws Whit off the trail and runs away with Kathie to San Francisco. It was hard to believe that our smart, trustworthy detective could be manipulated so easily.

It's not hard to hate the Kathie character, but it's not so much because we truly believe that she is evil. It's that she seems to make consistently evil, even if stupid, decisions. I hated her more for being a dummy than for being truly driven from within.

That said, this film has great noir dialog, like when Kathie says, "Oh Jeff, you ought to have killed me for what I did a moment ago", and Jeff responds, "There's time."

There's also a solid plot. Years after Jeff ran away with Kathie and lost her, he is discovered hiding from his past by one of Whit Sterling's men. Jeff is then blackmailed into doing a job for Sterling, but it's a setup. Sterling wants the job done, but he still wants revenge against Jeff.

It's a solid film that is generally well reviewed. I'll give it a seven of ten, despite my misgivings. It has a 96 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and gets 8.1 on IMDB. If you like Robert Mitchum and don't mind some contrived romance in your film noir, you'll love this film.