Out of the Past (1947)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
The peaceful life of a gas station owner is disrupted when a man from his past arrives in town and forces him to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.
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What critics compared Out of the Past to
Scorsese showed his actors the great 1947 noir " Out of the Past ," whose very title is a noir theme: Characters never arrive at a story without baggage.
It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth.
So it was that, armed with recent viewings of classic noir films of obsession like Laura, Crossfire, and Out of the Past—cut with yellow-journalist gut-punches like Shock Corridor and revelatory documentaries like Titicut Follies for verisimilitude—Scorsese took Dennis Lehane’s B-flick-inspired novel Shutter Island and made a real monster of a film.
The great femme fatales -- the characters played by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and by Jane Greer in Out of the Past to name just two -- have been the creations of men, irresistible dream girls onto which men can project their fears and longing.
On the other hand, it’s not difficult at that point to imagine him following up with Robert Mitchum’s immortal line from “Out of the Past”: “Baby, I don’t care.”
And there is a great shot of her enraptured by all the trouble she is causing as she watches too boys fight over her, just as Jane Greer did in Out of the Past Femme Fatale's DVD Potential De Palma has been enjoying proliferating DVD representation of late, and the Femme Fatale disc would give the "angry man" of cinema a chance to let off more steam, either via an audio track, or in video interviews.
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In many ways, Michel is as much a poor sap as Robert Mitchum’s Jeff from 1947’s “Out of the Past”, only Michel doesn’t have a promising new life he can turn to like Jeff did.
Breathless movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a French thug and Jean Seberg as the American dame who leads him to his doom – a motif (minus the nationality specifics) found in Hollywood films noirs like Double Indemnity , Out of the Past , and Angel Face .
I look at his new movie and all I can think of are the words of Robert Mitchum, in “Out of the Past”: Baby, I don’t care.
What he uncovers is a mess that includes all of the archetypal characters of the best of noir, from "Out of the Past" to "In A Lonely Place," with particular allusions to "The Big Sleep."
Dillon plays Sam Lombardo, the ladykiller-cum-boating instructor at a tony South Florida high school who finds himself accused of rape first by one leggy blonde student (Starship Troopers' Richards) and then another, darker one (Scream's Campbell) in this noirish sleazefest that plays like Basic Instinct meets Out of the Past and feels like Party of Five as directed by the Dark Brothers.
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From 1940s classics like "Out of the Past" (1947) through the likes of "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), "Point Blank" (1967), "Chinatown" (1974) and "Body Heat" (1981), each decade has taken its own kind of brooding look at what goes down at the dark end of the street.
Those are the bare-bones stories, but Rodriguez and Miller (who share co-director credit on the film, to the reported consternation of the Directors Guild of America) both understand that film noir is a matter of style and atmosphere rather than plot—even the best of classic films noir (Laura, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, etc.) have stories that don’t always stand up to close inspection.