by Walter Chaw
Out of the Past (1947)
U.S. & Canada: rental only
Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is believed by some to be, if not the best, at least the quintessential example of film noir. Screening it for the kids is a wonderful excuse to dig into it. I seized this opportunity to introduce the “big, dumb question” with which I usually inaugurate all of my post-film discussion programs and seminars: “What is this movie about?” We’ll return to that after the movie. In introducing Out of the Past, I asked them to remember the previous night’s The Night of the Hunter and the Preacher: That actor, Robert Mitchum, didn’t always play psychotic, switchblade-wielding men of the cloth.
I asked them, too, to keep an eye out for examples in the film where someone is framed in a way that made their characters seem trapped. In a close stairwell, perhaps; maybe against fishing nets, or through a gate that resembles a cage. They’d both seen Strangers on a Train, so I reminded them of the scene where Guy joins Bruno behind a gate across the street from Guy’s apartment when the news comes down about his wife’s murder. Until that moment, see, Guy is innocent. Thereafter, he’s stained by Bruno’s guilt. Tourneur, a veteran of Val Lewton’s atmospheric horrors, is a master of light and shadow, and there’s a whole story being told here outside the dialogue.
But then, there always is.
- What moments did you notice where a character was “trapped” by the camera and the objects placed in the frame with them?
- Who were they? What was happening in the story at the moment of their entrapment?
The particulars of what constitutes noir were finally defined by the French in the 1960s. I mentioned that most of the great American directors were not considered “great” at the time. Many, such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang, were considered to be genre directors and therefore not “serious” filmmakers. The French, with their legendary film-criticism journal Cahiers du Cinema, gave our pulp back to us in the form of a cultural legacy.
- Why was a film like Out of the Past considered “low art” in 1947?
- What are the elements of film noir, do you think, based on what you observed in Out of the Past?
This should lead to observations about the dangerous Kathy (Jane Greer) and the introduction of the term “femme fatale,” or “deadly woman.”
- Why were there “deadly women” in film noirs? What had just happened in the world in 1947?
- If WWII had just happened, what would Robert Mitchum’s character be in this film, most likely?
- If he’s a veteran of war, what do you think happened to him? What happens to people who go to war behaviorally? How does it change the way they see the world?
- What were women doing while men were away?
- Did all the women who went into the workforce want to return to the home once the war was over?
- How did men see women while they were at war in their theatres of deployment?
- How had society changed for them when they returned?
One popular reading of noir is that it’s a genre that speaks to the social unrest and existential displacement of men after the upset of WWII. The films Jimmy Stewart starred in before vs. the ones he starred in after are keen illustrations of this disparity. Should we visit Destry Rides Again, we’d want to pair it with Winchester ‘73 to gain contrasting pictures of everybody’s all-American. Vertigo is an even better illustration of the postwar shift in Stewart’s persona.
Visually, noir is incredibly striking–a look that began when, ironically, directors wanted the lighting to be less studio-bound and more “realistic” and diegetic. Most “natural” environments are drastically underlit in the movie world. I asked my kids to take stock of Out of the Past‘s sets and note how pooled the light was–how many dark areas there were, and to imagine what it would feel like to see a room lit like our family room in a movie. They agreed that Out of the Past can resemble a horror movie at times, where the shadows are big enough to hide monsters.
This led to a quick conversation about negative space. We’re going to watch Leigh Whannell’s extraordinary The Invisible Man at some point in our captivity, and I want them to have this conversation in mind when we do.
- How does film reflect its culture?
- If film reflects the culture in which it was made, what do the films currently in release reflect about us? Pick anything you’ve seen recently, and tell me what it will say to people sixty years in the future about life in 2020.
We spent some time recounting a few of the film’s choicest lines of dialogue. (“Baby, I don’t care” being the famous one and later used as the title of Lee Server’s Mitchum biography. Also, “Build my gallows high, baby,” which was the title of the source material.) I mentioned to them that Tourneur directed one of my favourite episodes of “The Twilight Zone”, “Night Call,” about an old widow who gets crank-called every night, only to discover the line has fallen and is draped across the grave of her dead husband. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric work, and as a sort of dessert pairing for Out of the Past, we watched them together in a double-feature.
- Why does Jeff’s friend tell his smalltown girlfriend what appears to be a lie?
- Why do you think his friend is deaf and mute?
- How is his disability portrayed in the film?
I also mentioned that Tourneur was part of Lewton’s stable of directors at RKO studios. I promised we’d watch a couple movies from that period, and we will–probably the two Cat People films along with The Seventh Victim as an entry into Psycho.
And we ended it with the big, dumb question:
What’s this movie about?
I love this question because it opens the door to some dissection of what it means to truly examine a work of art. The easiest form of analysis, I said, is telling me what the plot is. A does B because C and then D. That’s it. Unless you’re very dull, or the film doesn’t have a story to speak of, you can do this without much trouble from an early age. The easiest form of critique is to notice what’s wrong. This is why I have little respect for those MST3K knock-offs. I was asked once to host a program that trainspotted the things that were “wrong” or inconsistent about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and I turned them down flat. That’s what people do when they think they’re better and smarter than something–and, trust me, you never are.
Anyway, the big, dumb question forces you to consider that The Night of the Hunter is about sexual repression, domestic abuse, child abuse, religious hypocrisy, social control, cultural and gender stereotyping, economic caste systems (remember the single-mother waitress who comes out to see her “orphaned” kid? The woman bemoaning the kids looking for a handout?), and…what else? What is Out of the Past about?
Trauma? Mistrust of institutions? (Look at the way the film treats accountants.) The police? The law?
We go from Out of the Past to Francis Lawrence’s lush adaptation of the DC Vertigo comic “Constantine”. It seems like a weird choice, I know, but if we’re doing this right, we’ll manage the delicate feat of tying the dusty old pictures of the black-and-white past with the vibrant, eye-stabbing fantasias of the big-budget, comic-book action present.
