Jim's car, and the Kid smiles, saluting Jeff's name on the gas station's sign. Cast Robert Mitchum as Jeff Bailey, previously known as Jeff Markham Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat Kirk Douglas as Whit Sterling Rhonda Fleming as Meta Carson Richard Webb as Jim Steve Brodie as Jack Fisher Virginia Huston as Ann Miller Paul Valentine as Joe Stefanos Dickie Moore as The Kid Ken Niles as Leonard Eels Theresa Harris as Eunice Leonard Background and production Out of the Past was produced by RKO Pictures, and the key personnel—director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, actors Mitchum and Greer, along with Albert S. D'Agostino's design group—were long-time RKO collaborators. Although the studio focused on making B-films during the early 1940s, the post-World War-II Out of the Past was given a comparatively lavish budget. John Garfield and Dick Powell turned down the lead. Kirk Douglas, in only his third credited screen performance, plays a supporting role but a central part in the story as Mitchum's antagonist. The next time Mitchum and Douglas played major roles in the same picture was in the 1967 Western The Way West, alongside Richard Widmark. Musuraca also shot Tourneur's 1942 RKO horror film Cat People. Reception The film made a profit of $90,000. Out of the Past is considered one of the greatest of all films noir. Robert Ottoson hailed the film as "the ne plus ultra of forties film noir". Bosley Crowther, the film critic for The New York Times in 1947, complimented the crime drama's direction and performances, although he did find the latter portion of the screenplay hard to follow: Shortly after the film's release, the staff of the widely read trade publication Variety also gave it a positive review: Decades later, in his 2004 assessment of the film for the Chicago Sun-Times, critic Roger Ebert noted:With regard to the production's stylish and moody cinematography, Ebert also dubbed the film "The greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time": The film holds a score of 93% on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 9/10, based on 40 reviews. Adaptations Out of the Past was remade as Against All Odds (1984) with Rachel Ward in the Greer role, Jeff Bridges filling in for Mitchum, and James Woods as a variation of Kirk Douglas' villain, with Jane Greer as the mother of her original character in Out of the Past and Richard Widmark