Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.3.1 Out of the Past (1947) and Obsession?
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Produced by Warren Duff
Written by Daniel Mainwaring
Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard
Webb
Photography by Nicholas Musuraca
Music Score by Roy Webb
Costume Design by Edward Stevenson
Film Editing by Samuel E. Beetley
In January 1947, Jacques Tourneur had the opportunity to work again with
producer Warren Duff, the producer of Experiment Perilous. Based on a novel entitled
Build My Gallows High by Daniel Mainwaring, under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Homes
(James M. Cain also wrote two drafts, but contributing little for the final film), Out of the
Past is a title evocative of the noir cycle in general as well as descriptive of this particular
film. It should also be noted that by the time Out of the Past appeared, Mainwaring had
decided to concentrate exclusively on screenwriting and wrote a number of key noir and Bfilms,
such as William C. Thomas’s They Made Me a Killer (1946), Don Siegel’s The Big
Steal (1949 - a chase melodrama set in Mexico that was made by RKO to profit from the
success of Out of the Past by teaming its two stars, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, with
the same writer), Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950), Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker
(1953), or Felix Feist’s This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), to cite but a few.
Mainwaring started his writing career as a newspaper reporter for the San
Francisco Chronicle. His past experience as a private detective and the high amount of
newspaper articles he wrote on urban crime made him decide to concentrate on detective
fiction during the golden age of the pulps. Just like a member of the hard-boiled school of
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