The remake of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past needn't detain anyone longer than to diagnose it as part of the Hollywood grave-robbing epidemic, and to paint a large red cross outside the theater door. What would seem to have been an untransportable Forties storyline has, as in Body Heat, been yanked into the Eighties, and there have been enough other alterations, including a slackening of the powerful fatalistic undertow and the partial reformation of the screen's most unregenerate femme fatale ("Nobody's all bad." "No, but she comes closest"), so as to make comparisons with the original pointless. When all the elements of a movie coalesce as they did in the 1947 version, you cannot tamper with some of them and expect the others to keep on functioning as before. What sort of movie, then, do we have now? Bloated, sluggish, grossly carnal, and -- in a sense not too dissimilar to comparisons with the original -- pointless. The presence of the original leading lady, Jane Greer, in a newly created role, is a nice gesture -- a nice tribute to her, that is, and a nice treat for her fans. But nothing more. Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, James Woods; directed by Taylor Hackford. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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