Out of the Past 1947 Out of the Past (billed in the United Kingdom as Build My Gallows High) is a 1947 American film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. The film was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (using the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) from his 1946 novel Build My Gallows High (also written as Homes), with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain. Its complex, fatalistic storyline, dark cinematography, and classic femme fatale ga