silver nitrate notes

Out of the Past and Nicholas Musuraca's Night

22 may 2015

Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977) directed Out of the Past (1947) at RKO on the studio's B-unit budget. His cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca (1892-1975), who had photographed Tourneur's earlier horror films Cat People (1942) and The Leopard Man (1943) for producer Val Lewton and who understood, as few American cinematographers of the period did, how to light for absence.

The plot is noir to the point of parody. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), a former private investigator, has retired to a small town in California where he runs a gas station. His past arrives in the form of Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), the gangster who had hired him years earlier to track down Whit's runaway girlfriend Kathie (Jane Greer). Jeff had found Kathie, fallen in love with her, run off with her. He had then been double-crossed by Kathie and left for dead. Now Whit wants him back for one more job. The job is, of course, a frame.

Musuraca's photography is the reason the film works. He shoots the contemporary California scenes in relatively high-key light, motivated by sun and interior lamps. He shoots the flashbacks, which occupy most of the middle of the film, in a lower key, with fill so minimal that characters are frequently half-lit or unlit. Mitchum's face in the Mexico scenes is sometimes lit from a single source behind and above the camera, which produces a half-silhouette effect that Musuraca would not use in the present-day scenes. The past is, visually, a darker place than the present.

The bar scene in Acapulco where Jeff first meets Kathie is the film's great set piece. Kathie enters from a bright street through a swinging door. Musuraca has lit the doorway so that she is a silhouette for about three seconds before the door swings shut behind her and the bar's low light takes over. Jeff is at a table, in profile. The camera tracks with Kathie as she walks to the bar, picks up a drink, walks to Jeff's table. The camera does not cut. Kathie sits. Jeff speaks. The entire sequence is, visually, one continuous darkening of the frame. The audience experiences Kathie's arrival as the removal of light. By the time the dialogue begins, we already know what is about to happen to Jeff.

Mitchum was twenty-nine when he made the film. He would spend the next forty years mostly playing variations on Jeff Bailey, never better than he was here. Greer would never work with material this good again. Douglas, playing against type as a soft-spoken villain, is the only one of the three to get anything resembling a normal career afterwards.

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sources
[1] Fujiwara, Chris. Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. McFarland, 1998.
[2] Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward (eds.). Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference. Overlook, 3rd ed. 1992.
[3] Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.
[4] Server, Lee. Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care". St. Martin's, 2001.