For the last three years, Jeff Bailey has been laying low and trying to live a normal life by running 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.
Direction by Jacques Tourneur pays close attention to mood development, achieving realistic flavor that is further emphasized by real life settings and topnotch lensing by Nicholas Musuraca.
[VIDEO ESSAY] One of the best-loved '40s era contributions to the film noir genre, Director Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past" (1947) is a definitive model.
All these B movie poets were under contract to RKO in the winter of 1946, and produced the best movie of everyone involved -- once seen, never forgotten.
In a genre full of desperate characters scrambling and plotting to grab their slice of the American dream, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) is a hard-boiled tale of betrayal with an unusually haunting quality.
Each change of angle and shift of light evokes an inner disturbance; the actors seem to push through the dense shadow as through water, revealing fast people in slow motion ...
