Out of the Past

It begins in the California Sierras, folds back to New York and Acapulco and San Francisco, then drifts onward to a Lake Tahoe roadblock, always with the irresistible flow of a dream. (The intricate structure is scarcely appreciated by the police officer, who grumbles like a blindsided reviewer: "Too many people. Too much talk.") The gas station owner (Robert Mitchum) was once a gumshoe, desire and betrayal catch up to his small-town sanctuary, a tale recounted on a late-night car ride. The gambling gangster (Kirk Douglas) hires him to locate "the wild goose with 40 Gs," she (Jane Greer) emerges out of the Mexican theater and into the café to set up the poetic leitmotif. ("And then I saw her, coming out of the sun ... And then she walked in, out of the moonlight.") The runaway couple's affair is launched under sailboat nets and exalted by monsoons, it passes through a tangle of blackmail and murder before the final hail of bullets. "Well, build my gallows high, baby." The film noir apex is an extension of Val Lewton's lambent death-drive—the uncanny calm with which Jacques Tourneur lays the grids turns the chump's fall into a perverse three-way dance, crystalline to the point of obscurity. (Working with Nicholas Musuraca, he composes not in blocks of shadow and smoke but in gradations of suspended morality.) Mitchum, not yet thirty but already the weariest of hepcats, and Douglas at his most jovially pugnacious face each other like somnolent-avid totems of postwar masculinity, Greer has doppelgängers of her own in the resolved sweetheart (Virginia Huston) and the come-hither secretary (Rhonda Fleming). Observing from the sidelines is the deaf and mute youth (Dickie Moore), the impassive Tourneur lurker whose fishing-pole swing provides a startling and graceful frisson. "Is there a way to win?" "There's a way to lose more slowly." If The Big Sleep is the genre's supreme marriage fantasy, here is its icy-hot Liebestod. With Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Paul Valentine, and Ken Niles. In black and white.