In Britain, Out of the Past went out under the novel’s bleaker title, Build My Gallows High. Invasion of the Body Snatchers screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring wrote it under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes, and RKO outbid Warner Bros. for the rights before it was even published, giving Warner’s Archive the last laugh all these years later. Even James M. Cain (who wrote the novels Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice but never a produced screenplay) took a $20,000 crack at the script. Producer Warren Duff couldn’t use it, so Mainwaring came back to finish the job.

Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum, Cape Fear) runs a gas station in Bridgeport, California, and keeps his past to himself. Then a man from that past rolls into town with a summons from gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas, The Fury). Driving to Whit’s Lake Tahoe estate, Jeff comes clean to his girl, Ann. Years earlier, as a private eye, he took Whit’s money to find Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer, Immediate Family). She had shot Whit and skipped town with $40,000. Jeff tracked her to Acapulco, and once she strolled into a cantina out of the sun, the job never stood a chance.

Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca had teamed on the 1942 Cat People, and trouble still waits in their shadows. Mitchum plays Jeff with drowsy eyes and a cigarette that rarely leaves his hand. Nobody in noir ever made a bad decision look this cool. Greer, about 22 and a Howard Hughes discovery from Life magazine, keeps Kathie impossible to read. Douglas, in only his third credited role, makes Whit the friendliest threat in the room.

The back half gets knotty enough to leave first-timers sorting out who knew what, but its standing hasn’t suffered: the National Film Registry added it to their ranks in 1991. Most notably, Taylor Hackford went back to the novel for 1984’s Against All Odds where Greer plays the mother of the woman in her old role.