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 a 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. Out of the Past provided the signature Mitchum role-laconic and smitten at the same time-and his sexiest line in cinema, spoken to Greer: "Baby, I don't care." Sex, or a sucker's game? Greer may be the quintessential femme fatale of film noir, 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.