Out of the Past (billed in the United Kingdom as Build My Gallows High) is a 1947 American film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas.

[2] Its complex, fatalistic storyline, dark cinematography, and classic femme fatale garnered the film critical acclaim and cult status.

[3][4][5] Joe Stefanos arrives in Bridgeport, California, a rural mountain town, seeking Jeff Bailey, who owns a local gas station.

Kathie deliberately kills Fisher and drives away, leaving behind a bank book showing a balance of $40,000.

Leonard Eels, a crooked San Francisco lawyer, helped Whit dodge $1 million in taxes and is now blackmailing him.

Whit wants Jeff to recover the incriminating records and tells him to meet with Eels's secretary.

The Kid spots Stefanos poised to shoot Jeff and hooks his coat with a fishing line, pulling him off-balance so that he falls to his death.

Although the studio focused on making B-films during the early 1940s,[6][7] the post–World War II Out of the Past was given a comparatively lavish budget.

[9] Kirk Douglas, in only his third credited screen performance, plays a supporting role but a central part in the story as Mitchum's antagonist.

The next time Mitchum and Douglas played major roles in the same picture was in the 1967 Western The Way West, alongside Richard Widmark.

[citation needed] Musuraca also shot Tourneur's 1942 RKO horror film Cat People.

Robert Mitchum is magnificently cheeky and self-assured as the tangled 'private eye,' consuming an astronomical number of cigarettes in displaying his nonchalance.

And Jane Greer is very sleek as his Delilah, Kirk Douglas is crisp as a big crook and Richard Webb, Virginia Huston, Rhonda Fleming and Dickie Moore are picturesque in other roles.

[15]Shortly after the film's release, the staff of the widely read trade publication Variety also gave it a positive review: Out of the Past is a hardboiled melodrama [from the novel by Geoffrey Homes] strong on characterization.

Direction by Jacques Tourneur pays close attention to mood development, achieving realistic flavor that is further emphasized by real life settings and topnotch lensing by Nicholas Musuraca...Mitchum gives a very strong account of himself.

Kirk Douglas, the gangster, is believable and Paul Valentine makes his role of henchman stand out.

The film stars Robert Mitchum, whose weary eyes and laconic voice, whose very presence as a violent man wrapped in indifference, made him an archetypal noir actor.

[13]With regard to the production's stylish and moody cinematography, Ebert also dubbed the film "The greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time":[17] ...The trick, as demonstrated by Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca, is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale.

When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities and their energy levels.

[18] Out of the Past was remade as Against All Odds (1984) with Rachel Ward in the Greer role, Jeff Bridges filling in for Mitchum, and James Woods as a variation of Kirk Douglas' villain, with Jane Greer as the mother of her original character in Out of the Past and Richard Widmark in a supporting role.

Greer made a surprise appearance in a gag sequel called "Out of Gas," in which their characters met again 40 years later at a filling station.