Out of the Past is one of those films that gets better every year (that is, if the fragile nitrate film itself can be restored, as in tonight's Library of Congress safety print). Even more laconic and heavy lidded than usual, Robert Mitchum begins as a gas station owner hiding away east of Yosemite in Bridgeport, California. As the title hints, his past soon catches up, first in the form of rich mafioso Kirk Douglas, who manages to be at once whiny, snarling, and unctuous. Neither character proves anything like a match for the icy beauty of Jane Greer, rivaled only by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity as the most cunning of that fatal breed: the noir woman. The plotline would be hopelessly bleak were it not for Daniel Mainwaring's taut deadpan dialogue, noir wit at its best. When Mitchum's understanding girlfriend says of Greer, "She can't be all bad, nobody is," he responds, patiently, "She comes the closest." Director Jacques Tourneur and his frequent cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca bring the visual menace of their earlier Val Lewton-produced horror films into the open air of the Sierras. Setting the Western spirit tonight is a 1912 one-reeler, Algie the Miner, a recent rediscovery from pioneer producer Alice Guy-Blaché, whose comedies hold up wonderfully. In this one, a limp-wristed Billy Quirk (in something of vaudevillian "nance" routine) must prove manliness to his prospective father-in-law. Off to the West he goes, learning first that one does not thank gunslingers by kissing them. Scott Simmon