Smoking, Hot

I had a plan, you guys. Two columns tackling last week’s glut of new releases – one grouping the  haunted characters of Leviticus, At the Place of Ghosts and Passenger, and another for the parent-child themes of Supergirl, Tuner and She Rides Shotgun. And you know what happened?

Shipping delays. It’s always shipping delays, isn’t it. I have four of the six, but one key title from each planned column is missing, and in both cases it’s the one with all the special features. So I am holding back on those and begging your patience for just a little longer.

Thankfully, some things arrived in record time. Warner Archive Collection’s glorious 4K edition of Out of the Past reached me with lightning speed, given that I didn’t even know it existed until three weeks ago. But Allied Vaughn fired it out as soon as I requested it, and that lets me get this review into your mailbox on its actual street date. Imagine that.

Like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 thriller is an essential brick in the foundation of film noir. Maybe it was even the last step in the codification of the genre, the one that fixes everything in place once and for all. I used to say that about Wilder’s film, but apparently that was because I hadn’t seen Out of the Past in twenty years or so. Revisiting it this week set me straight.

Because sure, in 1947 there had already been movies about tough guys and tougher dames, and there had already been movies about easily swayed saps led to ruin by calculating women, and there had already been movies about people trying to turn over a new leaf only to be pulled back into the lives they’d hoped to leave behind. Out of the Past makes them all one story, and puts its weight on the broad shoulders of a 29-year-old Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum plays a regular guy named Jeff Bailey, who runs a service station in a remote California town. He has one employee, a deaf-mute kid who’s good with a wrench, and when Jeff’s not working he spends his time with the very nice Ann Miller (Virginia Huston). She’s sweet on him, and he her, even if no one else thinks they’re a good match. Something’s off about that guy, is the thing.

One day a big lug of a fellow named Stefanos (Paul Valentine) shows up looking for Jeff, and the two men have a fairly serious conversation. Serious enough that Jeff asks Ann to drive up to Tahoe with him that very night, and tells her a story once they’re on the road. He’s been keeping something from her: He used to go by Jeff Markham, and he was a private detective in New York until he got tangled up with casino mogul Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas).

Sterling hired him to track down Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who shot him and ran off – Sterling says – with $40,000 of his money. Jeff took the case, tracked Kathie to Acapulco and immediately fell for her. He threw Sterling off her trail and ran away with her to San Francisco. But that ended badly too, and now Jeff is hiding out in the sticks. Or he was, anyway.

That’s the first glorious third of Out of the Past, and Daniel Mainwaring’s script – based on his novel Build My Gallows High – only gets darker and more complex from there. The story’s moral fabric is built on a lazy Susan, with characters hurling themselves past each new ethical challenge like they have a bus to catch. Tourneur soaks the film in darkness, to the point that even the Acapulco sunlight struggles to reach Jeff and Kathie. Or maybe they belong in the shadows.

Christ, this is a good movie – beautifully shot, expertly paced and never, ever letting the audience lose sign of the base selfishness behind everyone’s entangled motivations and protestations of innocence. I’d forgotten this is the movie where “just a little cold around the heart” comes from. And how Jeff keeps finding cigarettes everywhere he goes. That’s noir, baby.

Warner Archive previously released Out of the Past on Blu-ray in 2014, scanned from a fine-grain master positive; for this UHD release, the team went back to the original nitrate camera negative. The results, both in native 4K and on the remastered Blu-ray that accompanies it, are absolutely breathtaking, with Nicholas Musuraca’s black-and-white cinematography starker and sharper than I’ve ever seen it.

Until now, I would have said Cat People was the best work he ever did for Tourneur. And that capture is from the Blu-ray. Excellent work, team Archive.

The splendid restoration is supported on both the 4K and Blu-ray by the excellent commentary track recorded by Jim Ursini for Warner’s initial 2006 DVD release, and a more recent video introduction from TCM Noir host Eddie Muller. This new edition also includes four 1947 radio plays: Mitchum leads Hallmark Playhouse’s “We Were Expecting You at Dakar” and Suspense’s “Death at Live Oak,” while Douglas stars in the Suspense episodes “The Story of Markham’s Death” and “Community Property.” You couldn’t ask for a better package. This is essential.

Out of the Past is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from the Warner Archive Collection. It’s one of the best discs I’ve seen all year.

Up next: We’ll see what shows up first, I guess! But there’s always Friday’s What’s Worth Watching to look forward to, if you’re on the paid tier … and if you’re not, maybe think about it? It’s not expensive to upgrade your subscription, and you might even discover something worth leaving your house for.