"Out Of The Past is the finest film noir I know - intelligent, expertly crafted and uncompromisingly heartless. Private detective Jeff Bailey's struggle to build a new life is doomed by the memory of his affair with the silkily evil Kathi Moffat.... (The) complex narrative structure keeps us constantly aware of the inescapable pressure of the past upon the present. Jacques Tourneur's direction is gratifyingly tactful, bringing to perfection the elliptical techniques he developed in his work with Val Lewton; Nicholas Musuraca's atmospheric, largely location photography surrounds the shadowed past with a bleakly sunlit present. Robert Mitchum is at his tough, cunning best and Jane Greer, a carnal, dry-ice madonna, is even better. When somebody says of her 'She can't be all bad. No one is,' Mitchum knowingly replies, 'She comes the closest.'" --Joel E. Siegel. For the 1975 Edinburgh Film Festival Tourneur retrospective, Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen consider the central principle of construction operating in a Tourneur film: "the systematic refusal of the sanctuary of a coherent world view. The real significance of a Tourneur film is always distributed over its silences rather than its speeches, its shades rather than its areas of light, its absences rather than its presences. His films constitute elaborate tracings of absences, making them lacunary texts par excellence.... Undoubtedly the centerpiece of the Tourneur oeuvre, Out of the Past presents the most striking dramatization of Tourneur's methods of text construction...(and) visually...with the intricate but systematic interweaving of light and shadow."