Critics reviews

Mitchum's homme fatale was distinct, "oddly subversive," as the more appreciative Andrew Sarris put it. In Out of the Past, he no sooner enters a room charged with tension, when, without breaking his stride, his fist flies out, flooring a mouthy wannabe heavy. The impulse is rote, but behind it is a gut-tested ethos: lightning appraisal of who's in the way and what they're made of, triggering decisive action... While the gesture is pure noir, Mitchum lends it a soulful mien.

Many of [Mitchum’s] films could have been called Out of the Past, like Jacques Tourneur’s sublime, definitive noir, in which Mitchum floats from place to place like a sleeper through a series of ravishing yet uneasy dreams.

The film's downbeat ending draws a sceptical conclusion, suggesting that past mistakes are impossible to overcome, and salvation is not available, even to those who want it. However, aside from the story's often daunting complexity, Out of the Past is nonetheless a captivating study in male pride, stung by the lethal wiles of a dangerous woman. Undoubtedly, within this traditionally ill-fated and perversely crooked world, the mood of obsession was never more powerfully suggestive.

The apex of film noir is an extension of Val Lewton's lambent death-drive—the uncanny calm with which Jacques Tourneur lays his grids turns the chump's fall into a perverse three-way dance, crystalline to the point of obscurity. (His cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, composes not in blocks of smoke and shadow but in endless gradations of suspended morality.)

Watching Out of the Past for the first time in years, I started to focus on entrances and exits, and the transitional way Tourneur and Musuruca light them. The most famous example is when Kathie is first introduced, walking into a Mexican cantina. There is a blazing white light outside the door, rendering her almost invisible. Her white dress and sun hat blend into this brightness, so when she walks into the shade of the alcove her silhouette seems to emerge out of nothingness...

The intricate story moves through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico, and picturesque points in between, but Tourneur cooks up shot-by-shot surprises that outdo those of the screenplay. Each change of angle and shift of light evokes an inner disturbance; the actors seem to push through the dense shadow as through water, revealing fast people in slow motion and capturing the haunted stillness of Jeff's gaze: he's a feral man suddenly petrified by love.

What strikes me most [about the flare by the lake] is that this is the one and only moment in the whole film that Tourneur and his cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca break the classic characteristics of film noir – and we are talking about one of the absolute classics of this dark genre – to give us some kind of breath. And this breath, regardless of whether you consciously remember the moment or not, will underline the absolute disgrace that befalls everybody and everything in this rotten world.

The film benefits from a complicated flashback structure—every bit the equal of Robert Siodmak's THE KILLERS—and from some fine shadowplay from the great RKO cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. But what makes this linger in the memory is the psychological depth of the characters, a mystery even to them.