As for acting, what's the big deal? "Read the lines, kiss the girl, cash the check, and that's it."

I can just sit back and enjoy the smoke curl as I get lost in "Out of the Past".  m/r

Out of the Past

by Mark Steyn  Mark at the Movies  August 12, 2017

Robert Mitchum was born in Connecticut one hundred years ago - August 6th 1917 - and had the kind of childhood that gives you plenty to talk about in interviews, although Mitchum rarely did. His father, a railroad worker, was crushed to death before his son's second birthday, and young Bob was eventually sent to live with his grandparents in Delaware. He was expelled from middle school for getting into a fight with the principal. Kicked out of high school, he drifted round the country, hopping freights, sleeping in boxcars, picking up a little dough digging ditches, getting jailed for vagrancy, working on chain-gangs... He found his way to Long Beach, where he ghost-wrote for an astrologer and composed songs for his sister's nightclub act. He was set upon by half-a-dozen sailors from the local base, and was on his way to whippin' all six of 'em when his wife stepped in to break it up because he was enjoying it too much. He got busted for pot, and he had a nervous breakdown that made him temporarily blind.
At which point he decided he was leading too stressful a life, and a little light work as a movie extra seemed comparatively relaxing...
The film that made him a star was as good as anything he did after he became one. Seventy years old this autumn, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past is a first-rate film wrought from an okayish novel with the rather more lurid title Build My Gallows High. It opens in the town of Mitchum's birth - Bridgeport, but not Bridgeport, Connecticut, only a somewhat improbable Californian namesake in the Sierra Nevada, where, even more improbably, Robert Mitchum is leading the kind of small-town life he rarely enjoyed on or off screen. He has steady work, as the owner of the local gas station, and the love of a good woman, played by Virginia Huston. Everything's so peachy and apple-pie that when trouble shows up Mitchum and his gal are on a picnic by the lake. But out of the past the dark secrets of his life refuse to stay buried: He was hired to do a job for a mobster, and he didn't do it. His sometime employer now requires that he make good on his debt.

The irked racketeer is played by a young Kirk Douglas, who back in 1947 was almost absurdly chiseled and cleft. His first meeting with Mitchum at his swank penthouse is one of those scenes that, before CGI and superheroes, you'd show to a visiting space alien who wanted to know what the point of motion pictures was. Douglas, very pointedly (so to speak), even manages a short disquisition on the other man's acting style: ""You just sit and stay inside yourself," he tells Mitchum. "You wait for me to talk. I like that." The men of film noir are famously laconic, of course, but they nevertheless have energy - as, say, the two most famous Philip Marlowes, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, certainly do. Mitchum was different, his sparseness of speech communicating a more general economy. It became his habit, when offered a script, to go through it marking as many of his lines as he could with the acronym "NAR" - "No Action Required".

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