Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca had gotten their training in RKO studios remarkable Val Lewton unit, where their stylish horror films, produced on infinitesimal budgets and based on literary classics like Jane Eyre had won the admiration of the nation s best critics, and gained the opportunity to put their ideas on a larger, even more complex canvas. They made the most of OUT OF THE PAST s comparatively lavish budget, studio time, and location shooting opportunities. Places such as Kathie and Jeff s mountain hideout and the Sterling Club become expressionistic nightscapes, lairs for the forces that wait to trap Jeff at every turn. Sequences such as Jeff and Kathie s sexual rendezvous at her place in Acapulco are so exquisite you surrender to the sheer joy of looking at the incredible range of grays, the mysterious, even erotic sweeping camera movement, the tunnel of light made by the small lamp . . . Throughout, film noir s trademark shadows are splashed over Jeff like a deadly visual benediction.
Characters arise out of dark corners, and then return, as if they live there.
The team worked from a script by Daniel Mainwaring, who had written the film s source novel, Build My Gallows High , under his pseudonym, Geoffrey Homes. Mainwaring admitted later that his novel was a slavish imitation of Dashiell Hammett s The Maltese Falcon . For the film version, RKO toyed with the idea of obtaining Bogart from Warners to play the lead. Luckily, the deal never gelled, and the film was rebuilt around Robert Mitchum s morose affinity for tragedy, rather than Bogart s lighter touch. Mainwaring is responsible for the film s gorgeous wordiness, its fetish for epigrams, which Mitchum presents as if each were his own epitaph.