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Hollywood’s postwar shift to social consciousness addressed familiar issues like bigotry and discrimination. On his way to making his gargantuan, serious epics, famed director George Stevens paused for this almost entirely forgotten contemplation of American anxiety in the business rat race, with a side order of alcoholism and potential adultery. Ray Milland is the troubled ad man who tries to help the drink-impaired actress, Joan Fontaine. Wife Teresa Wright waits patiently back home, but for how long? Is Stevens just dabbling in neorealistic doldrums, or did he feel the wave of dull existential despair as well? It’s one of his least-known films.

Something to Live For

All Region Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #199

952 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 89 min. / Street Date February 22, 2023 / Available from [Imprint] / au 34.95

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Ray Milland, Teresa Wright, Richard Derr, Douglas Dick, Harry Bellaver, Paul Valentine, King Donovan, Kasey Rogers, Douglas Spencer, Mari Blanchard.

Cinematography: George Barnes

Production Designer: Hal Pereira,...

Our weekly feature in which a writer answers the question: if you could force your friends at gunpoint to watch one movie or TV show what would it be? Why do I love film noir? Why does anyone? After all, it's a genre that seems to confirm that people are horrible, that the world is painful, and that we will let each other down given any opportunity. Film noir has a world-weary worldview, but I would stop short of calling it cynical. I am many things as I reach the halfway point of my fourth decade on Earth, but I am not cynical. I love film noir because while it may reflect a cynical world view, the reason it hurts is because there is still some small light, some tiny hope, some sense of optimism. If you're truly cynical, there's nothing the world can do to disappoint you. Me, I...

Out of the Past

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Written by Daniel Mainwaring

USA, 1947

Director Jacques Tourneur knew how to make the most out of a little, particularly when he was working in collaboration with producer Val Lewton (see Cat People, 1942, I Walked with a Zombie, 1943, and The Leopard Man, 1943). So when Rko gave this master of the low-budget picture a comparatively larger budget and a top-notch screenplay (by Daniel Mainwaring—as Geoffrey Homes—based on his own novel, “Build My Gallows High”) the result was one of the finest of all film noir.

Starring Robert Mitchum as Jeff and Jane Greer as Kathie, Out of the Past is built on a premise that is one of the defining characteristics of noir: the inevitability of an inescapable past. Such a device was often integral, with the repercussions of one’s recent deeds coming back to haunt them, but relatively rare was...

Out of the Past

Written by Daniel Mainwaring

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

U.S.A., 1947

Sometimes, there is no eluding one’s past, regardless of how hard one tries. The reasons are numerous. Perhaps the emotional and psychological weight of an event in one’s life are too great to shake off. In other instances the shackles exist because an individual is condemned to spend years actively correcting previous errors in judgement in the hopes of earning long sought after redemption. There exists another set of circumstances, the most deceptively simple of the lot, that being when a person merely walks away from an embarrassing, shameful and deeply regrettable episode, but deliberately creating separation from their history is no guarantee that the old ghosts will acquiesce to letting them be. When one least expects it, a new challenge presents itself from…Out of the Past.

Jeff Baily (Robert Mitchum) has...

Out of the Past

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Written by Daniel Mainwaring

Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas

USA, 97 min – 1947.

“I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t know where she lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.”

In Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) owns a gas station, in a small California town. He has been courting local girl, Ann (Virginia Huston), despite the disapproval of her parents. Out of nowhere, Jeff’s past comes knocking in the form of a henchman, who orders Jeff to meet with gangster,...