Background
Jane Greer was born on 9 September 1924 in Washington, United States.
Jane Greer was born on 9 September 1924 in Washington, United States.
These are some of her other films: Two O'clock Courage (45, Anthony Mann); Dick Tracy (45, William Berke); The Falcon’s Alibi (46, Ray McCarey); The Bamboo Blonde (46, Mann); Sinbad the Sailor (47, Richard Wallace); They Won 't Believe Me (47, Irving Pichel); Station West (48, Sidney Lanfield); with Mitchum again, and very funny, in The Big Steal (49, Don Siegel); The Company She Keeps (50. John Cromwell), a melo where she has the lead; You’re in the Navy Now (51, Henry Hathaway); You for Me (52, Don Weis); in the old Mary Astor role in The Prisoner of Zenda (52, Richard Thorpe); Desperate Search (52, Joseph H. Lewis); The Clown (53, Robert Z. Leonard), with Red Skelton; Down Among the Sheltering Palms (53, Edmund Goulding); Run for the Sun (56, Roy Boulting), with Richard YVid- mark and Trevor Howard; and one of the wives in Man of a Thousand Faces (57, Joseph Pevney).
There were a few later films, but the only interesting one was the remake of Out of the Past— Against All Odds (84, Taylor Hackford)—where she plays the mother of the Kathie Moffat character. “I go there sometimes.”
“I go there sometimes,” says Kathie Moffat, as an afterthought, to Jeff Bailey. They have met, as if by chance, in a cafe in Acapulco next to a small movie house. She has strolled in out of the day’s
last sunlight in a pale dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat. In fact, he’s been sent to find her, and maybe she knew that or guessed it already. Knowing tilings seems to be her trade, or her personality. She tells Jeff about this other place, where they play American music, and the way she says it—"I go there sometimes"—makes for one of the more mysterious lines in American film. Somehow, you have the worst thoughts about the other things she does.
This is Out of the Past (47, Jacques Tourneur). Jeff is Robert Mitchum, and Kathie Moffat is Jane Greer—who didn’t have much more going for her than dark hair that stirred like drapes in a breeze, the best mouth, eyes like blueberries in cream, and that threat of knowledge. That’s what Howard Hughes noticed, and Rudy Vallee, when they saw pictures of her modeling uniforms for the Women’s Army Corps. That’s what a war can do tor you: Hughes signed her up with a contract that forbade marriage; and then she married Vallee, who was twenty-three years older than she was, and wild! As for Jane Greer, did it mean she was naughty, or perverse? “Can’t I be both?” she would have asked.
And maybe there was something in her that knew, after Out of the Past, that bothering or building her career seriously was hardly worth-while, not with people like Hughes running the show. So she didn’t take herself seriously. She did just a few movies in the late forties and the early fifties, and then, maybe, wandered in and out of rooms waiting for someone to say. “My God, aren’t you Jane Greer?” And she'd say, “Sometimes ”?
Well , yes and no. She also married again, had sons, and lived quite well. All of which should be remembered and nailed down—but hardly stands up to the possibility that in Acapulco, in 1947, having run away with forty thousand dollars of Kirk Douglas’s money, she has rented a cottage where she listens to Charlie Parker records and works her way through The Sheltering Sky, cutting the uncut pages with this knife she has acquired.