This kicks off my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).
So when I was gearing up to write about some of my favorite films noir this week, I was shocked to discover that I've never written about Out of the Past (1948, directed by Jacques Tourneur). I couldn't name a favorite film noir, but Out of the Past is nevertheless one of those movies that I would never, ever part with if consigned to the proverbial desert island. When I think of the archetypal film noir, chances are THIS is the film I'm thinking about. So I decided that Out of the Past would be the subject of my first post for the blogathon. Then I got sidetracked.
A couple of years ago, my partner bought us one of those DVD burning combo players, and for the first several months I had it, I spent a lot of time transferring my laserdiscs and old VHS recordings from cable, etc., to DVD. Shortly after we got the combo player, we got a new puppy, a very sweet labrador retriever named Daisy. Daisy, like most puppies, was destructive, and she ended up destroying the remote for the DVD burner, which sat for a year before I got around to replacing the remote. I finally got the new remote last week. There was also a stack of tapes next to the burner that had been waiting to be copied, and on the top of that stack of tapes was Robert Wise's Western, Blood on the Moon (1947). Blood on the Moon is sometimes classified as a Western noir, and as I was copying it to disc, I was shocked to realize that, in a LOT of ways, Blood on the Moon seems like a companion piece to Out of the Past; a dry run for Out of the Past, if you will. It certainly LOOKS like film noir, and the comparison of the two suggests the essential foolhardiness of defining what is and isn't film noir on the basis of visual idiom alone, because in spite of the similarities between the two movies, I can't decide if I think Blood on the Moon actually IS film noir, even though it play the notes. The moral quagmire is absent. The essential optimism of the Western holds sway in the end, in spite of the downright nihilistic elements that the movie brings to bear (Walter Brennan's character, for instance, is the bitterest role the actor ever played). There's no downward spiral here. Mitchum's character is too morally strong for that. There's only the visual poetry of noir.
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