Watch Out of the Past For Free

Simply Perfect

Absolutely Fantastic

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

What a movie great story and stars dependable quality writing just sit enjoy and don't analysise

On every level it is the ultimate noir movie. I am a lifelong fan.

If I liked the film better, I'd be curious to read the original novel entitled Build My Gallows High, written by Daniel Mainwaring. Mainwaring used a pseudonym and adapted his work for the screen, resulting in one of the most famous film noirs in screen history. The main problem I had with the film Out of the Past was the odd storyline and construction. I imagined a 4 hour running time, including every plot point and character development from an original 800-paged novel-the studios insisted that the film be shortened and the end result was a lack of character development for anyone and a haphazard story cut to bits. I've since learned the original book is only 160 pages, and I can't understand why the film's story was choppy scenes were so confusing.The "good guys" are the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are the "bad guys", with no explanation for anyone's behavior. The plot moves so quickly with such swift deviation that I kept pressing pause trying to figure out what was going on; by the end, I'd given up. I got the characters confused and had no idea what was happening.Here's what I was able to get out of the plot: Robert Mitchum runs a garage in a small town. His assistant is a deaf and dumb teenage boy, and his sweetheart is the innocent Virginia Huston. Then, Paul Valentine finds him, and he confesses his secret past to Virginia. His secret past includes being indebted to Kirk Douglas, a gangster who wanted Bob to find and retrieve his runaway girlfriend Jane Greer. If there was a reason why Bob and Kirk were thrown together in the first place, it went over my head. And I couldn't count how many times I got Jane Greer and Rhonda Fleming mixed up! And what was the reason why Dickie Moore was deaf and dumb and inexplicably loyal to Bob Mitchum?I watched the movie because I knew it was famous and I love to drool over Robert Mitchum. If you absolutely love film noir films, you might want to rent this one, but be forewarned. And be on the lookout for the very famous line, "Baby, I don't care," that inspired the title of Lee Server's famous biography of Robert Mitchum!

I had a feeling that as soon as I watched this movie that it would be a great one, but it was much better than I expected it to be, Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past" is not the ordinary film-noir type of movie that anyone would expect even though it has pretty much the same formula for a typical movie in the genre the only difference being that the story of this movie isn't told in the traditional way. The movie stars Robert Mitchum in one of his best performances as Jeff Markham, a man who escapes his past to run a gas station only to see his past catch right up to him again. There are a lot of flashback scenes in this movie to explain the events that have been troubling his mind during the first half of the movie, and during those sequences we meet his ex-lover Kathie (Jane Greer), and a mobster named Whit (Kirk Douglas) who after we get to know them he gets framed for murder. Years after the flashback sequences took place Kathie is now Whit's lover, and Jeff is sent to San Francisco to meet with a woman named Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming) to try to help him out of this mess he's in. Markham talks about all of these things to his girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston). Tourneur's direction is very skilled here and because of it he made a masterpiece that ranks among the best film-noir classics of all time. The 1940s were the first decade to make these types of movies popular despite dwindling in the 1950s, Mitchum, Greer, Douglas, and Fleming each deserved Oscar nominations for their very good work in this movie. even though it isn't the best movie of 1947 it is one of them. Mitchum certainly gives one of the best performances of his career but it surely isn't as good as his truly sinister roles in "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), or in "Cape Fear" (1962). Kirk Douglas is also very good here with one of his very best performances as well. It was a great movie to watch but even though it doesn't lose any stars in my opinion, the only minor problem I had was that it wasn't as suspenseful as I thought it would be.