Movies - Out of the Past

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	Movies - Out of the Past

Out of the Past (released in Britain as Build My Gallows High) is a 1947 film noir in which a small-town gas-station owner reveals his mysterious past to his girlfriend and encounters people from his earlier life who place him in a dangerous situation. It stars Robert Mitchum, in his first starring role, as Jeff Bailey and Jane Greer as the femme fatale from his past.

The movie was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (using the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) from his novel Build My Gallows High (also written as Homes). Uncredited revisions were made by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur and released by RKO Radio Pictures.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The film is considered by film historians to be a superb example of film noir, due to its convoluted, dreamlike storyline and its impeccably chiaroscuro cinematography (the cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca who also shot Tourneur's Cat People
(1942) and I Walked with a Zombie
(1943)).

Plot

As with many films noirs, Out of the Past is noted for its convoluted story line.

The film begins in Bridgeport, California where a man named Jeff Bailey owns a gas station. He’s dating local girl Ann Miller and lives a quiet life, but is secretive about his past.

A stranger arrives in town and recognizes Jeff. Later he returns and tells Jeff that Whit Sterling is looking for him and that Jeff should meet him. Jeff agrees.

Before he leaves, Jeff begins to tell Ann about his mysterious past. His real name is Jeff Markham and he once worked with partner Jack Fisher as detectives. The detectives got a call to see a rich gambler – Whit Sterling. It seems that Sterling’s girlfriend had run away after shooting and wounding Sterling, and he wanted her found.

The movie then goes into a flashback of these events years ago. At Sterling's office in New York, Sterling hires Jeff Markham to find his girlfriend, Kathie Moffett, and get back the $40,000 dollars she stole from him.

Markham goes to a jazz club and talks to a friend of Moffett's. He learns that Moffett packed for warm weather, was vaccinated, and left for Florida.

Markham deduces that you don’t get vaccinated for Florida, but you do for Mexico. So he tracks the luggage to Mexico City and finds that she had been there but left on a bus south. From there the trail leads to Acapulco.

At the café La Mar Azul, Markham kills time by drinking beer. Finally, Moffett arrives at the café and the two meet. Jeff tries to ingratiate himself with Moffett as a fellow American, but doesn’t tell her that he’s a detective hired to find her. When she gets up to leave, she tells him about a cantina down the street called Pablo’s. She mentions that she sometimes goes there.

Markham then goes to the local Western Union to send a telegram to Whit Sterling to tell him he’s found her but finds the office closed for the siesta. He doesn’t send the telegram.

He goes to Pablo’s that night and the night after in hopes of seeing Moffett again. They meet again and begin to fall in love. Markham tells Moffett that he was hired to find her, and that Sterling is alive and just wants her back. Moffett says that she didn’t take Sterling’s money. The couple continue to meet every night and their relationship deepens.

Eventually they decide to run away together. They plan on meeting, with bags packed, at Markham’s hotel the next morning.

When Jeff Markham is packing in the morning Whit Sterling and his assistant Joe appear, having flown down to check up on him. Markham tells Sterling that he hasn’t found Moffett yet, and that she’s caught a boat south. After Sterling leaves, Markham and Moffett take a boat north to San Francisco.

The couple live a quiet life in San Francisco for a time, fearful of Sterling but thinking the odds are one in a million that someone will spot them. But it happens. Jack Fisher, Markham’s old detective partner, spots Jeff at a race track. Tracking the couple to a cabin in the woods, Fisher demands the $40,000 in return for his silence. Jeff and Jack have a fistfight that is ended when Moffett kills Jack by shooting him. Kathie then drives off, leaving Jeff behind. Jeff finds Moffett's bank book and sees that it shows a balance of $40,000--the money she said she didn’t steal from Sterling.

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