Film: Film noir: shedding light on the road to destruction

Robert Mitchum's classic `Out of the Past' sums up the genre and the man

IN Jacques Tourneur's 1947 classic film noir Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum stepped into Humphrey Bogart's shoes. Bogart was slated to play the doomed and fatalistic private eye Jeff Bailey, but Warner Brothers refused to loan him out to RKO Pictures.

Mitchum stepped in after his first success in William Wellman's The Story of GI Joe (1945). Later in his career, Mitchum would offer his version of Phillip Marlowe in the 1975 remake Farewell, My Lovely and in Michael Winner's disastrous attempt at The Big Sleep (1978).

Out of the Past pitches Mitchum into a criminal sexual triangle played out between femme fatale Kathie Moffet (Jane Greer) and sharklike white- collar crook Whit Stirling (Kirk Douglas). If it has become a classic of the noir canon it is because all the elements are glowingly present and correct. When Mitchum first appears, he is languishing by a lake with a sweetheart, Ann (Virginia Huston), taken with his air of mystery and worldliness. Living under a false name (his real name is Jeff Markham) he is building an equally false life as a mechanic. But Bailey's desire for happiness can't be seen as entirely fake.

One of Mitchum's first pieces of dialogue is a short, and for him, almost florid declaration of his desire to settle down, have kids with Ann and "never go anywhere again". This is a thematic spine in the noir genre.

If American melodramas homed in on the neurotic inferno under the post- war dream of domesticity, noir might be said to have encapsulated the jaundiced gaze of those for ever living beyond the picket fence. Out of the Past contains its fair share of little stabs at happiness, all of them shown to be one-night domestic bubbles en route to destruction. And Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey as an eternal for whom happiness is just bad luck on hold. As a genial oddjobs man, Mitchum doesn't convince.

Soon the iconic trench coat and snap-brim will envelop him, cementing this performance as an ur-noir moment. Mitchum talks the talk and walks the walk, but the element of his performance that reveals one of the most compelling parts of his persona is the character's passivity. It's world- weariness turned acquiescent; he's the ideal patsy because he's given up fighting fate. When he encounters Greer's definitive femme fatale Kathy Moffet again after she's first betrayed him, Bailey puts her down hard with the words "Get out. I have to sleep in this room." But he can hardly look her in the eye. Throughout the scene, Mitchum keeps shifting his eyeline. He's disgusted, but one senses that this disgust has as much to do with the self-realization that he's so much putty in her hands. "You're going to find it very easy to take me anywhere" are among his first words to Kathy on their initial meeting and when Kathy tries to spin him a story about the `small matter' of the $40,000 she's stolen from Whit , he silences her with the line "Baby, I don't care." Headstone words, these. They could be carved over both the character of Jeff Bailey as well as serving as the summing-up of Mitchum's entire career.

After all, his public persona was fed by a lovingly nurtured off-handedness about his craft. He once defined his screen technique as being "Read the lines, kiss the girl, take the money and run." It was a studied indifference as crafted as the on-screen stoicism. But life had prepared Mitchum to take the punches and roll with them, to such an extent that he seemed almost to invite them. Mitchum had serious drifter credentials; a teenage delinquent and runaway, he'd done the hobo routine of freight-hopping, winding up on a chaingang following a vagrancy conviction at the age of fourteen. A well-publicised marijuana bust in 1948 for which he did 60 days in the pen - "Like Palm Springs without the riff-raff" - was his verdict, did nothing to impair this boho image of a marginal individualist at the heart of the studio system.

One wonders what would have happened had he found the director, the one with whom a body of work might have been possible. But, as David Thomson put it, Mitchum worked "as if he had a fruit machine for an agent." There were moments, though, in the 53-year career where the encounters were happy accidents that crystallised and really explored the Mitchum image. If Out Of the Past keyed Mitchum's air of wounds-well-hidden to the warped psychosexual world of noir, this element of stoicism was further explored five year's later in Nick Ray's The Lusty Men (1952), where he played a rodeo-rider again yearning for a domesticity that's beyond him.

It seems fitting that the two other acknowledged classic Mitchum performances should have hinged on his letting himself go rather, than reining himself in. In Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) he plays the psychopathic hellfire preacher Harry Powell with malicious glee. Likewise, his Max Cady in J Lee Thompson's original Cape Fear (1962) played up the element of calculating observation that seemed to lie behind Mitchum's hooded- eye gaze and made it manifest. His Cady is a sociopathic schemer whose pleasure comes from toying with his prey. The charisma is deadly and performed as such. Out of the Past secures Mitchum's place in the noir universe of bruised male losers; as Greer explains to him, "You're no good and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other."