If there is a lesson to be learned from noir stories, be they in print or filmed, it is that the past never stays in the past for long, and the inevitably ill-fated future closes in faster than expected.
This formula has been the underlying core of countless novels and movies, but when it comes to Build My Gallows High, the 1946 novel by Daniel Mainwaring (writing as Geoffrey Homes), and the 1947 Hollywood adaptation, Out of the Past, this fundamental pattern is front and center, menacingly acknowledged and slowly but steadily eating away at everyone involved.
But Mainwaring’s novel, like the film, begins in the present, as former private investigator “Red” Bailey (Jeff in the movie, Robert Mitchum) has contentedly withdrawn to the small town of Bridgeport, California, where he runs a gas station, assisted by “The Kid,” and woos a young woman named Ann. How he arrived in Bridgeport and what he did before remains a mystery until his past comes calling and he is beckoned by an unsavory former associate. Left with little choice (a deployed enforcer makes sure of that), Red departs as requested and relates to Ann his hitherto shrouded backstory, including his real last name. To get too far into the weeds of the Gallows/Past plot would be to reveal its numerous twists and turns and the duplicitous actions that make it the engaging, endlessly coiling noir that it is. Suffice it to say, however, that behind all that transpired—and will transpire—is a woman: Mumsie McGonigle in the book, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) in the film. It was she who shot gambling kingpin Whit Sterling, leaving him with a bullet in the chest and without a bundle of cash, which she took when she fled. In the past, Red’s assignment was to track her and the money down; in the present, he must make amends for what he did and didn’t do before. Several key characters come and go in the story’s elliptical narrative, including Red’s old partner, a crooked lawyer, sundry henchmen, and a suspect secretary, but while there is a “plethora of crime and murder in Gallows,” as author Curtis Evans remarks in a newly published edition of the book from Stark House Press’s Film Noir Classics series, “at its heart the book concerns the tragedy of a man trying ‘against all odds’ to elude the dead clutching hand of his past.”
Read the complete article at Film International Online.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Kubrick and Control from Liverpool University Press and Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Something Wicked: Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture, from Bloomsbury Academic. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor.
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