This week, for Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” column, he profiles Out of the Past, one of the all-time classic film noirs.
I saw it for the first time when I was rehearsing for The Darkling Plain, a black-and-white modern-day noir film. The director, Shelagh Carter, asked us to watch Out of the Past, to get the style, the mood, the idea she was going for. She wanted our acting to have that noir style, she wanted the lighting to be out of the noir playbook, and since the film only had 2 of us in it, 2 women, she wanted us to have that female noir thing.
The Darkling Plain ended up making the festival route, and continues to do so today… it is the film that will never die. The other actress who starred in it with me jokes, “When it finally gets a huge premiere, we’re going to be 75 years old and completely unrecognizable from who we were in the movie.” We joke about the two of us staggering down the aisle at the premiere, with canes and oxygen tanks. Here’s the promo for it, when it played at the Montreal Film Festival.
I played a homeless rave-chick, who lives in a huge abandoned warehouse with her controlling best friend. They survive by stealing, shoplifting, begging. And there’s something missing in my character, there’s something bludgeoned in her soul. She’s got no compass within. At least that’s what I was going for. She would be susceptible to joining a cult. That was the idea.
… Of course, the film was made on NO money, and everyone worked for free, but it is absolutely astonishing, to see the result, to see what we all were able to do, with no money. The crew were all professional guys, who did this as a favor for our DP, who was a pretty big deal and has a great career. So these crew guys really made our little film LOOK like a noir movie, stark lights slashing across our faces … There was one long night-time sequence where I sit in front of a 3-way mirror, staring at myself, with long tracks of black mascara tears coursing down my cheeks. It is a CREEPY image, and of course, it took 6 hours to set up the light for that one shot, because everything had to be pasted together and clipped with clothespins (literally). The crew were heroes, truly.
And one of the legacies of that great experience for me was the love of film noir. I didn’t really get it before, I didn’t really understand the sensibility. But Out of the Past, starring Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum was a perfect entry-way into that dark world.
The 2 main characters basically smoke AT each other throughout the movie, curls of smoke filling the screen. And Jane Greer, playing the archetypal film noir female, is beyond fantastic. Chilly, frightening, alluring, cold as ice.
I love this anecdote, told by Roger Ebert:
The meeting between Mitchum and Douglas opens on a note of humor so quiet, it may pass unnoticed. “Cigarette?” offers Douglas. “Smoking,” said Mitchum, holding up his hand with a cigarette in it. Something about that moment has always struck me as odd, as somehow outside the movie, and I asked Mitchum about it after a screening of “Out of the Past” at the Virginia Film Festival.
“Did you guys have any idea of doing a running gag involving cigarette smoking?” I asked him.
“No, no.”
“Because there’s more cigarette smoking in this movie than in any other movie I’ve ever seen.”
“We never thought about it. We just smoked. And I’m not impressed by that because I don’t, honest to God, know that I’ve ever actually seen the film.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“I’m sure I have, but it’s been so long that I don’t know.”
That was Mitchum for you, a superb actor who affected a weary indifference to his work.
