31 Days Of Horror Day 30: Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 7

(Previous Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something were part of a Film Noir and then Neo Noir series that I was asked to help program and host. Starting with this entry, I am now the sole programmer, and the films will no longer be just crime films. Once again this is written for speech so I apologize for any irregularities of cadence)




Of all the films I’ve had the opportunity to show in this series, I Walked With A Zombie is the one I’m most excited about.

Out Of The Past, which was also directed by Jacques Tourneur was actually the first film I screened for this series, almost a year ago now. And as much as I truly love that film, I couldn’t help but be just a little sorry that I wasn’t showing this one.

This movie is a product not just of Jacques Tourneur but of Val Lewton, who in the forties produced a series of horror films which are among the finest ever made. Tourneur only made two films with Lewton. Though the two were lifelong friends and knew each other from years before when both worked for the legendary producer David O. Selznick. Saying the two influenced each other doesn’t’ seem quite strong enough. The other film the pair made was Cat People. Of the two Cat People remains the more well known, popular, and certainly more influential of the two.

But I would argue I Walked With A Zombie is the better film.

I Walked With A Zombie contains many elements usually found in Lewton. The literary allusions, with much of the film culled from Jane Eyre. His central female characters. What has been called his figure of beautiful sorrow. His level neutral view of the occult. The kind of darkness that led him to snap at one studio executive who claimed that his films had to many messages, “I Only have one message. And that is Death Is Good.”

But even among Lewton’s films I Walked With A Zombie stands apart.

Saying a movie is one of a kind is usually a trap. No matter how odd a movie may appear chances are there’s something that is at least a bit like it somewhere. But I can honestly say I don’t believe anything quite like this movie has been ever made before.
There is a rhythm and flux to this film that is unlike any I have ever seen. The possible exception being Night Of The Hunter. Calling a movie dream like is usually an easy out, but I Walked With A Zombie carries with it all the dread and poeticism of a real dream.














I don’t want to delve too deeply into the plot or individual scenes, incase this would turn out to be your first experience with the film. I will only say of Lewton in general, that Horror is usually derived from a source of physical revulsion, while Terror comes from a source of mental revulsion. As someone suggests in Martin Scorsese’s superlative documentary on Lewton, From The Shadows. All of Lewton’s films are terror films.

Which is why I think Lewton’s films have held up so well. While so many older horror movies, say the films produced by Lewton’s rivals at Universal at the time, are watched today as camp or at the very least through a heavy filter of nostalgia, Lewton’s remain as cutting as the day they were released.

So please sit back and enjoy I Walked With A Zombie. I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

POST SCRIPT So, I'll be showing I Walked With A Zombie later this afternoon. Then racing down to LA to go see The Aero Theater's Fifth Annual Dusk Til Dawn Horrorthon. Which has for five years, proven to be the best night of horror filmgoing LA has to offer. As well as my personal favorite night of movie going of the year. Aside from the great programming and wonderful prints, The Aero creates a found Footage montage between each film that will drive men to madness and have you screaming "THE POSSIBILITY OF ME WORKING IS REMOTE!!!" At the top of your lungs. At four AM.

I wouldn't miss it For The World.

So if you're an LA Reader and you're not going to The Aero, well what the fuck is wrong with you? And if you're an LA reader and you are going to The Aero, please say hello. I'll be the one wearing the "Camp Crystal Lake Counselor" T-shirt, Pea Coat, and mainlining as many stimulants outside the theater on breaks as possible.

As I will be spending Halloween afternoon and possibly night with some LA friends, I hope you'll forgive me if Halloween's post goes up a bit later then normal.

If some disaster does strike though, let me take a moment to thank you for reading through 31 Days and wish you a Happy Halloween. There's some great stuff coming up this November. Including a few more horror films that I couldn't quite fit into 31 Days but couldn't stand the idea of not writing about. As well as a some great new stuff I'm really excited about.

So stay sick, stay scared. And Don't go trick or treating without your boomstick!

Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 7; One Two Three

Tensions between the Soviet Union and America were coming to an all time high, while Wilder was making One Two Three. The filming of the movie was actually interrupted by the building of the Berlin Wall. So of course Wilder took the opportunity to do what he always did, and make the whole thing look as ridiculous as possible.

Wilder was coy about One Two Three’s ambition, in Cameron Crowe’s Mammoth interview with him he expresses no more ambition then “To make the fastest film in the world.”

It wasn’t that it was unheard of to poke fun at the tense relationships between America and USSR. Wilder had even done it before himself, cowriting Ernest Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, with the famous tagline “Garbo Laughs” was probably the most famous version of this and a few years later Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove would be the ultimate version of it.

What was unusual, and something even Kubrick didn’t tread upon, is the fearless way that Wilder posits that the entire Cold War is one big put on. That the ideologies on both sides are a put on. False platitudes, mouthed by unthinking simpletons after they’ve been drilled into their heads by wiley conmen. Only a real smooth operator like Cagney can survive with any kind of sanity intact.

This was James Cagney’s last film, aside from a brief appearance in the film Ragtime twenty years later. And he picked a real winner to go out on. It’s not just that his last one was a great movie, it’s that his last film was a movie that was tailor made to showcase what a unique actor he was, the entire film is based upon his staccato rhythms and swagger.

It was on the set on this film that Cagney delivered his famous maxim on acting, “Walk into the room, plant your feet, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.” A statement that makes me sorry that he and Wilder didn’t make more then the one film together.

Wilder was nothing if not a truthful director. That truthfulness is often mistaken for misanthropy. But Wilder always much too amused by people far too much for that. Wilder’s targets in One Two Three, are almost excluisively ideological and institutional. Both the vapid “late stage capitalism” of the heiress, and the fire and brimstone idiocy of Piffle are seen as the province of easily duped stooges. Daringly Wilder goes so far as to suggest that Nazism and the old aristocracy it replaced was the exact same thing. There’s not a character in the film unwilling to sell out what they believe in, when the opportunity presents itself. Only the amoral Cagney, who subscribes to no higher allegiance then the Coca Cola Company makes it through the film with any kind of dignity intact.

This all makes the film sound very dour and serious, which it’s not. Instead it’s one of the quickest farces ever made. If Wilder did not succeed in making The fastest film ever made, he came very close. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some very sharp teeth. The film’s most famous shot reveals has a “dancing” potrait of Khrusecv fall to reveal a dancing portrait of Stalin.

It’s a shot that to me, sums up the Wilder technique, revealing the truth with a laugh.

Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 6: Gone Baby Gone

(Previous Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something were part of a Film Noir and then Neo Noir series that I was asked to help program and host. Starting with this entry, I am now the sole programmer, and the films will no longer be just crime films. Once again this is written for speech so I apologize for any irregularities of cadence)

(I'm not going to lie its been pretty f-ing cool seeing these around town)

Dennis Lehane has gotten unusually lucky with his adaptations. Clint Eastwood did a fine job bringing his Mystic River to the screen, and just this year Scorsese delivered a fantastic adaptation of his Shutter Island. And yet I’d argue that out of those rather heavy hitting directors Ben Affleck has done the best job of bringing Lehane’s singular tone to the screen.

Unlike the other films made from his work, Gone Baby Gone is an adaptation of one of the Kenzie and Genarro books that make up the core of Lehane’s fiction. The five novels follow the two private eyes through the Boston underworld with a uniqueness of both setting and character that manages to set them apart from the glut of Private Eye novels.

Patrick Kenzie isn’t a bruised white knight like Phillip Marlowe. He’s not a smooth operator like Dashell Hammet’s continental op. Nor is he even a particular brilliant detective. He’s a smartass, whose managed to keep his good heart despite all the evidence the world has shown him. Casey Affleck gives nepotism a good name, bringing him to life with all of his conflict and wit intact. As does Michelle Monaghan as Genaro. Though if the film has a flaw its that its more of a Kenzie film. Mostly for narrative reason’s a slight change is made to series mythology and Genarro is made something of an outsider, so there’s someone there to have exposition delivered to. The problem is that it ends up making her feel a little less then a full on partner and sidelines her for far too much of the runtime.

On the whole though casting is one of the film’s strongest suits. Ed Harris gives one of his strongest performances in years, Morgan Freeman playing not so much against type but to it gives a great twist on his normal persona, Amy Ryan gives a career best performance. And perhaps most gratifyingly the under used Amy Madigan finally gets a role to sink her teeth into. Much of the rest of the cast is filled out by natives, which lends the film a realism that makes other gritty Boston crime films like The Departed, feel glamorized. No matter how intense Scorsese got, when you see an old man smoking through his tracheotomy is the type of image that you don’t get from central casting.

Most of these novels aren’t “who dunnits”. That’s not to say that Lehane doesn’t write some excellent mysteries into them. But the center of the books are always around a moral question. The question at the heart of each Dennis Lehane novel isn’t “Who kidnapped the heiress?” Or “Who has the money” but “How can I wake up and look at myself in the mirror?”

The fact that Ben Affleck has the talent, or even the inclination to address such a question may be surprising to those who know him best as the dopey would be matinee idol he was at the beginning of the decade, and not the talented character actor he has proven himself to be before and afterwards. It’d be easy enough to credit this to the fact that Affleck grew up in the neighborhoods and around the people that Lehane writes about. His familiarity and eye for people certainly adds a certain lived in feel to the film and his second film The Town coming out in a couple of weeks, returns him to this comfortable territory. But that’s certainly not the only thing Affleck brings to the table. Without giving away too much of the plot, there are scenes in here that could come out from a horror film, and scenes that could come out of a buddy comedy, and the way Affleck is able to juggle these tones both the grotesque and the light proves him to be a versatile skilled director. Though his next film The Town is based upon a much weaker novel, I’m looking forward to seeing what Affleck can do with it.

While this is the most recent film that we’ve shown so far in this series, Gone Baby Gone feels like a film from a different era. It’d be easy to imagine it as a lost film of the seventies from someone like Michael Ritchie or William Friedkin. It’s a dark film that asks hard questions and doesn’t bother with easy answers. In other words it treats it’s audience like adults. And a filmmaker whose willing to do that is a valuable one indeed.

This is a dark film, but its an honest one.

Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 5: Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is a film so ubiquitous that its hard to chart its impact.

Pulp Fiction drew on so much, and has been in turn so copied, that it becomes almost invisible.

This draws a problem for someone trying to talk about the film. I mean should I mention the dance sequence, that’s shown in countless clip shows, retreads, and parodies? What about the hypo scene? Or the watch speech? Or what Butch and Marsellies find in the basement of the pawn shop. They’ve all entered the lexicon. So well known that they’re almost impossible to see.

This is a fate that befalls all classic movies, but given that so much of Pulp Fiction's acclaim at the time came from how fresh it was its feels even weirder. You mean there was a time when it was considered weird for a movie to mention another movie? You mean there was a time when Tarantino wasn’t a household name? Weird.

Pulp Fiction is a unique film, in Tarantino’s career as well as in general. Tarantino has spent the last decade doing nothing less then creating his own cinematic universe. Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill, and Grindhouse all take place in their own pocket Tarantinoverse as surely as George Lucas’s films take place in “A long long time ago, in a Galaxy far away.” And the mythologies and rules of Tarantinoverse are no less intricate then the Jedi’s.

Pulp Fiction, despite its many flourishes...

Is still placed in something that resembles the real world. One of my favorite shots in the film is a simple one of Butch cutting through the back Alley to an apartment complex. A shot that anyone who has spent anytime in LA will recognize as it s
omehow manages to look like every single apartment in LA.

Because that’s what people miss about Pulp Fiction. The important thing about it isn’t how, modern and blaise it is. But how retro.

The critics of the time blasted Fiction as being nihilistic and glib. This seems laughably now, partly in thanks to just how many times and just how badly Tarantino’s film was imitated. You couldn’t walk into a movie theater or video store between 1995 and 2000 without being besieged by a cheap imitation waiting to show you what a glib nihilistic crime movie REALLY looked like.

The fact remains, that while Tarantino often did, and still does shock the audience into laughter with violence, he can not be accused of making it not matter. After all, the priniciple action of Pulp Fiction isn’t Marvin getting shot in the face, or Marsellus Wallace getting medival on a “Soon to be living the rest of his short life in agonizing pain ass rapist here.”

No. The principle action in Pulp Fiction is an act of mercy. Its Jules proving to himself and to the other characters that he is better then we think he is. And just because violence is easy and learned, doesn’t mean it can’t be overcome. Tarantino isn’t a scold, which is why the movie ends with Jules and Vincent triumphantly strolling out of the diner, rather then Vincent dying on the toilet seat, after failing to change his ways, the way he would in chronological time. But the message is clear. Call it divine intervention, call it Karma, call it whatever you want, the character who mends his ways walks away. The character who doesn’t pays.

Though its certainly more graphic, I’d argue that Pulp Fiction is easily the most optimistic film I’ve shown so far. The message of all the other films, is “There’s no way out.” Pulp Fiction is about one man simply and defiantly choosing one.

Somebody's Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something: Part 4

You may remember a while back that thanks to my print critic work I was asked to head up a local Film Noir festival. Well we're doing a sequel of sorts this July with a batch of Neo Noir films. Today I'll be talking about Point Blank and thought I'd share what I had to say. Sorry if the syntax is funny its written for speech.


Point Blank is a tough film for me to talk about, as I think it’s a pretty great movie and a pretty terrible adaptation.

Point Blank is based on the first Parker novel, The Hunter by Donald Westlake. Though Westlake wrote many books and screenplays, including those for The Grifters and The Stepfather, he’s still best known and well beloved for the two long running series he wrote. The first The Dortmunder books are a series of comic capers, involving the titular luckless thief and his bedraggled crew. The second which he wrote under the name Richard Stark, involves the ruthless thief Parker.

Despite their tight plots, and well drawn characters the studios have had nothing but trouble bringing these characters to the screen. With the Dortmunder books it’s the usual case of bad studio decisions, including the casting of a young Robert Redford as the perpetually hangdog Dortmunder. With the Parker novels the reasoning is a little less straight forward. Its been tried many times, with many different actors playing Parker, including Lee Marvin, Robert Duval, Jim Brown, Mel Gibson, Peter Coyote, and even Anna Karina. Though in one of those touches that makes you shake your head, not one of them has ever been named Parker.

And yet despite the honest efforts of so many, Marvin is great tonight, Duval is probably my favorite, there’s never been a film that accurately captures the tone of Westlakes Novels. For the reason why, lets look at what Dennis Lehane, who as far as I’m concerned is the greatest living writer of crime fiction, and if you like this stuff you owe it to yourself to check out a few of his books today, wrote in the introduction to the new addition of the Parker books that were just released, after a long spell of being out of print.

“Parker. The greatest antihero in American noir. If Parker ever had a heart, he left it behind in a drawer one morning and never came back for it. He never cracks a joke, inquires about someon’s health or family, feels regret or shame or even rage. And not once does he wink at the reader. You know the Wink. It’s when the supposedly amoral character does to let the reader know he’s not really as bad as he seems. Maybe in fact, he’s been a good guy all along.

Parker IS as bad as he seems. If a baby carriage rolled in front of him during a heist he’d kick it out of his way. If an innocent woman were caught helplessly in gangster crossfire, Parker would slip past her, happy she was drawing bullets away from him. If you hit him, he’d hit you back twice as hard. If you stole from him, he’d burn your house to ground to get his money back. And if, as in Butcher’s Moon, you were stupid enough to kidnap one of his guys and hold him hostage in a safe house, he would kill every single one of you. He’d shoot you through a door, shoot you in the face, shoot you in the back, and step over your body before it stopped twitching.

Nothing personal by the way he gets no pleasure from the shooting or the twitching. He’s a sociopath, not a psychopath. But what he is above all is a professional.”

Understandably, adapting something that harsh can make studio execs a little queasy. Which is why, though many Parker books have been adapted, The Hunter, the one tonight's film is based on, keeps getting remade. It might not be pretty, but at least Parker is doing these dirty deeds based off of a recognizable human emotion like the desire for revenge. And not just a profit motive.

So if I believe this film, is at best a misinterpretation of a series of books I and many others hold in very high regard, why do I like it so much?

Well for one thing it just plain neat!

Director John Boorman has had one of the strangest careers in modern film, switching between excellently made but somewhat standard movies like, Deliverance, Hell In The Pacific, and The Tailor Of Panama. And films that are, completely insane. Its like he feigns normalcy long enough to get the studio executives to look the other way, and the next thing you know he’s making Zardoz and there is Sean Connery in a thong, and a giant stone head screaming that “The Gun is good, The Penis is evil.” Or it’s the Exorcist 2 and he has James Earl Jones dancing around whilst dressed as a giant Bee.

Here he comes the closest to making an American French New Wave film. The most famous thing about Point Blank is its non Linear editing, the way the scenes seem to dance around their central point. You’ll see flashes of the past intrude on the present, and previews from the future. It’s a jarring style, and in the hands of a less competent filmmaker it could be annoying but Boorman pulls it off.

The film is also a great LA noir, with the swinging sixties vibe going around in the background. The first round of Neo Noir, starting from the end of the first cycle, to Chinatown, was often set in LA. Then as now still a city in flux. In many ways that city which is so many cities is the ideal place for a noir. Raymond Chandler certainly thought so. And if you’re interested to see more films that play with this genre, location and era, I highly recommend picking up Paul Newman’s Harper, The Long Goodbye, and The Late Show.

The film also hinges on Marvin’s performance. And seldom if ever, has his “huge slab of walking granite” persona been used to better effect. Marvin was never just tough, he’s beyond tough, picking a fight with him, would be like picking a fight with Mount Rushmore.

And yet there’s a certain sadness to his performance here that I don’t think you ever really saw again from Marvin. Revenge becomes his only reason for existing. And when he gets it, there’s nothing left for him.

There are those who even read the film as a ghost story. If you watch closely you’ll notice that Marvin never actually kills anybody in the film, And once his unfinished business is done he fades back into the night. Many a film noir are narrated by a corpse, this might be the only one that stars one.

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 2: Underworld USA

As you might remember from last month, thanks to my work as a print critic someone has inexplicably asked me to program the front half of a film noir retrospective. In response to this baffling turn of events, last month I played Out Of The Past. Today I'm doing Underworld USA, one of Sam Fuller's most overlooked films. Once again apologies for syntax it was written for speech yadayadayada hope you enjoy.

Of Sam Fuller, Martin Scorsese once said, “It’s been said that if you don’t like The Rolling Stones then you just don’t like Rock and Roll. By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you don’t like the cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it.” I happen to agree.

Sam Fuller is one of the most important and least well known directors in American film. His influence can be felt in innumerable filmmakers work, including unsurprisingly the likes of Scorsese and Jim Jaramusch… and even less surprisingly Quentin Tarintino. He has also ended up an influence over seas, he was one of the first directors that the French wrote about as an Auteur; and has been cited as an influence by Goddard and Bertolucci. There’s another well known Rock axiom that states, “Though only a thousand people bought The Velvet Underground’s first album, all of them started bands of their own.”

By that token, comparatively few people have seen Sam Fuller films, but he left his mark on everyone who has. But Fuller still maintains a style that is distinctly his own, perhaps summed up best when he said, speaking about phoniness in Hollywood War movies when compared to his own “ I don't cry because that guy over there got hit. I cry because I'm gonna get hit next. All that phony heroism is a bunch of baloney when they're shooting at you.” Despite all his influence, there remains something truly unique about the Fuller style. There are countless imitators but not a single duplicator.

Fuller wasn’t just a movie man, he was a pioneer journalist in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then fought across Europe serving in The Big Red One, before eventually turning to movie making. This coincidently makes his Autobiography one of the most entertaining I have ever read.

Once he started making films, he started making every kind he could In his career he made Westerns, Gangster films, Noirs, War films, and a few ones so strange they can’t really be labeled by any genre. After finding the studio system too constricting Fuller became one of the first independent American Filmmakers.

So after so much big talk about Fuller, just what is it that makes him so special? Many things set Fuller apart from the filmmakers of the time, his bold style, his utter lack of sentimentality, and his fearless nature in tackling subject matter that the production code and mores of the day normally considered taboo. He was truly ahead of his time in just about every way possible.

Fuller wrote about his harshness in his own inimitable style in The Third Face. “I’m not dealing her with kings, ravishing princesses, charming princes who ar born with castles, jewels, and juicy legacies. Ever since my characters where born, their lives have been harsh and unfar. They have to fight to survive. They are anarchists turned against a system that betrayed them.”

But to me its his energy, some would argue his vulgarity, that really makes him special.

And that’s why I chose to show Underworld USA today. Its not one of his most well known films, nor is it one of his most respected. Its almost something of a curiosity, a B Side. Naked Kiss better showcases how ahead of the time he was in subject matter, it takes him 80 minutes to accomplish what it takes Von Trier two hours and forty minutes to not accomplish in Dogville. Shock Corridor portrays his radical techniques. Pick Up On South Street is a showcase for his hard bitten style and unsentimental treatment of his material, as well as being for my money one of the best Noir films ever made, and arguably the best film the fifties produced. But I think its because it doesn’t have those distracting elements that Underworld acts as such a supreme showcase for all the talents that made Fuller such a special filmmaker.

The story of the film you’re going to see today really isn’t anything that special or original. It’s the average revenge story something you’ve probably seen a dozen times before. but the way its told, the stark images, the lean story, the way it flies at you off the screen is really something incredible.

The things that do set Underworld USA apart is the way it shows Organized crime as something truly institutional. It really wasn’t until Coppola’s Godfather that most movies began to look at Organized Crime as something intertwined in American life. As Fuller put it, “Not Thugs, but tax paying executives.” The old school gangsters of the thirties boom where always individualists who burned out as they tried to one up society, think Cagney bursting into flames as he yowled, “Made it Ma, Top Of The World.” By Underworld USA the paradigm has shifted as one of the gangsters says in the film…

“There’ll always be people like us. But as long as we don’t have any records on paper, as long as we run National Projects with legitimate business operations and pay our taxes on legitimate income and donate to charities and run church bazaars we’ll win the war. We Always have.”

In Fuller’s world crime and corruption are not the aberrations they’re the norm. It’s a thoroughly noir world view. There is no way to escape the darkness because there is no alternative to it. Its all dark.

The dark unmistakably noir heart of the movie though is its revenge, and the way Tolly’s utter single minded pursuit of it drives off or destroys everything else in his life. Robertson, best known today for his portrayal as the kindly Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films, radiates a kind of menace and driven obsessions shocking to anyone not familiar with his earlier career. Robertson captures the mania perfectly. Fuller reports that a real life Mob Boss upon viewing the film said to Fuller, “If only my Son had that kind of affection for me.”

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 1: Out Of The Past

So when I'm not blogging I also serve as a critic for the local weekly. I have a column where I basically get to write about what ever film I want as as long as it clocks in a 500 words or under everybody's happy. Anyway this somehow led to me programming the first half of a film noir festival and today I get to tell a bunch of people why Out Of The Past is awesome. I've had tougher jobs. So I thought I'd go ahead and post my introduction for you fine people. Forgive me if the cadences are a bit off, they're written for speech after and the editing I did on them was minimal.

When I was first asked to pick a film for this screening the one that leapt to mind before any others was Out Of the Past.

Out Of The Past in so many ways isn’t just a film noir, it’s the film noir. All the elements we think of when we think of the genre, the classic stars, the moody shadow drenched style, and doom laden story are all present and accounted for in Out Of The Past. Keeping that in mind I’d like to share two quotes that to me sum up Film Noir better then any other.

The author James Ellroy put it pretty simply when he said “Film Noir, means you’re (blanked).” Scorsese put it a bit more eloquently when he said, the essence of Film Noir was “No matter which way you go Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.”

It’s fitting then that the director of Out Of The Past, Jacques Tournier, knew a little something about fate. Today he is best known for his horror films; particularly those he made with Val Lewton. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, as well as Night Of The Demon which he made after their partnership but which shared many similarities with his earlier work. All four of these excellent films, deal with fate as a conscience malevolent force. From their opening frames there’s no doubt that the film’s could end any other way except the way that they do. No way for its desperate characters to escape what fate has in store for them. Film Noir so often narrated by the dead, or dying shares this concept, and Tournier applies it masterfully here.

Like Ellroy and Scorsese said, the main conceit of Film Noir is that you’re doomed. This is in direct contradiction to most Hollywood films of the time, and indeed today, with their basic message that everything is going to work out for the best. That fate is kind. The message of Film Noir is that everything is not going to work out OK, Fate is not only uncaring it is actively malevolent.

As Ebert said in his essay on the film, “Most crime movies begin in the present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero is doomed before the story begins -- by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is never good, just kidding himself, living in ignorance of his dark side until events demonstrate it to him.” Mitchum’s certainly charismatic, but he’s a man with no qualms about working for a mobster and no problem with screwing over his partner and client. Once he gets a whiff of the woman in question it’s not his brain he’s thinking with.

Out Of The Past provides us with one of the greatest Noir casts of all time. Mitchum has such dynamic that we can actually fool ourselves that he might get away for a little. Kirk Douglas is one of Noir’s great villains, his cool malovelence is scarier then then his rage ever could be, he never even raises his voice.

But the real key to the movie is Judy Greer as Kathie, as Ebert notes, “Mitchum and Douglas think the story involves a contest of wills between them, when in fact, they're both the instruments of a corrupt woman.” The Femme Fatale in her purist form. However, The crime writer Ed Brubaker… and if you like crime fiction (and if you’re here I’m assuming you do) and you’re not reading Brubaker you’re missing out. Has a different view “Kathie has often been called the ultimate Femme Fatale, but to me she’s so much more then that. Because I can understand Barbara Stanwyck’s motivesin Double Indemity –she wants out of her loveless marriage and she wants to be rich- but Kathy Moffett remains an enigma. Why is Kathie doing any of the things she’s doing? What made her so alone and so afraid that she’ll turn on almost anyone, even trying to murder the people she loves.” It’s that beautiful chaotic desperation that elevates Moffett and Out Of The Past to a level most noir films never achieve. Kathie’s only motive appears to be survival and yet with Jeff, she finds both happiness and passion, as well. That she’s wiling to give the latter up for the former is her undoing. But it’s a particular kind of human failure and one again which comes from desperation. Long after any viewing of Out Of The Past I will find myself wondering where that desperation comes from.”

Desperation is really the key word in Out Of The Past. Everyone in it is desperate for something, Mitchum’s trying to escape his past, Douglas is trying to keep control of his empire and the only woman he’ll never be able to keep, and Greer is desperate to get away from whatever terrible thing is driving her. Of course none will get what they want, the trap is already been sprung, the only thing anyone can hope to do is “Die Last” as Mitchum says late in the movie.

In closing I’d like to take another quote from Brubaker’s essay “Good noir often has an element of disability layered inot it. It’s symbolism and character all at once – the old man in the wheelchair who hires Bogart in The Big Sleep, the Professor’s sexual hang ups in Asphalt Jungle, the reporter with two canes in Lady From Shanghai the GI with shell shock in The Blue Dahlia, just to name a few off the top of my head. Noir is showing us a fractured world full of damaged people, who nonetheless try to survive, but who mostly fail… The mute kid that Jeff Markham befriends fits that noir theme here, serving as both a supporting character and as a symbol for Jeff’s need to keep his past a secret. That alone would have been a great noir beat., to hit, but the final stroke of genius of this film is that only the mute boy and the audience ever know the truth about Jeff and why he does the things he does. No one else in the film does, not even the girl who loves him. The silent pact between movie and viewer echoes long after the final credits have rolled.”

And that to me is what Noir is, a dark secret that reaches out past the decades, coming for us always Out Of The Past.