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With Sin City all the ugliness is front and center, pummeling you into acceptance and boredom in figurative and literal black-and-white. Within Out of the Past even the shadows have stories, stories untold as motivations are kept in the dark until just the right time.
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Pieces of the story begin to fall in place as the events of the past unfold all accompanied by Mitchum’s voice over, which is an interesting point given my recent complaints over the awful voice over in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller‘s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.Īll the detail captured in Musuraca’s cinematography is elevated by Mitchum’s voice over rather than relying on the voice over for the detail, such as the case with the overly-stylized, wannabe noir that is Sin City 2, glossy and affected to the point nothing can be felt. Sterling is an affable businessman (and/or gangster) of questionable ethics and having dealt with Jeff when he was a private investigator, hires him once again to find Kathie and bring her back to him, not so he can harm her, he just wants her back (or so he wants us to believe). We soon realize, however, Jeff has some demons in his past as a stranger comes to town looking for this Jeff Bailey character, ultimately leading Jeff to tell Ann about his past and a story that begins with a woman named Kathie Moffat ( Jane Greer) whose shot a man named Whit Sterling ( Kirk Douglas in only his second feature film) and fled the country with $40,000. The twisted shadows, flicker of flame and smoke from the countless number of cigarettes in the film are every bit as important as the narrative itself and no detail is overlooked.īased on the novel “ Build My Gallows High“, Out of the Past begins in a small town wherein Jeff Bailey ( Robert Mitchum), a name innocent enough, especially as it conjures memories of an even more genial fellow in James Stewart‘s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life released one year earlier.īailey, as we first come to know him, runs a small gas station and is carrying on a relationship with a local woman named Ann ( Virginia Huston).
Out of the past archive#
Originally released in 1947, Warner Archive delivers an excellent video release, grain is still present, but not overly so and Nicholas Musuraca‘s rich cinematography looks as if the film had been preserved under the best possible conditions for the past 65+ years. To begin, the presentation is immaculate. Getting acquainted with it was a no brainer and what a treat it was.
Out of the past movie#
How could I have never heard of or seen a movie considered important enough Collin felt it was a worthy representative of the film noir genre? As fate would have it, Warner Archive was releasing the film on Blu-ray for the first time only a week after I published that article. Among those picks were two films I hadn’t seen, the first being Buster Keaton‘s short One Week and the second was Jacques Tourneur‘s Out of the Past, a dark film noir starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Typically this comes in the form of a Criterion Collection release, the gold standard (at least domestically) in ensuring classic cinema remains alive, but a recent example for me came within the article I posted, “ The Telegraph in which he offered up ten films he felt could best capture the story of Hollywood. As someone who only started delving deep into cinema’s rich history about eleven years ago I still pay attention to a variety of sites and bloggers, hoping to hear of films I’ve never heard of or seen, something to shake up the monotony.