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In 1947, the same year that Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was released, Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A mainstream film that focused on anti-Semitism, Gentleman's Agreement was not without its virtues, though it was often didactic and self-congratulatory. Its protagonist, journalist Philip Schuyler (Gregory Peck), pretends to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism, but the film's moral focus is upon Schuyler's finance, Kathy Lacey (Dorothy McGuire) who lacks the courage of her convictions. She is against anti-Semitism but is unwilling to speak out, especially in situations in which bigots voice their opinions. Schuyler forces her to overcome her own timidity, to see that if she confronts her fears, the demons of prejudice will disappear. A reflection of America's Enlightenment tradition, Gentleman's Agreement assumes that the voice of reason will ultimately prevail, that the dark shadows of America's past can be erased.1 In Out of the Past, director Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (whose pen name was Geoffrey Homes) were not that sanguine. Their film, called "one of the finest examples of film noir in Hollywood's history" (Flynn 44), would show that the terrors of history were still present in post-World War II American culture.
Before directing Out of the Past, Tourneur had explored racial themes in film noir by concealing them within the "pulp" context of popular culture. Before 1947, he had already directed the racially charged Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). In Cat People, Irena (Simone Simon), is Serbian, and she tells a tale to her future American husband about the history of her village in Serbia in which the villagers were enslaved by the "Marmadukes." Some of the truly wicked villagers fled to the mountains and became black panthers, and Irena fears that the curse of the past may fall upon her. To her fiancé, the past, as Irena describes it, is just "stuff." He laughs at her story, reminding her that this is twentieth-century America. Nothing like that tale has ever happened here. I Walked with a Zombie also explores history as something more than just "stuff." The film is a version of the Jane Eyre story set in the modern island of Antigua in the...