Build My Gallows High - film review

Build My Gallows High - also known, but I think less memorably, as Out of the Past - is a classic film noir dating from 1947 that, somehow or other, I've managed to miss all these years. At last I've caught up with it, and I was impressed, not least with the central performance by Robert Mitchum as a man who goes by the name Jeff Bailey.

The film opens with a man arriving at Bailey's gasoline station, and one immediately fears the worst. Bailey has a pretty, innocent girlfriend, and when the newcomer threatens his new-found happiness, he tells her about his past. His real name is Jeff Markham, and he was formerly a partner in a two-man private eye firm. He was hired by Whit Sterling, a rich crook (Kirk Douglas) to find a woman who, he says, shot him and made off with forty thousand dollars. But when he eventually caught up with the missing lady, he fell head over heels for her.

This isn't surprising, because Kathie (Jane Greer) is beautiful and seductive. I can't recall having seen Jane Greer before, but she makes a truly stunning femme fatale. As the plot becomes increasingly complex, her habit of destroying the men who cross her path is utterly compelling. This is a doom-laden film, with superbly concise dialogue.   .

The source material was the final novel written by Daniel Mainwaring (1902-77), published under the name Geoffrey Homes. He also wrote the screenplay, and became more interested in scripting films than in turning out more novels - though I'd guess his earlier books are well worth seeking out. The director of the film was the gifted Jacques Tourneur, whose other work included Cat People and The Leopard Man (based on Black Alibi, an excellent book by Cornell Woolrich). Build My Gallows High was successfully re-made as Against All Odds in 1984; I haven't seen it (though I liked the famous theme song), but I'm keen to watch it now, especially as it features Jane Greer - but not, this time, as a femme fatale.

The Leopard Man

Cornell Woolrich is a writer whose work was ideally suited for adaptation into movies. And this has been widely recognised by succeeding generations of film-makers – Wikipedia lists over 30 films based on his stories. One of the most acclaimed is a low-budget film noir directed byJacques Tourneur and released in 1943 – The Leopard Man. The source book is Black Alibi, published the year before.

It’s classic Woolrich stuff, with sinister imagery, macabre night-time incidents and a pervasive sense of foreboding. Other than the French duo Boileau and Narcejac, I can’t think of anyone who did this sort of thing as well and as consistently as Woolrich. Back in the 1980s, I went through a Woolrich phase, and devoured every story of his I could find, and I still rate him highly. And Tourneur makes good use of the material, with a short but snappy film, not much more than an hour long.

The setting is New Mexico. A young man, Jerry Manning, hires a black leopard as a gimmick to garner publicity for his girlfriend, who is a singer in a night club. A rival singer frightens the animal, and it escapes into the night. When a young girl is found savagely murdered, the leopard is the obvious culprit. But then another young woman is killed, and before long Jerry begins to suspect that a serial killer is at work.

Today, it’s easy to figure out what is going on, but that does not diminish the impact of the film. It’s pretty well made, and even though by modern standards it is scarcely the horrific film it was billed as 70 years ago, it’s still very watchable.