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Fatale attraction
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Build My Gallows High (aka Out of the Past)
1947 | 97mins | dir: Jacques Tourneur | starring: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas | available from Amazon
reviewed by
Lebby Eyres
[email]
uploaded: 09-04-2004
What an uninspiring lot the current batch of Hollywood heroines are. Fortunately, that's what old movies are for — great leading ladies
Oooh, they don’t make ‘em like they used to. Heroines, that is. Think of the current crop of Top Ten movies. We’ve got Halle Berry as a repressed female psychiatrist in Gothika, a few holy Marys in The Passion of The Christ, an overweight and overhyped Charlize Theron in Monster and, worst of all, Julia Roberts as a cutesy blue-stocking in the female Dead Poets, Mona Lisa Smile.
Not that inspiring, is it? In fact, if it’s stylish screen ladies you’re after, you’ll be much better off staying at home this week rather than dashing out to the flicks. Or, at the very least, setting your video. Because the best film of the week certainly isn’t showing at the cinema – it’s on BBC2 on Friday afternoon. And so much the better if you’re ‘off sick’, because Build My Gallows High is just the kind of film duvet days were invented for.
The film, by Cat People director Jacques Tourneur, is a superlative example of what they call film noir. In other words, the heroines are bad, and the heroes are good, but a bit dumb when it comes to the evil, conniving ways of the fairer sex. Especially when they look like Jane Greer. There’s one brilliant scene in Build My Gallows High, when Jane Greer tries to reassure PI Robert Mitchum, who’s been sent to find her, that she didn’t run off with a gangster’s $40,000. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “I, I didn’t know anything except how much I hated him. But I didn’t take anything. I didn’t, Jeff. Don’t you believe me?”
Mitchum’s answer as he takes her in his arms? “Baby, I don’t care.” Of course not. He knows, and we know, that she’s trouble, but he just can’t help himself. And we also know, as he recounts the story of how he got caught up with Greer and her hoodlum boyfriend, Kirk Douglas, to his current fiancée, that he still won’t be able to help himself if he ever meets up with her again.
That’s not to say that the characters in Build My Gallows High are just caricatures – far from it. In fact, what makes the film such a classic example of its genre is that Greer is much more than just a femme fatale, and Mitchum a gullible gumshoe. They’re real, flawed people – and they don’t half get good lines.
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| “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn't know where she lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I don't know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.” Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) |
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| 9/10
She's bad — but we want to be her! |
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