This is my first entry in the Back in Black Blogathon hosted by Hamlette's Soliloquy and yours truly.
The essence of "film noir", in my opinion, can be stated as I often do, as a place "where the good guys aren't all that much different than the bad guys except that the good guys have a moral compass". Think of the classic Humphrey Bogart film The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is our good guy (or "hero", if you will), but he is only the hero because the rest of the cast is peopled with such characters as Peter Lorre's greedy little twit, Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet's amoral Caspar Gutman, Elisha Cook, Jr.'s psychopathic gunsel Wilmer and even the less than scrupulous femme fatale, Bridgid played by Mary Astor. Bogart is no less likely to skirt the rules of polite society, but at least he has a sense of honor.
Film noir really got it's start in the print medium, in the pages of pulp magazines like Black Mask. The gritty rough and tumble characters that appeared in those stories eventually gave way to films in the 40's. I like the way David J. Hogan puts it in his book Film Noir FAQ: film noir "forces us to acknowledge that the presumably solid foundation upon which we base our assumptions and our very lives is temporal and dangerously unstable. It's likely to not merely shift beneath our feet, but give way completely, turning the routine of our lives upside-down and annihilating our expectations. We're plunged into a disorienting place where everything we thought {emphasis mine} we knew is wrong".
The characters in the film noir world, often, are just "average Joes" who find themselves caught up in circumstances they were not expecting. We get characters who are normal guys (and most often they are "guys") who find out that things are not panning out right. A detective may think he's on a run-of-the-mill case, but it turns out that, aside from being able to take on the bad guys with a reasonable amount of success, when it comes to dealing with women, his brains turn out to be on vacation and he's using a different part of his body to do the thinking. These women are what are referred to as "femme fatales" (and these, too, are most often women.)
Occasionally that pattern reverses and it's the woman who is the "average Jane" and she finds herself falling for a man who has a rather unscrupulous demeanor. (Sorry, Wrong Number would be a perfect example). And that is just a simplistic description, because the film noir world has many different scenarios. The best of them, however, can be summed up as this.
A favorite publishing house, Hard Case Crime, recently took to reprinting old pulp novels, as well as new material written in the same style. You can find many older issues of these reprints in used bookstores. I liken the stories to be akin to "film noir in print. If you'd like to investigate this, check out their website: Hard Case Crime. I recommend a few to start: The Murderer Vine by Shepard Rifkin, Shooting Star by Robert Bloch, Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block and a recently written sequel to the aforementioned Maltese Falcon story, The Return of the Maltese Falcon by Max Allan Collins.
Out of the Past (1947):
The film opens in a small out of the way town, Bridgeport, where a mysterious figure named Joe (Paul Valentine) shows up looking for Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum). Joe is looking for Bailey because, well, this guy "Bailey" is not the local gas station operator he has led people to believe he is. He has a past that he is kept hidden. (Out of the Past indeed...)
Joe has come looking for Jeff because a former acquaintance, Whit, wants to see him. So Jeff takes his current girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), on a road trip up to meet with Whit, and through a flashback which makes up the first half of the film, Jeff reveals his real background.
See, Jeff was originally known as Jeff Markham, and he was in the business as a private eye, along with his partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie). Jeff had met with a big time gambler named Whit (Kirk Douglas), who hired Jeff to track down his girlfriend, Kathie (Jane Greer).
Recently Whit and Kathie had had a falling out, mainly because Kathie had shot Whit and absconded with $40,000 of Whit's money. Ostensibly, Whit wants her back (because he misses her..? Maybe...)
(Just a side note: {and this has nothing to do with the story}. At the 13:40 mark of the film, while Jeff is talking to Whit, I would swear that Kirk Douglas farts. I can't find any reference to it anywhere, but watch Douglas' expression just after the event, and you tell me...)
So Jeff goes to Mexico City, although without his partner Jack. And, of course, he easily finds his prey. And ends up following her as she transitions from there to that mecca of vice south of the border in these old films, Acapulco.
Although his task, that of bringing Kathie back to Whit, may not be so cut and dried. What complicates the matter most is that Kathie is a hot number, and Jeff begins using his other brain instead of the one God gave him for thinking. The trick, for a private detective tracking down people, is to not get involved. But Jeff breaks that cardinal rule. He gets involved, and develops an infatuation for Kathie. For Kathie's part, is she falling for him, too, or is she just stringing him along? At the beginning it could be a mutual infatuation, maybe, but keep in mind, as it later becomes evident, she knows why Jeff has made contact with her. And, though she claims to him that, yes, she shot Whit, but she didn't take the money,
Several things happen in succession. First Whit shows up with Joe in Acapulco, but Jeff thinks he managed to brush them off with a lie that he hasn't found Kathie. Also, Jeff's partner shows up. And Jack turns out to have less scruples than probably even Whit. He tries to blackmail Jeff, if Jeff doesn't come across with a good chunk of that $40,000. Jeff tells Jack the story that Kathie told him; she didn't have the money, so Jeff can't give Jack any part of it. But Jack doesn't believe him, and they get in a scuffle, and Kathie shoots Jack, then runs off. Jeff also discovers a little bank book she left behind that reveals she had made a deposit recently. Wanna take a guess how much was in that deposit...?
So, thus Jeff ends his story that he has been telling Ann about his past. She wonders where Kathie has gone, but Jeff tells her he doesn't know. Which brings us back to the present where Jeff is meeting up with Whit. And a surprise... Kathie is there too. At some point in the past Kathie had come back to Whit. Whit, despite the fact that Jeff had failed him on the Kathie caper, still wants Jeff to perform another job. He wants Jeff to get some incriminating evidence that a shyster lawyer has on him when he used the lawyer as a tax dodge.
But that's not all, because Whit, in case it was not obvious, is a guy who never forgets anything. Nor is he the type to let bygones be bygones. He called Jeff in on this caper, not because he truly likes Jeff's reputation as a guy who plays fair. Whit has plans to even the score for the way that Jeff almost tried to cross him by planning to run away with Kathie. As such, he and Joe, as well as Kathie have set Jeff up to be framed after they have eliminated the shyster lawyer. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, since Jeff is also going to be the fall guy for killing his partner.
(BTW, I guess I missed something. After Kathie kills Jeff's partner in the first half of the film, Jeff supposedly buries the body. But I didn't see any reveal that the found the body in the interim. So there is no proof he was killed, nor is there a body. Jack could have just disappeared... so the murder conceivably is a "moot point".)
But Jeff smells a rat early on, and tries to throw a monkey wrench into the plans. He has his own way of getting the upper stance on the situation. There are more double crosses in this film than in a boxing match. It goes back to that thing I said early on; even though we are sympathetic for Jeff because he is ostensibly our "hero", Jeff is not so upright that he isn't willing to take chances with the law to get the upper hand. Ultimately, as bodies keep piling up, we don't really know which side of the fence Jeff is going to end up on.
So, it should come as no surprise that, even with the love and devotion of Ann on his side, Jeff may just end up leaving with Kathie. But that too may be not so much a case of a love of Kathie, as much as she may just have the winning hand in the dealing of blackmail.
Out of the Past is regarded as a quintessential film noir film. It ranks #23 of a list of the greatest movies in that genre on Rotten Tomatoes and holds an 88% Fresh rating on that website. It gets better reviews in retrospect than it did at the time of it's release, I guess. In 1948 James Agee wrote "Out of the Past is a medium-grade thriller", and that it was "fairly well played, and very well photographed", but that "Robert Mitchum is so very sleepily self-confident with the women that when he slopes into clinches you expect him to snore in their faces." On the other hand, more recent reviews call it the "ne plus ulta" of film noir, and it "is an exemplary noir steeped in doom and sensuality."
Wikipedia says it earned a profit of $90,000, which may not seem like much, but given that it was released in 1947, and was not the kind of film that would appeal to a wide range of film goers even at that time, I'd say that was a decent showing.
In 1984 the story was tweaked a bit, but still comes across as sort of a remake, in Against All Odds, which starred Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. Although that film did not fare as well with the public or the critics, I suggest it makes for a nice double feature that you can compare with the original.
If you are starting out watching film noir for the first time I always recommend the Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon, of course, but if you move on from there, you couldn't go wrong with this one as your next foray.
Drive safely, folks. And remember... your past is always with you, the best you can do is to accept it and hope that it doesn't come back to haunt you.
Quiggy
