A bit of classic cinema noir: Out of the Past

Mobster-gambler Kirk Douglas hires straight-shooting detective Robert Mitchum to track down the gal who pumped him with slugs from the 45 and went on the lam with $40K, but when Mitchum tracks the dame to Acapulco and spots her at a lone cafe he falls for her hard and double-crosses his own client. Mitchum and the gal make plans to head off on their own, but Douglas won't give up this gal - he wants back his 40 grand and a shot at revenge for the slugs to the gut. Douglas hires Mitchum's former sidekick, who tracks the lovely couple at a mountain hideaway, where the gal performs her old trick with a pistol and shoots the sidekick dead. Worried about the rap, the no-good gal goes back to Douglas, who sets a trap to knock off a rich oldster and pin it on Mitchum, but Mitchum sees through the scheme. That's the basic hardboiled plot outline of the 1947 "Out of the Past," a not-bad noirish detective thriller that has an unusual element I didn't catch in the summary above: Mitchum leaves the biz and creates new life under a new ID as a gas-station owner in the High Sierras, where he falls for a sweet young girl in town, but has to tell her ultimately about his troubled past. Will she go for him anyway? Can he make one last foray into the dark world to clear his record, pay off old debts, and spend the rest of his life changing tires? Some of the dialog is pretty funny and outdated, other dialog sharp - though not at the Chandler level, to say the least. Movie marred by some wild improbabilities, such as the likelihood of Mitchum's ever tracking the woman to Acapulco, on a hunch. Has some nice elements, too, including some good outdoors scenes, a rarity in noir films, a very good first scene at which a menacing sidekick finds the under-cover Mitchum, interesting deaf-mute character (played by a deaf actor, I wonder?), and a terrific scene when the thugs visit Mitchum in Acapulco, where he says he hasn't found the girl, and he - and we - expect that the girl will show up at any second and blow his cover.