A Film Canon

Out Of The Past makes the astonishing gesture of couching noir claustrophobia within a proportionate agoraphobia, such that the three acts conform, roughly, to three increasingly panoramic, vertiginous locales - the Sierra Lakes, Acapulco Beach, San Francisco - but simultaneously witness the increasing entrapment of protagonist Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), whose past catches up with him in the form of gangster Whit Sterling's (Kirk Douglas) insistence that he fulfil one last task, itself a culmination of this entrapment, as vengeance for his complicated involvement with Sterling's wife, Kathie (Jane Greer). To this end, Tourneur and art director Albert S. D'Agostino suffuse their interiors with paintings and photographs of landscapes, or subordinate them to their balconies and windows, most poetically in the final set-up, which takes place in a chaotic, darkened, half-furbished apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. In this way, Tourneur creates a series of claustrophobic panoramas, all of which feel like so many attempts to provide a phenomenology of car travel, which is more foregrounded than in any noir to date, and associated with the point-of-view shot - particularly in the opening sequence - in a manner that recalls the 'phantom rides' of early silent cinema. That said, Tourneur's peculiar proclivity for atmosphere - and, more specifically, his ability to literalise it, in the form of the slightest medium, or presence - also manages to open up a vision of escape, albeit in a mythical, or hypothetical, register, such that the common denominator between these three locales - expansive bodies of water - both remains curiously oblique to car travel, and attains a resolutely non-urban, transcendental presence; the shimmering surface of Tahoe.