Out of the Past (1947)

 

If I were 30 years younger, I might become obsessed with this movie. Now, though, my thought was more like, "Where have you been all my life?" An astounding movie that pushes the film noir genre to its logical extreme. I could not believe my eyes when I saw it for the first time last night. Never even heard of it -- can you believe it?! 

How extreme, you ask? When it comes to the femme fatale, this femme is most unapologetically and unrepentantly fatal. Jane Greer's character, Kathie, is not fundamentally different from other female villains of this type, but her depth of badness is almost unrivaled in all of English-language cinema, except perhaps Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct." Her power comes as much from her beauty as from the purity of her evil. It's so delicious as to be revolutionary. (One of these days I have to write something about the importance of bad women.) 

And then the complex plot. The highly stylized dialog is faithful to the hard-boild pulp tradition but a tad more dense than average, perhaps even more so than "The Maltese Falcon" or "Double Indemnity." Plotwise it is more elegant and, although complex, more logical and believable than the aforementioned two classics. I felt a happy tingle down my spine when Robert Mitchum's Bailey muttered to himself in the taxi, "It's a frame." The merciless pacing nearly broke my neck. Plotting is a lost art in modern American cinema. I have not seen anything on par with this plot since "LA Confidential." (Sorry Rian Johnson. Your mysteries are but child's play in comparison.) 

Finally, there's the cinematography. I expected the typical shadows and lights, but I did not expect them to be toyed to this extent. The night scenes and the day scenes; the indoor scenes and the outdoor scenes. Every scene is ever so slightly more stylish and more intense than the best noir I have seen. I had to pause the streaming to check that it was indeed made in the 1940s, because it is so full of expressionist images that I thought surely it had to be a decade or two later. The images feel meta; they feel like a distillation of the very best techniques in all film noir, years after the entire treasure trove has been savored, digested, and transformed. 

I grew up on Raymond Chandler, who, despite his glorious prose, is too sentimental. This I have to admit at my crusty old age. "Out of the Past" is nearly entirely unsentimental about human lust and greed, but it does not work too hard to be performatively cynical, either. Nobody is a patsy, not really, which distinguishes itself from Dashiell Hammett's tendencies. Every time the plot appears to drift dangerously into a genre convention, the scene cuts away on the cusp of cliche. The only discordant note was Bailey's non-femme-fatale girlfriend Ann, who threatens to ruin the movie's realism with small-town American wholesomeness ... or so I thought. The ending, however, completely subverted my expectation and wrapped up the movie's ultimate perfection.