In no particular order, the 4 greatest noirs are: Out of the Past, The Clock, Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly. I know, I know, I'm skipping over Casablanca and some others, but these 4 are great because they are still rare enough they haven't been burned into our memory bank to risk boredom or parody. Each scene in OOTP is worth savoring, like a memory of a favorite vacation with your wife or girlfriend when you were young.Take the scene where Jeff (an odd name for Mitchum, but ok) is packing to leave, and is going to meet Kathy, when Whit (Kirk D.) shows up with his goons. Even though you know it's a movie, you are scared to death of Kathy knocking on the door and Whit realizing Jeff has lied to him about finding Kathy. The tension is agonizing, and yet it doesn't come from violence, it comes from our own fear of circumstances beyond our control revealing to others that we have lied about something. Powerful, powerful stuff.The movie has a little bit of corny dialogue, and there is some storyline confusion, but really, not much. Just lie back, eat your popcorn, and realize this movie is going to take you on the ride of your life.

This movie is an ideal launching pad into the "noir" genre. No need to bore folks with the necessary elements of film noir, simply watch and enjoy. My only issue with the film is a slight confusion, possibly a continuity issue. When jeff travels to SF to acquire the tax records, I found some confusion in the death location of Eels. Jeff and Meta visit Ells and leave. They go to a new location, Meta gets out, Jeff stays behind and stakes it out. Eventually Eels body is discovered in the building by Jeff BUT they had left him at the previous location. How did Eels get from his residence to the Mason building? Am I missing something? Otherwise, a brilliant film.

Before I started watching this film I didn't expect to care about what was happening in the film until half way through when I realized I was hooked on the film. This films story was truly excellent and the dialogue was also superb. The high point of this film is really the story it tells like every good film should but it does have its downside. The acting as a whole is simply OK and the camera angles and lighting are more on the downside. Overall this film had excellent storytelling which I believe is the most important aspect of films and is a good film.

I had a feeling that as soon as I watched this movie that it would be a great one, but it was much better than I expected it to be, Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past" is not the ordinary film-noir type of movie that anyone would expect even though it has pretty much the same formula for a typical movie in the genre the only difference being that the story of this movie isn't told in the traditional way. The movie stars Robert Mitchum in one of his best performances as Jeff Markham, a man who escapes his past to run a gas station only to see his past catch right up to him again. There are a lot of flashback scenes in this movie to explain the events that have been troubling his mind during the first half of the movie, and during those sequences we meet his ex-lover Kathie (Jane Greer), and a mobster named Whit (Kirk Douglas) who after we get to know them he gets framed for murder. Years after the flashback sequences took place Kathie is now Whit's lover, and Jeff is sent to San Francisco to meet with a woman named Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming) to try to help him out of this mess he's in. Markham talks about all of these things to his girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston). Tourneur's direction is very skilled here and because of it he made a masterpiece that ranks among the best film-noir classics of all time. The 1940s were the first decade to make these types of movies popular despite dwindling in the 1950s, Mitchum, Greer, Douglas, and Fleming each deserved Oscar nominations for their very good work in this movie. even though it isn't the best movie of 1947 it is one of them. Mitchum certainly gives one of the best performances of his career but it surely isn't as good as his truly sinister roles in "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), or in "Cape Fear" (1962). Kirk Douglas is also very good here with one of his very best performances as well. It was a great movie to watch but even though it doesn't lose any stars in my opinion, the only minor problem I had was that it wasn't as suspenseful as I thought it would be.