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Out of the Past (billed in the United Kingdom as Build My Gallows High) is a 1947 American film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas.
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
Out of the Past, American film noir, released in 1947, that is widely recognized as a quintessential example of the genre.
Jeff Bailey (played by Robert Mitchum) appears to be an ordinary gas station attendant in a small California town. When he is called to a meeting with the slick gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), however, Bailey is forced to reveal to his girlfriend (Virginia Huston) that his real name is Jeff Markham and that he is, in fact, a private detective. In an extended flashback, Jeff retraces his history with Whit, who years earlier had hired him to track down Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). According to Whit, Kathie had been his girlfriend but had shot him and taken off for Mexico with $40,000 of his money. Upon locating her in Acapulco, Jeff found himself immediately enchanted by the seductive baby-faced Kathie—a classic femme fatale—and soon ran off with her to San Francisco. When Jeff’s disgruntled business partner (Steve Brodie) eventually found the couple and attempted to blackmail them, though, Kathie fatally shot him and then disappeared.
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The film then shifts to the present, and Jeff discovers that Kathie has returned to Whit, to whom she has confessed the affair. To make it up to his former client, Jeff accepts a job retrieving some income tax records with which a lawyer, Leonard Eels (Ken Niles), is threatening to blackmail Whit. The mission is quickly revealed to be a ruse, however, with Whit planning on killing Leonard and pinning the murder on Jeff. The intricate plot that ensues ends badly for Jeff, Kathie, and Whit: all three characters end up dead, shot either by each other or by the police.
Out of the Past is often ranked among the greatest film noirs ever made. Director Jacques Tourneur, previously known for such B-grade horror films as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), received high praise for his teaming of Mitchum and Douglas, and Mitchum’s laconic performance in particular has been hailed as one of the best of his career. Although Geoffrey Homes, whose pulp novel Build My Gallows High (1946) provided the film’s source material, was officially credited with the screenplay, his draft was substantially rewritten by both James M. Cain and Frank Fenton. Against All Odds, a loose remake, was released in 1984.
•Studio: RKO Radio Pictures
•Director: Jacques Tourneur
•Producer: Warren Duff
•Writer: Geoffrey Homes (pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring)
•Music: Roy Webb
•Running time: 97 minutes
•Robert Mitchum (Jeff)
•Jane Greer (Kathie)
•Kirk Douglas (Whit)
•Rhonda Fleming (Meta Carson)
- Lee Pfeiffer
With Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming. A private eye escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up with him. Now he must return to the big city world of danger, corruption, double crosses, and duplicitous dames.
- (41K)
- Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
- Jacques Tourneur
- 1947-12
Jul 18, 2004 · “Out of the Past” (1947) is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a town, with a new job and a new girl.
Out of the Past is a film that launched Robert Mitchum’s career and his portrayal of the laconic, indifferent ex-private eye with an air of an experienced man nothing could possibly surprise, consciously treading along the path of his self-destruction, set a new standard.
Dec 30, 2021 · Out of the Past was one of about 360 feature productions made in Hollywood during 1947. It was released into a booming market in which 90 million Americans were paying admissions each week at 19,107 theaters to create domestic revenues of $1,565 billion.
Out of the Past (1947), (aka Build My Gallows High, its title in Britain), is one of the greatest, multi-layered film noirs of all time. The downbeat screenplay was based on Geoffrey Homes' (a pseudonym - his real name was Daniel Mainwaring) 1946 novel Build My Gallows High, a book that consciously imitated Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon ...
