Out of the Past
Short description
Out of the Past follows Jeff Bailey, a man running a gas station in a small California town who has built a quiet life with his girlfriend, Ann. That life ends when a figure from his past arrives and forces him back into the criminal world he had abandoned. Years earlier, under a different name, Jeff had worked as a private detective in New York. A racketeer hired him to track down Kathie Moffat, a woman who had vanished with both his money and his affections. Jeff found her, fell for her himself, and fled with her, and the affair collapsed in violence before he disappeared into his new identity. When his old employer resurfaces with Kathie at his side, Jeff is drawn into a scheme involving compromising documents and a lawyer in San Francisco, and finds the danger aimed squarely at him.
Jacques Tourneur directed the film, the third in the run of features listed for him, arriving after Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and before Berlin Express. Daniel Mainwaring wrote the screenplay, and Warren Duff produced for RKO Radio Pictures. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, with Jane Greer as Kathie, Kirk Douglas as Whit Sterling, Paul Valentine, Virginia Huston and Rhonda Fleming among a credited cast of 38. The film runs 97 minutes. It holds a critics' rating of 8.9/10 from 41 reviews, higher than its audience score on TMDB of 7.7/10 from 666 votes; that gap suggests critics have long rated it more strongly than general viewers do.
What's left behind the scenes
- Work on the film began with an incident in Bridgeport that could have ended very tragically. The brakes failed during landing on a plane carrying actor Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) and accountant/producer Warren Duff (1904-1973). The accountant and Duff were sitting in the back and lost consciousness upon impact, but the pilot and Mitchum were unharmed. In his usual manner, the actor simply climbed out of the plane, brushed off his trousers, and headed to the set.
- According to Jane Greer (1924-2001), who played Katie, the costume designers once dressed her in an unfinished dress (unfinished at the back). They knew she would only be filmed from the front that day, and the actress herself didn't mind. She said she was young, thrilled to be in a movie, and everything else was unimportant. Robert Mitchum, however, caused a scene, and at his insistence, the dress was finished before they began filming the scene.
- In 1991, the film was included in the National Film Registry.
- The film is based on the novel 'Build My Gallows High' (1946) by Daniel Mainwaring.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
