One of the most exquisite and intriguing of all the noirs, Out of the Past is expertly crafted into a complex narrative in which past, present and future are linked as in a Möbius strip. Robert Mitchum, hiding out in his small-town identity, is forced to relive his once and future career as a private eye when a complicated, unresolved case opens up again like a chasm. It seems that, once upon a time, he fell in love with the woman he was sent by mobster Kirk Douglas to trace; in a Mexican cantina, he became the fly to Jane Greer's spider, and the rest was history. Now this same woman has come back, like a very live ghost, to haunt him. Greer may be the quintessential femme fatale of film noir (when someone says of her, "She can't be all bad-no one is," Mitchum replies, "She comes closest"), but then again, she may not. Her presence (and past), out of the shadows into light and then back again, echoes an obsession with the unknown, the refusal of any kind of sanctuary, that is central to the Jacques Tourneur world view.