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

labyrinth of thwarted dreams. The city of dreams differs very little from the city of reality
in film noir, in general, and particularly in Out of the Past. Indeed, it is worth recalling
what Robert Warshow wrote (see p. 173): “there is only the city [for them]; not the real
city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important,
which is the modern world” (Warshow 1972:131). Yet, Out of the Past starts and finishes
with daylight rural scenes, in vast open spaces, which establishes the whole tone and
attitude of the film. However, the noir overpowering entrapment remains, especially in the
San Francisco section, though the film contrasts it with a new visual scheme that permits
the protagonists to breathe freely and suggests their potential liberation.
The sort of love and hate relationship between Jeff and Kathie reminds us of Neff
and Phyllis in Double Indemnity. Both men come to realise that they are being “played for
saps” by their femmes fatales, to the point of having Jeff saying to Kathie “You’re like a
leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.” In any case, it is the aggressive
sexuality of these women that deceives the leading male characters of these films, stressing
how far the archetype is a male construction, a projection of the vulnerable sensibilities of
the protagonists. In these movies, male self-destruction (usually along with that of the
woman) is almost always inevitable: In Double Indemnity, or Scarlet Street, or Out of the
Past. “Pretending” to accept her plans of leaving with him, Jeff (off-screen) phones the
police, knowing that this way he willingly sets in motion the reason for his own
destruction. Before they leave Whit’s residence, they have one last drink and reminisce
about their past:
Kathie: Jeff, we’ve been wrong a lot, and unlucky a long time. I think we deserve a
break.
Jeff: We deserve each other.
While they are both driving down the road, the police set up a roadblock. In the
final dramatic sequence of the film, Kathie realises that she has been sold out by Jeff.
Because of the censorship imposed by Hollywood’s Hays Office Code of morality, the
deceitful couple is forced to discover that crime never pays, that redemption can only be
found in their deaths. Like Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy, who says “I told you I’m a
bad girl, didn’t I?, Kathie vengefully pulls out a gun and cries to Jeff: “You dirty, doublecrossing
rat.” While in the novel Jeff is shot by Whit’s men, in the film Kathie shoots him
dead in the driver’s seat, firing her gun into his crotch. In the meantime, as in the ending of
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