William Dozier, production chief at RKO-Radio, not only bought the property but hired Homes to develop the screenplay for producer Warren Duff, himself a screenwriter of note. He consciously gave it some of the qualities of a book he admired greatly, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. After a grueling year in which he wrote a half-dozen scripts for Pine-Thomas Productions, makers of low-budget action films for Paramount release, Homes retreated from the studios long enough to write his first novel in several years, Build My Gallows High. Much of its excellence can be credited to its author, Geoffrey Homes, a novelist and screenwriter whose real name was Daniel Mainwaring. There are extensive location scenes with several of the principals made in the Lake Tahoe area on the California-Nevada boundary and second-unit work from Acapulco, New York and San Francisco. Out of the Past was generously financed and shot in 64 working days (an unusually long schedule at the time), mostly on the sound stages at RKO’s Hollywood studio and the Pathé lot in Culver City. Each approach gave us its share of masterworks. The RKO style was almost the opposite: underplayed performances, photography themed more to convey pictorial beauty and intangible menace than startling dramatic punch, unobtrusive music that emphasizes mood rather than action, and comparatively leisurely cutting. The Warner approach - best exemplified by The Maltese Falconand The Big Sleep - emphasized sharply drawn images photographed from often bizarre angles, fast-paced direction emphasized by rapid cutting and swift transitions, gaudy musical scoring, and strong central characterizations by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. While all of the studios contributed noteworthy noir films, the leaders were Warner Brothers and RKO. Out of the Past has become recognized as one of the prime examples of noir films.Įach of the major studios imparted to their pictures a distinctive style recognizable to even a semi-alert moviegoer. These films reflect the growing pessimism of the war years and their aftermath, depicting with cynicism an awareness of dark forces engendered by a world being consumed by greed and corruption. It is what was called, in those days, a “hard-boiled melodrama.” Certain pictures of this kind today represent a sort of sub-genre known as film noir, a designation created in 1946 by a French critic, Nino Frank, but only recently recognized in Britain and America. This article originally ran in AC, March 1984.
It also has emerged from that formidable mass of pictures as one of the highlights of its time, a picture whose charm becomes more apparent with each viewing. Out of the Past was well-advertised and had names that meant something at the box office, assuring it a wide enough audience to put some black ink on the books. While this may sound like small potatoes by today’s standards, it represented the production cost of three “A” pictures or a dozen profitable “B’s”. Although 1947 was a great year for most of the studios, RKO went into the red to the tune of $1.8 million. RKO-Radio, which produced Out of the Past, released 39 features and 84 one and two-reel short subjects that year. The foreign market accounted for an additional $900 million. It was released into a booming market in which 90 million Americans were paying admissions each week at 19,107 theaters to create domestic revenues of $1,565 billion.
Out of the Past was one of about 360 feature productions made in Hollywood during 1947. A retrospective examination of this RKO film noir classic, shot with style by Nicholas Musuraca, ASC. At top, Jeff (Robert Mitchum) tries to outrun his past.