The Tough Guys : Robert Mitchum

                "Robert Mitchum is film noir".- Martin Scorsese


                                                                                                                                                               My first in a series on tough guys is big, bad, Bob Mitchum. Mitch may have given more good performances in more bad or mediocre films than any Hollywood star of his stature.

                                                    Born in Connecticut in 1917, Robert Mitchum came up the hard way:riding the rails during the depression, ditch digging and boxing professionally. Down south at 14, Mitchum was arrested for vagrancy and did time on a Georgia chin gang. Somehow Mitchum escaped and went back to his family, now in Delaware. Ever footloose, Mitchum soon rode the rails out to California in 1936 and stayed with his sister, Julie. One of his many jobs was as ghost writer for astrologist Carroll Righter. It was sister Julie who convinced Bob to join the Players Guild of Long Beach where Mitchum worked as a stage hand and sometime bit player for the company. In 1940 Mitchum married his childhood sweetheart Dorothy. Also around this time Mitchum got a job at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation where he would work with a fellow named James Dougherty, who at the time happened to have a girlfriend {and future wife}Norma Jean Baker aka Marilyn Monroe. A nervous breakdown, apparently from job related stress, forced Mitchum to quit Lockheed and he decided to try his luck working in movies.                                                                                                                                                    

The image of noir:Fedora, trench coat, wet pavement, Mitchum in the urban jungle. Only thing missing is the cigarette and a dame.

                       Mitchum broke into films in the early 40's when Hollywood was having a leading man shortage due to several big name actors-Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Taylor, William Holden, Robert Montgomery among others-joined the troops; fighting fascism in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. In 1943, Mitchum got his first speaking part in a Hopalong Cassidy western, a quickie called Hoppy Serves a Writ. For the young Mitchum, who by this time also had a young son, James, it was a boon or as he would put it, "50 bucks a week and all the hay that I could eat". From that point on, Mitchum never stopped working. Most of the 20-odd films Mitch made on his way to the top were forgettable fare: the western West of the Pecos; a comedy The Girl Rush; Border Patrol; We've Never Been Licked to name but a few. However, he did make a bit of an impression in his two MGM pictures at the time, small parts though they were, in 1943's The Human Comedy and 1944's Twenty Seconds Over Tokyo. Also in 1944, RKO Pictures, an always struggling {now defunct}studio, signed Mitchum to a long term contract with the usual options. Not quite sure what to do with their new piece of beefcake, the studio put him in a couple of westerns. Then in 1945, maverick director William Wellman {Wings, the original A Star is Born, The OxBow Incident} borrowed Mitchum for a important part in his war film The Story of G.I. Joe, as Lt.Walker, a reflective, lonely officer of Company C that journalist Ernie Pyle {Burgess Meredith}immortalized in a series of newspaper articles. The picture was a hit, Mitchum got his one and only Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor {he lost}and it made him a star.

The Story of G.I. Joe, 1945

Hollywood in the 1940's sometimes moved so fast that it took awhile before a studio realized what it had in it's own backyard. Thus in 1946, Mitchum was on loan-out to MGM for 1946's Undercurrent, directed by Vincente Minnelli and co-starring a couple of big 1940's names Robert Taylor and Katharine Hepburn {who took none too kindly to Mr. Mitchum, as a relatively inexperienced newcomer, being one of the two stars cast opposite her} and Desire Me starring the Queen of The Metro Lot in the 40's, Miss Greer Garson. Mitchum also appeared in the noirish-western, Raoul Walsh's Pursued with Teresa Wright for Warner Bros. He also had a small yet memorable part in Edward Dymtryk's Till The End Of Time, stealing the show as a war veteran whose inner softness and sensitivity betrays an outer cynicism and hardness, his one and only 1946 film for RKO. It wasn't until 1947, two years after putting him under contract, that Mitchum had a part that was worthy of his talent, 1947's Out Of The Past, RKO's classic example of noir with a femme fatale {the lethal Jane Greer in the performance of her life}, a charming yet dangerous villain {an early portrait by Kirk Douglas}, seductive b&w photography {by the great Nicholas Musuraca}, and a doomed protagonist - not an innocent but not guilty either - who is a victim of fate,  played by our man Mitchum.

Mitchum, about to enter the cantina to wait. And wait. And wait. Out of the Past, 1947

The waiting is over. Here she comes, out of the sun, into the shadows. Big Bob is about to be hit by a ton of soft, lush, deadly bricks. Out of the Past, 1947

Look at her. Try to tell yourself you wouldn't be her chump, too. Out of the Past, 1947

 Out of the Past changed the Mitchum persona. In G.I. Joe, Mitchum, however laconic, was a man of action. But Out of the Past took his lazy, laconic, easygoing style and turned it into a character flaw. From that point on in his career Mitchum often played a chump. Films like Where Danger Lives, His Kind of Woman, The Lusty Men and especially Otto Preminger's 1953 noir classic Angel Face, show us a Mitchum whose character has little ambition. They're men that-though not old in years-have already witnessed too much of life's frustration and defeat and can be fooled only by love; men who are just floating thru life, until a dangerous woman enters the frame and then it's game over.

The start of Jeff McCloud's long walk home. The Lusty Men, 1952

In 1952 Mitchum took on the role of  Jeff McCloud, a former rodeo champ now just trying to get by one day at a time, in The Lusty Men. Also in it are Arthur Kennedy as a ranch hand, wanting more from life and thinking bronco-busting can get it for him, and Susan Hayward as his wife, who only wants a quiet life and a place to call their own. Directed by Nicholas {Rebel Without Cause} Ray, it's a small, lonely film that was overlooked by most critics and nearly all moviegoers in it's day, but it has developed a bit of a reputation as a cult film and gives Mitchum one of his most atypical roles and best, self contained performances. His Jeff McCloud is just a little solitary, just a little melancholy {check out the way he answers the old timer he meets at his old boyhood home when the old man asks McCloud if he has ever been married}and a physical wreck with broken bones left all over the rodeo circuits of the west. The Lusty Men is a kind of stepbrother to Huston's 1961 film The Misfits, with it's black and white photography, the shotty, fringe-dwelling hangouts of the nomadic principle characters; people with no where to go and getting there fast, looking for "a home of their own" in Nicholas Ray's phrase, but destined never to find one.

The right hand says love. Need I tell you what the left hand says? 1955's Night of the Hunter

1955's Night of the Hunter is one of the true masterpieces of expressionistic cinema with the dark, angular camera work by Stanley Cortez {The Magnificent Ambersons} of studio-bound sets, Charles Laughton's only directorial effort is a tour-de-force of evil. Evil personified by the presence of Robert Mitchum. I know more than a few folks who had seen this movie on the late, late show and being scarred for life and never trusting Robert Mitchum again. To some, any role he would play in the future would be measured against his satanic "preacher".

Night of the Hunter. The preacher's wedding night, with Shelley Winters.

 Having been busted in 1949 for possession of marijuana, Mitchum would retain the persona of an outcast, a wild man, a loose cannon, someone who is dangerous to be around. The 1949 arrest was big front page news and quite the scandal. Along with Errol Flynn's rape trial, Ingrid Bergman's near-career-ending affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini and Fatty Arbuckle's rape trial, Mitchum's arrest for possession is one of the legendary scandals of Tinseltown. Put yourself in the time frame of the late 40's/early 50's: Men and women didn't openly "play house", women didn't have children out of wedlock, only junkies smoked reefer, to name but a few taboos of the day. Now put yourself in Mitchum's place and one would have to figure,"my career is over". Not only that, he was busted in the home of a woman who was not his wife. So in addition to his career, Mitchum could have also have lost his wife and his family. Ouch. Mitchum was convicted, served his time:7 days in county jail {His take on it: "Like Palm Springs, without the riff-raff."}and 43 days in the Castaic, California prison farm, said the right things about being "sorry" and so on. Mitchum must have been relieved when he found out that his career wasn't going to be thrown away like an old newspaper. The reason for this: Howard Hughes' RKO went into major damage control to save their number one box-office star. The studio paired Mitchum up with Out of the Past co-star Jane Greer for a noir The Big Steal and a family Christmas themed comedy with Janet Leigh, Holiday Affair. These two films showed Mitchum as both tough and tender. The films clicked, as did many snapshots of Bob home playing daddy and good hubby for public consumption. Mitchum was off and running for another 40 years of stardom. And he got to keep his wife and kids. Or vice versa.

Doin' time.

Out of the clink.Mitchum emerges, bigger than ever.

 In 1954 Mitchum's RKO contract ended and he began free lancing. 20th Century-Fox for Preminger's Point of No Return with Marilyn Monroe,  Stanley Kramer's all-star snooze-fest Not As A Stranger, John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr, Allison, the first of 3 movies with Deborah Kerr. Also during his mid-50's career, Mitchum was fired from John Wayne's Batjac production of William Wellman's Blood Alley opposite Lauren Bacall. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir Cut To The Chase, Mitchum showed up to the San Francisco location after a night of heavy drinking and tore a room apart when he found out he was not promised a driver for the location filming and quit or was replaced after 3 days filming claiming he couldn't work with director Wellman. Now this is the same director who 10 years earlier cast Mitch in G.I. Joe the picture that made him a star of the first order and he and Wellman had just made 1954's Track Of The Cat, a psychological western filmed in color but using mostly a black & white color scheme. Couldn't work with Wellman? Clearly Mitchum had some issues to work out with himself. As the years past the 50's gave way to the 60's, Mitchum would continue to grow as an actor, at times essaying portraits in films one would not have expected of him. Vincente Minnelli's Home From The Hill and Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners  from 1960 and both, especially the Zinnemann film, becoming hits with critics and audiences. In fact one could make a strong case for 1960 being Mitchum's Annus mirabilis, his year of years, as he was voted The National Board of Review Critics Award as it's Best Actor of 1960 for the two previously mentioned films. Oscar, as usual, turned a deaf ear. Part, if not all, of Mitchum's problem with the Hollywood community {and thus, Oscar}is his rep as a bad boy. As Max Cady in1962's Cape Fear, Mitchum feeds off that rep showing the audience a study in sadistic bullying, threatening intimidation and finally, all-out physical violence.

1962 also brought the all-star WWII epic The Longest Day and Two For The Seesaw, which paired him up for the first time with Shirley MacLaine. According to her memoir My Lucky Stars, in which Miss MacLaine dishes on the famous co-stars from her many films, she and Mitchum had an affair which lasted several years. Although she was in love with Mitchum, MacLaine eventually called it quits when it became increasingly clear that he would never leave his wife. The 60's brought a lot of junk Mitchum's way too: The Last Time I Saw Archie a feeble comedy, the jungle adventure film Rampage; Man In The Middle; a couple of westerns Villa Ride and  5 Card Stud and the artsy-fartsy Secret Ceremony with Mia Farrow and Liz Taylor. A couple of good ones came out of the mid to late 60's too. Howard Hawks' El Dorado with Duke Wayne {who apparently held no grudge against Mitch for the Blood Alley debacle}and a very young James Caan in what is essentially a re-working of Hawks' 1959 western classic Rio Bravo with Mitchum replacing Dean Martin as the drunk law enforcer of a small west Texas town. The other movie Mitchum made that I have a fond memories of is 1965's African-adventure saga called Mister Moses with pistol-hot Carroll Baker of Baby Doll and The Carpetbagger's fame. I say memories because I haven't seen this movie in at least 20 years, as it seems to be forgotten and never shows up on the cable channels I receive. Never put out to the home video market in any form, I recall seeing it on KCOP TV Channel 13 back in the 80's and was quite taken with Mitchum's portrayal of a con man trying to get an African tribe to relocate it's location, but as to the reason it must relocate is something I have completely forgotten. Made by the British director Ronald Neame, photographed by Oswald Morris, with a music score by John Barry. Perhaps a company like Olive Films, who have rescued several older movies from complete extinction in recent years, will come along and save it from lost-movie-purgatory.

On the beach with Sarah Miles in Ryan's Daughter, 1970

The 70's brought a new Mitchum. A kind of kinder, gentler Mitchum, a Robert for the New Age/New Male 70's. Oh Bob could still be big, bad and tough if the situation warranted it {such as 1972's Wrath of God and The Yakuza from 1975 would demonstrate} but there would be parts like the kind, cuckolded schoolmaster/ husband of Sarah Miles' Rosy Ryan in David Lean's much maligned Ryan's Daughter; 1971's Going Home with Mitchum as a man just released from prison for the murder of his wife, a crime which occurred years before, and having to deal with his young son {Jan-Michael Vincent} and the obvious issues they must deal with; 1976's The Last Tycoon starring Robert DeNiro as a Irving Thalberg-like movie studio head and Mitchum playing an L.B. Mayer type who pretty much opposes DeNiro at every turn and 1978's remake of the Bogart and Bacall classic, The Big Sleep. Directed by Michael Winner {Death Wish 1,2 and 3 The Nightcomers, The Sentinel]}, the remake changes locales from southern California 1940's to London, England circa 1978; to me that right there is a major flaw. The cast is a good one, though: Sarah Miles {taking the Bacall part}, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Mills, Joan Collins, Candy Clark, Edward Fox. But Mitchum {whose presence is still being felt in every frame} in his second go round as Raymond Chandler's gumshoe, cannot do much to elevate the script, faithful though it is to the source novel; Winner's direction is by the numbers and his pacing flacid. The 70's also brought a couple of films I have yet to see, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Amsterdam Kill. In 1974 Mitchum was set to play in Rosebud, an international thriller with Otto Preminger at the helm for what would be the third time in for a Mitchum movie. But it wasn't meant to be. Bringing back shades of his Blood Alley debacle, reportedly Mitchum showed up on location in Corsica drunk. On location for two weeks, Mitchum had worked a total of three days. As reported in Lee Server's terrific bio of Mitchum called  Baby, I Don't Care, Mitchum gets bored and moves from professional actor to erratic liability, fighting with Preminger and being replaced by Peter O'Toole, another actor with a hell-raising, hard drinking reputation.{Mitchum's take on it:"O'Toole! Hell, that's like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller"}.

Lobby card for Farewell, My Lovely, 1975

Which brings me to what may be my favorite Mitchum movie of all-time. Its certainly is one of my favorite Mitchum performances: 1975's Farewell, My Lovely.Critics at the time liked Mitchum's take on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. As pointed out by critics at the time, Mitchum, at 57, was least at decade too old; yet he made the part his own. My only regret is that he didn't play the part earlier. Made fast on the heels of that other all-time great neo-noir Chinatown {1974}, Farewell, My Lovely takes Mitchum's age factor and put it front and center in the opening voice over narration, with Marlowe explaining to the audience that he is holed up in a seedy hotel and coming to grips with "the plain fact that I am tired, and growing old". The femme fatale is played by Charlotte Rampling, fresh from her romp with Dirk Bogarde in the explicit, controversial The Night Porter, and though British, she brings the right amount of Bacall-esque sultriness the part requires. As Marlowe, Mitchum is tough and seen it all but shows great empathy toward some of the characters; the old floozy Jessie Florian, ex-bandleader Tommy Ray and his family, even for the big lug who hired him and started the whole thing, Moose Malloy. The film also features an early Sylvester Stallone, pre-Rocky, as one of the thugs who works for Madame Frances Amthor.

Released on August 8, 1975, Farewell, My Lovely reminded fans and critics alike why Robert Mitchum was a great screen actor. There was buzz about a possible Oscar nomination, with his increasing age making him a sentimental favorite. But, no. Hollywood chose to look away and ignore another great Mitchum performance. And it was his last great one, too

The 80's brought a few theatrical releases, most of them negligible. In 1982, age 65 and still capable of doing good work,  Mitchum made his dramatic small screen debut in the noir-ish mystery One Shoe Makes It Murder with Angie Dickinson. A year later, Mitchum was absolutely frightening in the TV movie A Killer In The Family, as the title role. Then came the big behemoth 1983's TV event of the decade, the adaptation of Herman Wouk's bestseller The Winds Of War. In it Mitch is Victor "Pug" Henry, a middle aged Naval officer and confidante of FDR. The mini-series was well received by the critics and TV viewers alike. It was a reunion of sorts for Mitchum; Polly Bergen who played Gregory Peck's wife in Cape Fear  was cast as Mitchum's wife, Jan-Michael Vincent played his son, just as he did in 1971's Going Home and Peter Graves who appeared with Mitchum in The Night Of The Hunter in 1955.  Also in the extravaganza were Ali MacGraw, John Houseman and Ralph Bellamy. In 1988, it's sequel War and Remembrance, was broadcast to acclaim and huge ratings, though most reviews noted that at 71, Mitchum had become too old for the part whose character was about 50 in the book.                                                                                                  

Group Portrait. The Winds Of War, 1983

                                                                                                                                                          
 The last nine years brought mostly cameos {Scrooged, the remake of Cape Fear}and some TV spots including a weekly sitcom called A Family For Joe. Broadcast in 1990 on Saturday nights at 8pm, it ran for nine episodes and was cancelled. His last filmed performance came in something called James Dean:Race With Destiny in 1997. In 1996 when he was informed that his lungs were shot from too many cigarettes, doctors wanted to put him in hospital, but he refused. Robert Mitchum died at home in Montecito, California on July1,1997 at the age of 79. His wife Dorothy, still with him after all those years, had gone into his room to check on him. He had stopped breathing. She kissed him, one last time. Peace had finally come for Robert Mitchum.

"I don't want to die."
"Neither do I baby, but if I do....I want to die last."
Quote from Out Of The Past


Sources: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server
              Wikipedia's Robert Mitchum page
               My Lucky Stars by Shirley MacLaine
               Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies: Robert Mitchum by John Belton
               And the movies of Robert Mitchum