In Bridgeport, a sleepy town in the lower Sierra Mountains, a stranger (Paul Valentine) arrives looking for the operator of a gas station by the name of Jeff Bailey. The mute kid who works for Bailey drives to a lake to summon his boss, who’s fishing with the nice local gal (Virginia Huston) he’s involved with. Robert Mitchum plays Bailey, mysterious and elusive when it comes to talking about his past.

Bailey confronts the stranger, a figure from his past who still works for someone named Whit, a man who would very much like to see Bailey again. Bailey picks up his girlfriend and on the way to Whit’s mansion, he comes clean about his background. His real name is Jeff Markham. He used to be a private detective in New York, and was hired by a gambler named Whit (Kirk Douglas) to track down his flame, a woman who shot him and ran off with $40,000 of his money.

The dame’s name is Kathie Moffat. In flashback, Bailey visits a black juke joint and after talking to one of Kathie’s friends, traces her to Acapulco. Walking out of the sun into the cantina where Bailey waits for her is Jane Greer, making a memorable entrance and playing one of the classic temptresses of the film noir genre. Bailey falls in love with Kathie and runs away with her instead of turning her over to Whit.

Bailey and Kathie settle in San Francisco, but are spotted by Bailey’s ex-partner at a race track. He tries to blackmail the couple, but Kathie shoots him and runs off. This brings us up to the present. Bailey is reunited with Whit, who wants him to steal some tax documents that a lawyer is trying to blackmail him with. Kathie is back by the gambler’s side.

Still with me? Kathie reveals to Bailey that she told Whit all about the two of them, but he takes the job anyway. Bailey heads to San Francisco to complete the job, certain he’s being set up, but unable to run away from his destiny. He never got over Kathie, and while he’s able to stay one step ahead of Whit and his goons, is helpless to walk away from the girl.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur and adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Holmes) from his novel Build My Gallows High, Out of the Past is considered by some one of the finest entries in film noir. It’s definitely got the style down. Director of photography Nicholas Musaraca drenches the film in evocative, menacing shadow, Jane Greer is on as the smoldering siren, and the dialogue crackles:

“You can never help anything, can you? You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another.” Or …

“All women are wonders because they reduce men to the obvious.” And …

“Oh Jeff, you ought to have killed me for what I did a minute ago.” “There’s still time.”

The verbal fireworks aside, the film becomes an incredible pain in the ass. I gave up on it twice before making it all the way through. It’s not just that the plot is indecipherable. The Big Sleep required a scorecard to figure out who shot who. But that film had Bogart & Bacall. As long as they seemed like they knew what was going on, that’s all you really cared about. Their characters and their chemistry rendered the plot irrelevant.

Mainwaring is no Raymond Chandler and instead of rising above pulp fiction, panders down to it. Mitchum and Greer give excellent performances, but can’t pave over the boggling nature of the story, which is backwards to the point of being irritating. Before any of the characters are introduced, someone else in the movie talks about them first. Then we have to guess who’s who and remember the exposition that was given earlier. Every character is set up in this bizarre manner.

Jacques Tourneur, the French born director whose forte was generating mood in B-movie classics like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie gives the film a distinctive look, but style only goes so far and it never elevates the movie above the level of goofball whodunit. Remade in 1984 by Taylor Hackford as Against All Odds, with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward and James Woods.