Out of the Past

Screening on Film

Directed by Jacques Tourneur.
With Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas.
US, 1947, 35mm, color, 97 min.
Print source: Library of Congress

If Cronenberg's A History of Violence is still on your mind, don’t miss this classic noir, which begins by catching up with Jeff Bailey (Mitchum), a “retired” private detective once mixed up with a gangster (Douglas) and his girl (Greer) and now playing a peaceable gas station owner in a small California town. Tourneur, still fresh off his early 1940s horror hat-trick (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man) wrings this tale of betrayal (based on Daniel Mainwaring’s novel Build My Gallows High) out of the most unlikely of noir settings: the white heat of the Mexican sun and the wooded streams and glorious homes of the High Sierra Mountains and Lake Tahoe.