There are noirs, there are noirs, and then there’s Out of the Past, representing the best of the genre. That’s a bold claim when you consider bonafide classics like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and The Maltese Falcon, but almost every defining aspect of noir is actually defined here: The inscrutable plotting that only just makes sense in the final five minutes; dialogue so savory the screenplay must have been brined in salt for a month; light escaping from an ocean of inky shadows to catch every last tendril of smoke from roughly five million cigarettes and transforming them into cinematic silk—and while Out of the Past’s Jane Greer is maybe the uber-femme-fatale, the sweaty, barely restrained eroticism in every scene between Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas is what you’ll remember most when it’s over.