Filed by KOSU News in Art & Life.
May 5, 2012

Weekends on All Things Considered series, Movies I’ve Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

For writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, whose credits include The Big Chill, The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie he can’t get enough of is Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.

Kasdan tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that he’s seen the 1947 film noir movie at least eight or nine times.

“Every scene has got great things and it’s very funny,” Kasdan says. “It’s very wised up in the manner of film noir.”

The movie starts out bright, sunny, and cheerful, Kasdan says, but soon descends into a darker mood as we learn more about the main character’s past, a former private investigator played by Robert Mitchum.

“The whole language of the underworld and the understanding that the characters have of each other, you feel like you’re being led into a secret world,” he says. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]