Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2015 August 19 • Wednesday

Out of the Past has been one of my favorite movies for a long time. The combination of Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Jacques Tourneur and Nicholas Musuraca, who head the list of talent involved in this movie, is unbeatable.

It wouldn't amount to as much without a great story and great characters, however, and these were supplied by screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who attempted his own novel Build My Gallows High, which had been published under the pen name of Geoffrey Homes.

If a movie's really good and it's based on a book, I frequently seek out the book. While books usually deliver more than the movie version, or at least provide some nuances and depth that film adaptations have to shrug off, I've been surprised by the number of times a movie has improved on a book. Out of the Past is an example of this.

The biggest change is in the character played by Jane Greer. Named Kathy Moffett in the movie, in the book she's the ridiculous Mumsie McGonigle. She might as well just be named MacGuffin, for that's what she is, not so much a character as a device and a plot convenience.

The character names appear to have been picked with care and suggest archetypes: Guy, Kid, Red, Whit, Meta. This fits with the sense of fatalism or existentialism that runs through the pages. "What was going to happen would happen and that was that. When you came right down to it, it didn't matter much. It really didn't matter at all. Even if he was a worthy citizen full of good deeds and honors, it wouldn't matter."

The movie improves on the story's structure and transforms its slightly static nature into an inexorable magentic pull. There is much great atmospheric writing and attention to detail in the book, and these seem to have survived into the movie as well, such as "the sea an unruffled inland lake so smooth you could find stars in it" or "The shadows of her long lashes were like cob-webs on her pale skin".

Some characters are more memorable in the book than they are in the movie, such as Lloyd Eels. He's not important as a character. He's just there to be the main problem for the hero. The movie doesn't need him to do more than show up and speak his lines. The book can spend a little more time on him, though. "Lloyd Eels was a tall man who hadn't come off the assembly line. Somebody had found some spare parts lying around and had put them together carelessly, not bothering to get the bolts tight so that they seemed almost ready to come apart."

But Mainwaring (or somebody) came up with much snappier dialogue for the movie, and served the story well by streamlining the love triangle. While this is a more important aspect of the book, and brings with it considerable poignancy and complexity of character, it would have been less interesting in the movie, I think, and also a distraction. (In the book it also leads to a contrived and somewhat exasperating woman in jeopardy scene that feels patched in just to provide some titillation to sleazier-minded readers.)

Build My Gallows Highis a great read, no doubt about it, though the movie improves on it. You could think of the novel as a an earlier draft. While the way the movie ends the story is superior, the book does have a devastating last line. The first line is "Red Bailey didn't see her coming".