Jacques Tourneur builds unease with shadow, suggestion and people who cannot quite be trusted. We admire the restraint, and in Out of the Past it serves people whose bad judgement we can understand.
Fi1m perspective
Smoke catches the light in Out of the Past (1947), while darkness makes faces harder to read. Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca make us look closely without promising that a closer look will settle anything. We found the film unsettling because a change of setting offers so little relief from the suspicion. The settings feel solid and inhabited, and their variety keeps the film from becoming a succession of dark interiors.
His work with producer Val Lewton at RKO began in 1942, after shorts and B-pictures at MGM. Cat People (1942) established his suggestive horror style, and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) continued to favour implication over explicit scares. Lighting and things kept off screen do much of the work. Yet Canyon Passage (1946), a western noted for its location work, is a useful reminder that horror was not the limit of his interests.
Out of the Past shows why the people matter as much as the shadows. Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer give its tangled story characters worth caring about, while the flashbacks give Jeff Bailey room to make excuses for himself. Tourneur allows us to see a man who wants to escape his past without necessarily being willing to change, and makes his bad judgement painfully understandable. The plotting does sometimes get between us and the actors, and that matters in a film with people this interesting. We would rather spend that effort watching them than sorting out another complication.
His later freelance years included television and films across genres, though the features were less consistent than his RKO work. The British supernatural thriller Night of the Demon (1957) returned him to the suggestive horror of the earlier films. Start with Out of the Past for the performances as well as the photography, but give its plotting your full attention.
Biography
Jacques Tourneur was a French-American film director. Born in Paris in 1904, he died in Bergerac, France, in 1977. The son of director Maurice Tourneur, he began working in cinema as an assistant and script clerk on his father's films before making his directorial debut in France in 1931.
He returned to Hollywood in the mid-1930s and directed shorts and features at MGM. At RKO he made several horror films produced by Val Lewton, including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943). His other notable credits include the film noir Out of the Past (1947), the western Canyon Passage (1946) and Night of the Demon (1957). He also directed episodes of television series such as The Twilight Zone.
