As suggested by the title, Out of the Past is a movie about a man who thought he had put his past behind him and could live out his days contentedly married to a nice woman in a small town.  But one day, his past catches up with him, dragging him back.  As might be expected, this precipitates a flashback.

Flashbacks are common in a film noir like this one, presumably because they help create the right mood for stories about what Foster Hirsch refers to as “doomed characters” who are “victims of fate.”  [The Dark Side of the Screen:  Film Noir, page 2.]  There is no logical reason why this should be so.  If man has free will, then he would have had it in the past just as he has it in the present. Alternatively, if events occur by chance, they could have done so in the past just as they do today. Because the past cannot be changed, however, the inalterable nature of those past events creates the feeling that those events were unavoidable when they first unfolded.

Even a movie told completely in the present tense can be experienced differently when seen a second time, for then we know the end toward which the events in the movie are headed, and we experience a sense of inevitability that was absent when we watched the movie the first time, when the future seemed open to all sorts of possibilities.  For that reason, films noirs with flashbacks age well, for the sense of inexorable fate is doubled on a subsequent viewing.

Danny Peary says, “Out of the Past repeatedly suggests that lives are determined by chance,” [Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, page 242] after which he lists several examples, which are discussed below.  But the overriding principle is fate, which guides the flow of chance events toward their ultimate destination.

Understood this way, we can accept some of the almost unbelievable coincidences that occur in this movie, for in a world governed by fate, what is unlikely may be inevitable.  For example, viewed objectively, it is a bit farfetched that Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), a private detective, could spend his afternoons sitting in a little café called La Mar Azul in Acapulco, drinking beer, in hopes of spotting Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), whom he has been hired to find on account of her having shot her lover, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a big-time gambler, when he found out she stole $40,000 from him.

When Jeff is first hired to find Kathie, Whit says he’s not worried about the money.  He just wants her back.  Jeff talks to the woman that used to be Kathie’s maid, who says that Kathie must have gone south, Florida to be exact, given the clothes she packed.  However, the maid also refers to Kathie’s having gotten sick from being vaccinated.  Jeff notes that you don’t need to be vaccinated to go to Florida, so he takes the bus to Mexico City and then to Acapulco.  Jeff figures that Acapulco is the place because “if you want to go south, here’s where you get the boat.”  And so, against all odds, Jeff’s waiting around in that café works, for one day Kathie walks in through the door.

Another example of how fate overcomes the odds occurs after Jeff and Kathie fall in love and decide to hide out in San Francisco, where Jeff starts working as a private detective again.  He says, “There wasn’t one chance in a million we’d bump into our past.”  It is helpful that Jeff acknowledged the odds against running into anyone they once knew, and it is fitting that we see him at a racetrack as he says this.  This preemptive admission of just how much of a long shot it was makes it easier to believe it when it happens.  He is spotted by his ex-partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), whom Whit hired to find Jeff and Kathie after he realized that Jeff betrayed him by running off with Kathie instead of bringing her back. But even more so, the fatalistic connotations of the flashback, in which this part of the story is told, make their being found out even more acceptable.  It was bound to happen, sooner or later, we tell ourselves.

Chance was also put in its place in a previous scene, one in Acapulco, where Kathie takes Jeff to a casino. She continually places big bets on the roulette table and loses.  He tells her that isn’t the way to win.

“Is there a way?” she replies with resignation.

“There’s a way to lose more slowly.”

Jeff adds that he especially does not like betting against a wheel.  In the movies, only women and weak men play roulette, where one must passively sit at the table while the odds slowly grind one down.  A real man likes to imagine that he has some say in the matter, which is why Jeff is happy to go to the racetrack, where a man can flatter himself that his knowledge of the horses, the jockeys, and the track enables him to beat the odds.  Of course, it is at the track where the million to one shot against him comes in.

Adding to this sense of fate is the enchanting nature of Kathie herself.  “And then I saw her coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care about the forty grand,” Jeff says as we see her walking into La Mar Azul.  After their first meeting, she mentions a cantina named Pablo’s, adding, “I sometimes go there.”

Jeff continues his narration:

I went to Pablo’s that night. I knew I’d go every night until she showed up, and I knew she knew it.  I sat there and drank bourbon, and I shut my eyes….  I knew where I was and what I was doing. I just thought what a sucker I was. I even knew she wouldn’t come the first night, but I sat there, grinding it out. But the next night I knew she’d show. She waited until it was late.  And then she walked in out of the moonlight, smiling.

Kathie is sexually irresistible, and we know that Jeff is destined to make love to her.  She tells him she never stole the $40,000, asking him, “Won’t you believe me?”

“Baby, I don’t care,” he replies, kissing her and sealing his fate.

One night, they go back to her cabin just as it starts raining.  Because they got wet, they get a towel and start drying themselves off.  We are used to seeing old movies where the love scenes are indicated by metaphors:  two lit cigarettes burning in an ashtray, logs burning in the fireplace, fireworks lighting up the sky.  In this movie, Jeff flings the towel away, knocking over the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, just as the storm blows open the door, with the rain pouring down. Whew! That must have been some pretty good sex.

Nicholas Christopher says that the first time he saw Out of the Past, he had taken a few puffs on an opium pipe, so he attributed the dreamlike experience of watching the movie to the opium. Years later, however, he saw the movie cold sober:

And again, as I found myself entering that same vivid, darkly beautiful dream I remembered from Paris, I realized with astonishment that it had not been the opium which had engendered the dream, but the film.  [Somewhere in the Night:  Film Noir and the American City, page xii.]

After quoting the two entrances made by Kathie referred to above, he makes a general observation about how she appears to Jeff:

And he keeps referring to her as emerging from various sorts of light.  As a glowing, luminescent image.  Almost otherworldly.  Always striding into darkness….  “And then suddenly she appeared,” he says with a lift of anticipation, “walking through the moonlight, to me….”  “And then I saw her,” he says, “walking up the dirt road in the headlights of her car….”  [Ibid., pages 2-3.]

At this point, it worth contrasting Kathie with another woman, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston).  The movie begins in Bridgeport, a small town in California.  Jeff, having changed his last name to “Bailey,” runs a filling station, and he wants to marry Ann.  She is an attractive woman, but she is not sexually exciting the way Kathie is.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I would have counted myself lucky to have had a girlfriend as pretty as Ann back in the day.  But compared to Kathie?  Forget about it.  With her, I wouldn’t even have tried.  I knew my place in the world, and that did not include having a girlfriend like Kathie.

Actually, I think I would have been most comfortable with Marny (Mary Field), the wise-cracking hash-slinger who owns the café in Bridgeport right across the street from Jeff’s filling station, although nobody is interested her.  While she is talking to Jim, the local sheriff, we learn he used to be Ann’s boyfriend: “First she’s got you,” Marny says, “now she’s got you and Bailey. And the only thing I seem to get is older.”

After Jim leaves, she turns her attention to a stranger that just dropped in.  It is Joe (Paul Valentine), Whit’s right-hand man.  Wanting to find out about Jeff, he says to her, “Tell me something.”

“You don’t look like I could,” she replies.

He asks her if the Bailey she was talking about runs the filling station.  She indicates as much.  He says he just happened to be passing through when he saw Bailey’s name on the sign over the filling station, and wonders if he is someone he used to know.  Actually, Jeff went by the name of Markham when Joe knew him, but Joe doesn’t want Marny to know his reason for being there.  Rather, he saw Jeff himself in front of the filling station on a previous occasion.  Add this to the list of unlikely coincidences that only an inexorable fate could bring about.

The beginning of this movie has been compared to The Killers (1946), where Burt Lancaster is trying to escape his past by working in a filling station in a small town when he happens to be spotted by Albert Dekker, a gangster he double-crossed once.  This is one of many elements of previous films noirs that occur in this movie, discussed further below.

When Bailey returns to the filling station, Joe tells him Whit wants to see him.  Jeff realizes he has to square things, and putting on his trench coat and fedora, he has Ann give him a ride to Whit’s house on Lake Tahoe.  During the trip, he tells her about his past, which constitutes the flashback.

Before proceeding, there are a couple of points worth mentioning.  This movie is based on a novel written by Daniel Mainwaring, Build My Gallows High.  In “Daniel Mainwaring:  An Interview,” by Tom Flinn, Mainwaring says, “I had been to Acapulco a couple of years before I wrote the book.  It was just a little bitty town, not like it is today.  There were very few cafés, and one hotel.”  [The Big Book of Noir, page 66.] This makes it a little more reasonable that Jeff could hang around one café and hope that Kathie would show up.

In the same interview, he says, “The scenes in San Francisco, however, took place in New York in the book. We switched to San Francisco because we wanted to shoot there.”  [Ibid.]  The story starts in New York, where Whit hired Jeff to find Kathie.  That means that in the book, after leaving Acapulco, Jeff and Kathie went back to New York.  Had that been in the movie, their being seen by Fisher at the racetrack would have been a lot more believable.  As it is, we have to wonder why Fisher, after being hired by Whit to find Jeff and Kathie, would pick San Francisco as a good place to look for them.  Fate or no fate, that really strains our credulity.

Anyway, after Jeff is spotted at that racetrack, Fisher shows up at the cabin Jeff and Kathie have in the woods, wanting his cut of the $40,000 Kathie stole.  Jeff still thinks she doesn’t have it.  While he and Fisher start fighting, we see Kathie watching calmly as her right hand seems to be reaching for something.  A slight, determined smile appears on her lips.  The fight continues, and then a shot rings out.  We see Kathie standing there with a gun in her hand, probably the one she shot Whit with. Jeff says she didn’t have to do that.  She says, “You wouldn’t have killed him,” pointing out that Fisher would have told Whit about them.  Believing her present situation to be untenable, she runs out the door, jumps in a car, and drives off, leaving her purse behind, which has a checkbook in it, listing a deposit of $40,000.

The flashback is concluded just as Jeff and Ann arrive at Whit’s house.  He gets out, and Ann drives back to Bridgeport.  Whit tells Jeff he has another job for him to do, figuring Jeff owes him.  While telling him about it, Kathie comes walking into the room, having returned to Whit.  In many scenes, we see Jeff from behind as he walks away.  With Kathie, on the other hand, she makes dramatic entrances by suddenly walking into a room.

As James Harvey points out, however, there is a difference:

But in the second half of the movie—the part that’s in the present—Kathie is a different figure from the woman in Acapulco.  Even her reentrances (which go on) are different:  less grand than furtive—less like here-she-is! (“And then I saw her…”) than where-did-she come-from?  [Movie Love in the Fifties, page 19.]

Anyway, it seems that Whit had an accountant in San Francisco help him cheat on his taxes but who is now blackmailing him, and Whit wants Jeff to get those tax records back from the accountant.  This is the part of the movie that Bosley Crowther must have had in mind when writing his review for the New York Times, where he says that “the sum of deceitful complications that occur in ‘Out of the Past’ must be reckoned by logarithmic tables, so numerous and involved do they become.”

Suffice it to say that Whit’s plan is to have Kathie, accompanied by Joe, go to San Francisco, murder the accountant, and frame Jeff for it.  As part of the frame, there is an affidavit that Kathie signed saying that Jeff murdered Fisher.  However, Jeff is one step ahead of them and foils the plot.  He now has the tax records, which he will give up in exchange for the affidavit.  In the meantime, he goes back to Bridgeport to see Ann.

While all this was going on, Whit had gone to his Blue Sky Club in Reno.  Kathie fears that she and Joe might now be in trouble with Whit for having botched things.  She calls Whit and tells him to stay where he is.  Then she has Joe go to Bridgeport to kill Jeff.  That would mean that the tax records would make their way to the Treasury Department, in which case Whit would end up going to prison, but she and Joe don’t care because they would be in the clear.  However, Joe ends up falling to his death with the help of Jeff’s deaf-mute assistant at the filling station, referred to as “The Kid” (Dickie Moore), who hooks him with his fishing line.

When Jeff returns to Whit’s place, he makes a deal with Whit to give him the tax records that Jeff now has, in exchange for which Whit will give Jeff $50,000 and take the frame off him for killing the accountant, for which they can now blame Joe.  However, someone has to take the rap for killing Fisher, and that will have to be Kathie.

Now, where have we heard that before?  In another essay by Tom Flinn, “Out of the Past,” he notices a similarity between this movie and The Maltese Falcon (1941) in the need to have a fall-guy.  He also compares Sam Spade and Gutman to Jeff and Whit, while comparing Kathie and Meta to Brigid.  (Meta is another femme fatale in this movie, played by Rhonda Fleming, who is the tax accountant’s secretary and lover.  She plays a role in setting him up to be killed.)  [The Big Book of Noir, pages 69-70.]

In the commentary provided by James Ursini on the DVD, he says the tax records have a function similar to that of the Maltese Falcon.  To all that, I suppose we might add that just as Spade didn’t like his partner Archer, so Jeff didn’t like his partner Fisher, whom he referred to as stupid and oily.  And just as Brigid killed Archer, so Kathie killed Fisher.

Flinn goes on to note that both films have the protagonist express “mocking admiration” for the “performance” of the femme fatale, as when Spade says to Brigid, “You’re good, you’re very good,” while Jeff says to Kathie, “You’re wonderful, you’re magnificent.”  In a footnote, he goes on to say that such “masculine tributes to feminine duplicity” can also be found in Nightmare Alley (1947) and Dead Reckoning (1946).  [Ibid., page 70 and page 76, n. 2.]

Regarding all these elements in Out of the Past that are reminiscent of earlier films noirs, including similarities to Double Indemnity noted below, Flinn says the following:

In the development of any art movement (or film genre) there comes a point well after the initial breakthrough has been accomplished when the themes and ideas that marked the development of the style or genre reappear in countless elaborations, producing works of greater complexity if less originality than those that defined the style or initiated the genre.  Usually termed “decadent” or “baroque” by historians, these later efforts are frequently dismissed as “more of the same” at the time they are produced, though they often seem more interesting in retrospect than the classic works they followed….  It would be hard indeed to find a better example of the “baroque” phase of film noir than RKO’s Out of the Past….  [Ibid., page 69]

After Jeff leaves to go see Ann again, Whit tells Kathie that if she doesn’t admit to killing Fisher and take the fall, he will have her tormented, tortured, and ultimately killed.  Then he goes to Reno to get the money to pay off Jeff.  When Jeff returns, he walks into Whit’s living room where he sees Whit lying dead on the floor with a dumb look on his face, pretty much matching the one now on Jeff’s face.

It seems these guys just won’t learn.  The whole thing started when Kathie shot Whit.  In San Francisco, she shot and killed Fisher.  Then she helped arrange for Joe to kill the accountant, which he did.  And then she schemed with Joe for him to kill Jeff while Whit was away.  You’d think by this time Whit and Jeff might have realized that trying to make Kathie be the fall-guy is a dangerous thing to do.

At this point, we hear Kathie’s voice, “You can’t make deals with a dead man, Jeff,” as she makes another one of her dramatic entrances into a room.  And now she has the $50,000 that Whit was going to give to Jeff.

Kathie could kill Jeff too, but she doesn’t, probably because she is still in love with him.  Now that Jeff’s plan has been thwarted, Kathie says she wants the two of them to go back to Mexico and start all over again.  He reluctantly agrees to go along with her plan.  While she goes upstairs to pack, however, he calls the police to let them know where they will be heading.

When they get in the car, Jeff has trouble getting it started, but Kathie reaches down, presumably adjusting the choke, allowing the car to start.  This reminds us of a scene from Double Indemnity (1944), although in that case, it was the man that finally got the car started, whereas in this case, it is Kathie, reinforcing the idea that she is in charge now.

As they drive down the highway, Kathie sees a police blockade up ahead and realizes Jeff has betrayed her.  She says, “Dirty, double-crossing rat!” as she pulls out her revolver, jams the barrel into his genitals, and pulls the trigger.  Then the police riddle the car with machine-gun bullets, killing both of them.

In the novel, Whit’s men kill Jeff.  Danny Peary notes that for a while, James M. Cain worked on the script. He speculates that it was Cain who had Jeff and Kathie die together at the end, just as he did in his novel, Double Indemnity, where Walter and Phyllis commit suicide while on a ship at sea by jumping overboard together, thereby feeding the sharks.  [Op. cit., page 243.]

Following this, the movie takes us back to Bridgeport.  We see Jim telling Ann that he wants to be with her, but she says she can’t.  Then she walks over to the filling station and asks The Kid if Jeff was going away with Kathie.  Although The Kid knows that Jeff had planned to come back to Ann, he lies, nodding “yes,” allowing her to think Jeff never really loved her. This frees her to go back to Jim.  Lucky him.  He gets Jeff’s leftovers.

In the interview with Mainwaring, Tom Flinn says, “Even with the two people from the small town getting together and going away, it’s not much of a happy ending because all the interesting people are dead.”

Mainwaring replies that this ending was required by the “front office.”  “Nowadays they would have ended it with both of them dead.”  [Op. cit., page 67.]

Apparently, it was not enough for the bad people to die in the end.  Ordinary domestic life had to be affirmed.  Even so, this “happy ending” is subversive because it is based on a lie.