Out of the Past [Build My Gallows High] ***** (1947, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming) – Classic Movie Review 914

Robert Mitchum gives a legendary performance as a one-time private eye, caught between a mobster (Kirk Douglas) and a femme fatale (Jane Greer), in the brilliant 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past [Build My Gallows High].

‘Build my gallows high, baby.’ Director Jacques Tourneur’s brilliant 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past [Build My Gallows High] is an extremely engrossing, especially rousing thriller. It is the quintessence of noir, one of the most typical and perfect examples of its endlessly fascinating kind.

The 30-year-old Robert Mitchum, unconventionally handsome but looking a bit worn and world-weary at the edges, gives a stupendous, star-making and legend-making performance as Jeff Bailey, an archetypal trench-coated one-time private detective ensnared into treble-crosses, revenge and the wily schemes of hard-as-nails femme fatale Kathie (Jane Greer) when nasty mobster gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) hires him to discover her. Can Mitchum get her out of his mind and into the past and take off with the homespun girl Ann (Virginia Huston) who really loves him?

Kirk Douglas (1916 to 2020).

In the present Jeff is a small-town gas station worker, ordered to meet Whit, whose new job for Jeff will clearly be a trap. In the past, Jeff was a private eye hired by Whit to find his mistress Kathie, who shot Whit and made off with $40,000. Jeff traced her to Acapulco, where Kathie made Jeff forget all about Sterling. The tale unfolds in spectacular noirish flashback as Whit tells girlfriend Ann his story in the car on his fateful way to meet Whit.

Mitchum magnetic performance is ‘modern’ and realistic, as he spits out Geoffrey Homes’s one-liners as though he has just thought of them, though he suggests they have been running round the recesses of his mind for half a lifetime. Mitchum’s trench-coated anti-hero is clearly a cousin of Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, a character Mitchum got to play eventually in the remake of The Big Sleep. Is there a moment in the film when Mitchum isn’t smoking? Well, hardly!

The young and alluring Greer is also splendid as the kind of femme fatale who’s ‘like a leaf that blows from one gutter to another’, as Mitchum calls her. She looks mighty tough and world-weary for a young woman of 23, and is the perfect female counterpart for Mitchum.

Though definitely there to support the stars, Douglas and Rhonda Fleming as Meta Carson, also make the strongest of impressions, giving highly impressive portrayals of irredeemable human trash. In his third film, already 30, the little known Douglas charismatically exudes shark-like menace, his huge, big-teethed smile never reaching his eyes. He has only three or four scenes in the film, but he makes every second count. It is another star-making performance.

Also impressive are Dickie Moore as the devoted deaf and dumb Kid who works for Jeff, Richard Webb as Jim, the small-town guy devoted to Ann, Steve Brodie as Jeff’s devious gumshoe partner Fisher, Paul Valentine as Whit’s vaguely fussy helper Joe, and Ken Niles as the creepy Eels.

The Kid, Jim, and Ann are the three representatives of human niceness in the film, all hopelessly devoted to one of the story’s twisted characters, and all doomed to disappointment and probably despair. Out of the Past may be tense and exciting, but it is also doomy and despairing, With its menacing mood and its tragic story of frustrated love, passion and jealousy, it picks up the French feeling of poetic romantic pessimism, seen notably in Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939).

Also known in the UK as Build My Gallows High, the title of the Geoffrey Homes [Daniel Mainwaring] novel it is based on, this is top-class vintage Forties film noir material. Apart from the luxury of dazzling performances from a perfect cast, it is cleverly plotted and involvingly characterised, and motors on wittily written pulp poetry dialogue (‘All women are wonders because they reduce all men to the obvious’ – ‘So do Martinis’).

It’s a knockout visually, imaginatively lensed by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca in gleaming black and white, with some striking camera angles and attractively weird compositions, adding to the flavour, and sometimes disguising the artificiality of the sets and backdrops, sometimes effectively emphasising them. The art direction by Albert S D’Agostino and Jack Okey is a low-budget pulp triumph, adding enormously to the atmosphere.

And it is all tensely and atmospherically handled by Tourneur, keeping the film brisk and involving. Roy Webb provides the ideal score, cranking up the unsettling mood.

‘Build my gallows high, baby,’ Mitchum says to Greer, and she sure does. He’s kidding, but she isn’t. The script is by Mainwaring himself, writing under his pseudonym as Geoffrey Homes, though apparently James M Cain and Frank Fenton worked on the screenplay uncredited too.

Also in the cast are Mary Field, making her one little scene count as Marney the Diner Owner, Adda Gleason and Harry Hayden as Ann’s parents, Theresa Harris as Eunice Leonard, John Kellogg as Lou Baylord, Jeffrey Sayre, Wallace Scott, Archie Twitchell, Brooks Benedict, Oliver Blake, Eumenio Blanco, James Bush and Frank Wilcox.

Out of the Past [Build My Gallows High] is directed by Jacques Tourneur, runs 97 minutes, is made and released by RKO Radio Pictures, is written by Daniel Mainwaring [Geoffrey Homes], based on his novel, is shot in black and white by Nicholas Musuraca, is produced by Robert Sparks (executive producer) and Warren Duff, is scored by Roy Webb, and is designed by by Albert S D’Agostino and Jack Okey.

Build My Gallows High is the UK premiere title and the US working title. Out of the Past is good, but Build My Gallows High is great.

It was remade as Against All Odds (1984) with Jeff Bridges. Greer plays Mrs Wyler in the remake. Out of the Past was Greer’s tenth movie in only three years of working. She was just 23. Mitchum and Greer re-teamed for The Big Steal in 1949.

Out of the Past premiered in New York City on 25 November 1947.

Lancaster and Douglas also star in the classic noir I Walk Alone (1947), which was released on 31 December 1947 (US).

Movie mogul Howard Hughes fancied Bettejane Greer and brought her to Hollywood after he saw her in Life magazine on June 8 1942, modelling army uniforms for women. ‘Howard Hughes was obsessed with me,’ she said. ‘But at first it seemed as if he were offering me a superb career opportunity.’ She shortened her name to Jane for her fourth film, Dick Tracy (1945).

She quickly married crooner Rudy Vallee after fleeing Hughes, who kept her virtually a prisoner during her first few months. An enraged Hughes pressured her, and ruined the marriage, and she returned to Hughes and her RKO studio contract. She died aged 76 on 24 August 2001 of cancer.

RIP Rhonda Fleming, who died on 14 October 2020, age 97. She was in both Out of the Past and Spellbound.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 914 derekwinnert.com