Out of the Past (1947)

Tonight's selection:

(1947)

"All women are wonders because they reduce all men to the obvious. 

And so do martinis."

Jeff Bailey is just your everyday gas station owner. 

He keeps mum about his past, both with his girlfriend Ann (whose parents strongly disapprove of him) and with his deaf-mute assistant "The Kid." One day, though, a former business associate drives through town and recognizes Bailey as he's working the pumps.

Joe persuades Bailey to come up to Lake Tahoe and see their old mutual boss, Whit Sterling, for whom Joe still works.

Bailey decides to take Ann with him, and on the way, he opens up about his past life. Years ago, Sterling hired Bailey, who was then private detective "Jeff Markham", to track down and return his estranged wife, Kathy. Kathy shot him twice and left him for dead and ran off with $40k. Sterling doesn't care about the money; he just wants Kathy back. 

"I don't understand."
"When you see her, you'll understand."

Bailey/ Markham agrees, but he tells his partner Fisher (Steve Brodie) he's doing this one alone. Fisher doesn't care, so long as they split what Sterling's paying. Bailey locates Kathy in Acapulco and - wonders never cease - immediately falls in love with her. 

He double-crosses Sterling and runs off with Kathy to San Francisco.

Everything's cozy and great until they're spotted by Bailey's old partner, Fisher, who follows them into the mountains and confronts them. He wants his cut of the old deal. Kathy shoots him dead and flees. Despondent, Bailey takes up his new life as a gas station man of mystery. 

After Bailey finishes his story, Ann promises to wait for him while he goes to Tahoe. Sterling welcomes him into his home and assures him that the past is the past. 

Bailey is skeptical.

The big surprise comes when grapefruit is served and in walks Kathy. She's told Sterling everything. Sterling uses this leverage to have Bailey do a little favor for him: go to San Francisco and see about getting his hands on some tax documents that implicate Sterling with defrauding Uncle Sam out of $1m of undeclared income. The papers are in the possession of a lawyer, Mr. Eels. Feeling he has no choice, Bailey agrees.

He's put in touch with Eels' secretary, the extravagantly named Meta Carson.

After talking with the soft-spoken Eels, however, in a wonderfully awkward scene, Bailey begins to suspect that Sterling has set him up for a frame: he intends to have the lawyer killed and pin it on Bailey. Bailey warns Eels, but he's unable to prevent his murder. 

Although he is unable to prevent Eels's murder, He discovers Kathy was in on the frame, having signed an affidavit naming Bailey as Fisher's murderer back at the mountain lodge.

Now the target of a police manhunt, Bailey has to play everyone against one another for a chance to get back to Ann and clear his name. But - as foretold by the doomed tone of voice of Bailey's voiceover narration throughout the film - it's not meant to be. Kathy kills Sterling, and Bailey agrees to flee to Mexico with her. He deliberately drives into a police stake-out and the bullets fly. 

Out of the Past is one of the more popular film noirs. It's easy to see why. The performances are great, the scenery's great, all the film noir boxes anyone could want to look for are checked, and   it's a very accessible picture. It's easy to follow even when it takes its twists and turns.

Part of its appeal is undoubtedly the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. As always, museum-painting perfect, particularly when paired with director Jacques Tourneur. 

THE CAST

I always feel a little odd trying to come up with things to say about guys like Robert Mitchum. What more is there to say? He's Robert Mitchum. Here's a brief tutorial, specific to Out of the Past. On a side note, I think only Sam Rothstein from Casino or Rick Blaine from Casablanca smokes more cigarettes than Bailey does in this film. Some kind of cinematic record. 

I'm not quite as enamored with Ms. Greer as everyone on-screen, but she's certainly a bad-ass femme fatale. I don't think I've seen her in much else, actually. Of her classic stuff, I mean - I remember her from Twin Peaks and other TV of that era. She's great here, to be sure. 

The once and future "Queen of Technicolor."

I checked out Kirk Douglas' autobiography from the library a few years back. It was overall enjoyable, but what I remember most was one anecdote he told about how he set out to seduce thirty women in thirty days. He failed, and it sent him spiraling into depression. "I had failed as a Man." Ever since I project this on his every performance and chuckle to myself. But I'll be damned if doing so here doesn't cut to the quick of Sterling's character and role in the psychodrama. Which conforms to a theory I have on all great actors: they circle the same thing in their psyche from performance-to-performance.

Special shout-out to Paul Valentine. All too often the enforcer-guy in these things tends to the over-the-top (perfumed bullets, theatrical routines, mother fixations, etc.) But Stephanos is actually somewhat sympathetic. It'd actually be interesting to tell this story from his point of view, and I wonder if someone has done this, actually, disguised as another film. This nose smells a mystery!

Jacques Tourneur, one of the jewels of the RKO crown, especially when paired with Musuraca, was given considerable resources to make Out of the Past, and he wielded them perfectly. Ed Dmytryk was originally slated to direct, but a scheduling conflict made that impossible. Tourneur got the job on his recommendation. 

"What was left of the day went away like the pack of cigarettes you smoked."

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His Kind of Woman (1951)

"Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense."

- Manny Farber, reviewing the film for his pick as one of the best films of 1951

His Kind of Woman was originally directed by John Farrow, but producer Howard Hughes brought in Richard Fleischer to add a few shots. Then, Hughes co-wrote a new ending with Fleischer, and then Fleischer ended up reshooting the entire film, during which the leads (Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and most especially Vincent Price) took the liberty of revising their own dialogue. 

Eh?

Any film with such a convoluted journey to the finish line is likely to be uneven, and this one certainly is - but gloriously so. Its unevenness almost certainly elevates His Kind of Woman to a film noir classic rather than just an enjoyable slice of noir with a great cast.

The film begins with an exiled-to-Napoli American gangster (Raymond Burr) being assured over the short wave that the plan to get him back into the States is underway.

Ten thousand miles away, professional gambler Dan Milner (eternally cool Robert Mitchum), has just finished a thirty day stretch in the Big House.

After strangers threaten him over a debt he never acquired on a bet he's never placed and rough him up when he doesn't cooperate, Milner is made a strange offer: head down to Mexico for a year and lay low and further instructions will follow. This will disappear the trumped-up gambling debt, and he'll pocket $50K for his troubles. Milner agrees - with trademark "Hey it's your nickel, fella" body language from Mitchum - and off he goes to Mexico. 

While waiting for further instructions just over the border, Milner meets Lenore Brent (Jane Russell), a singer, in the bar near the landing strip and chats her up.

Turns out they're headed to the same place: Morro's Lodge, on the southeastern coast of the Baja California Peninsula.  

Lenore is meeting Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price), a married actor with whom she's having an affair. Cardigan's all-consuming narcissism will serve the plot well in the third act.

But, in true every-quirk-to-serve-the-plot fashion, said narcissism will come in handy for everyone.

Everyone hangs around just looking cool for most of the second act.

Milner tries to suss out the mystery of the hoods keeping tabs on him, while Lenore keeps making his head snap (or the Robet-Mitchum equivalent of this) with strategic flirting, surprise How-did-you-get-in-heres and grand entrances.

G-man Bill Lusk (Tim Holt) flies into the resort in the middle of a hurricane under guise of a maverick-drunk-totally-not-Howard-Hughes-playboy-type and kicks things into high gear when he heps Milner to the real reason he was sent to Mexico: as face-fodder for Ferraro, the exiled gangster. Fellow resort guest Krafft (John Mylong) is the plastic surgeon that Ferraro hired to help him surgically burgle Milner's face.

Crazy as it sounds, this has a tenuous connection to plausibility. Allegedly this sort of duping-someone-to-steal-their-face scheme was why Lucky Luciano moved to Cuba in his unsuccessful (at least while breathing) hope to move back to the United States.

Milner is kidnapped by the baddies and brought aboard the gangster's yacht. He escapes and is able to alert Cardigan, who seizes the opportunity to become the Shakespeare-quoting over-the-top real-world bad-ass his screen persona has always imagined himself to be. He organizes an assault on the boat, while Milner is gratuitously and excessively beaten, left to die (sort of) in the steam room, and even threatened with an experimental Nazi brain damage serum. 

The bad guys all die, Cardigan reconciles with his wife, and Milner and Lenore, after coming clean with one another, fade-to-banging. 

"You could be a handy thing to have around the house if a man went broke."

As mentioned in Drew Morton's review of the film for Pajiba: "The oddest and most rewarding characteristic about His Kind of Woman is the complete tonal reversal it exhibits. The first half of the film is a fairly typical noir plot. However, once Dan gets kidnapped by his malevolent benefactor and held hostage on an off-shore boat, it shifts to a bizarre comedy, with Mark Cardigan emerging from the supporting peanut gallery as Dan's savior, commandeering a sinking row boat and shouting down his crew's incompetency with the line 'Alas, why must I be plagued by yammering magpies on the eve of battle?'"  

The just-mentioned rowboat scene is a gag right out of a silent film.

When he insists on pushing the overloaded boat from shore, it immediately sinks under the weight of his hubris.

Primarily, though, Vincent Price's character (Mark Cardigan) sells the film. Something which may have initially upset Mitchum - Price later wrote that he thought Robert Mitchum was disappointed in the film "because if he had known about (Hawks emphasizing) the comic tilt, he would have played his character in a lighter vein." It does make things a little uneven. But it's a tonal 180 ("it bifurcates," as mentioned here; perfect word choice) that works for me. Like the switch in tone from Tarantino (the first part) to Rodriguez (the second) in From Dusk to Dawn. 

Really if the only reason this film exists is to dress a send-up of self-obsessed actors in film noir clothes, that's justification enough. (Tropic Thunder might even owe some conceptual debt to it, though I've not seen anyone else make this connection so perhaps I am overreaching.) Easily one of the most outrageous of all his performances. 

Mitchum and Russell are the leads, but no one could be faulted for referring to His Kind of Woman as a Vincent Price film.

As for the rest of the cast:

Some familiar faces from other noirs we've covered here, namely The Killer That Stalked New York (Bela Oxmyx) and The Asphalt Jungle (Thurston Howell III).

Voice actor Paul Frees (a personal favorite) has a rare onscreen cameo as one of the heavies waiting for Milner at his apartment at the beginning.

And finally, Harry Wild, the cinematographer for Murder My Sweet, The Big Steal, and other noir classics, last seen in these pages for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, does his usual excellent job. 

This film even features an impressive uncut sequence following a shapely server around the lounge and pool in much the same manner as we saw in Kiss Me Deadly.

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