Robert Mitchum was born in Connecticut one hundred years ago - August 6th 1917 - and had the kind of childhood that gives you plenty to talk about in interviews, although Mitchum rarely did. His father, a railroad worker, was crushed to death before his son's second birthday, and young Bob was eventually sent to live with his grandparents in Delaware. He was expelled from middle school for getting into a fight with the principal. Kicked out of high school, he drifted round the country, hopping freights, sleeping in boxcars, picking up a little dough digging ditches, getting jailed for vagrancy, working on chain-gangs... He found his way to Long Beach, where he ghost-wrote for an astrologer and composed songs for his sister's nightclub act. He was set upon by half-a-dozen sailors from the local base, and was on his way to whippin' all six of 'em when his wife stepped in to break it up because he was enjoying it too much. He got busted for pot, and he had a nervous breakdown that made him temporarily blind.
At which point he decided he was leading too stressful a life, and a little light work as a movie extra seemed comparatively relaxing...
The film that made him a star was as good as anything he did after he became one. Seventy years old this autumn, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past is a first-rate film wrought from an okayish novel with the rather more lurid title Build My Gallows High. It opens in the town of Mitchum's birth - Bridgeport, but not Bridgeport, Connecticut, only a somewhat improbable Californian namesake in the Sierra Nevada, where, even more improbably, Robert Mitchum is leading the kind of small-town life he rarely enjoyed on or off screen. He has steady work, as the owner of the local gas station, and the love of a good woman, played by Virginia Huston. Everything's so peachy and apple-pie that when trouble shows up Mitchum and his gal are on a picnic by the lake. But out of the past the dark secrets of his life refuse to stay buried: He was hired to do a job for a mobster, and he didn't do it. His sometime employer now requires that he make good on his debt.
The irked racketeer is played by a young Kirk Douglas, who back in 1947 was almost absurdly chiseled and cleft. His first meeting with Mitchum at his swank penthouse is one of those scenes that, before CGI and superheroes, you'd show to a visiting space alien who wanted to know what the point of motion pictures was. Douglas, very pointedly (so to speak), even manages a short disquisition on the other man's acting style: ""You just sit and stay inside yourself," he tells Mitchum. "You wait for me to talk. I like that." The men of film noir are famously laconic, of course, but they nevertheless have energy - as, say, the two most famous Philip Marlowes, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, certainly do. Mitchum was different, his sparseness of speech communicating a more general economy. It became his habit, when offered a script, to go through it marking as many of his lines as he could with the acronym "NAR" - "No Action Required".
"Staying inside yourself" is as good a description as any for what Mitchum did in the half-century after Out of the Past. For surface-acting, he was content to leave it to his cigarette. In fact, my late colleague Roger Ebert liked to call Out of the Past the all-time great cigarette movie, thanks mainly to how Jacques Tourneur shot it, lighting the space into which the characters exhale so that the puffs of smoke shift and shimmy and expand and contract like an interior monologue expressed as an interpretative cloud-dance. The Douglas/Mitchum smoke-offs are especially choice.
There is a dame, of course: a femme who almost proved fatale. She shot at Douglas four times, but three missed: Someone says, "A dame with a rod is like a guy with a knitting needle", and they all laugh. The mobster doesn't mind his squeezes firing at him, but he resents her scramming with forty grand of his, and he wants it back. Mitchum finds her in Acapulco: a broad-brimmed white hat with dark-haired Jane Greer underneath and even poutier than usual:
HER: You know, you're a curious man.
HIM: You're gonna make every guy you meet a little bit curious.
HER: That's not what I mean. You don't ask questions. You don't even ask me what my name is.
HIM: All right, what's your name?
HER: Kathie.
HIM: I like it.
HER: Or where I come from?
HIM: I'm thinkin' about where we're going.
She doesn't care where they're going, as long as it's not back to Kirk Douglas. On the beach by moonlight they kiss, and she tells him she hates that guy, but she never took his dough. She leans in and looks into his baby blues: "Don't you believe me?"
And Mitchum delivers the most famous line of his career: "Baby, I don't care."
The scene is beautifully lit, dreamy and rhapsodic. But the players are hard and real: Baby, I don't care. How many editors and headline writers lifted that for their Robert Mitchum profiles over the years? It was a great line in a great movie. There were other great movies across the decades - Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear - but a lot more stinkers to the point where, by the Seventies, it was as if (in David Thomson's words) he had a fruit machine for an agent. He did something neither Humphrey Bogart nor Dick Powell managed: he got to play Philip Marlowe twice - but a quarter-century post-noir and under directors who had no idea how to handle the material. The Big Sleep, directed by Britain's Michael Winner, plays like a clever co-production deal for some arcane tax-break. Mitchum is laconic and sleepy-eyed, but he's now a shamus not in the mean streets of Los Angeles but in the leafy lanes of the English Home Counties, which isn't the same at all. There's Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair, because someone talked him into agreeing to a couple of scenes as long as they were easy. There's Sarah Miles and Candy Clark as the dippy sisters who seem a bit low-wattage convincingly to pull Mitchum. There's Joan Collins, who, as is her wont, has the measure of the project. And, when they drag the Thames for Jimmy Stewart's Bentley, there's John Mills playing a London detective like an Indian Army colonel.
But baby, he don't care. Mitchum followed it with a risible but lucrative turn as Pug Henry in the Winds of War mini-series and its sequel - after which he didn't care about anything. Emphysema had reduced him to the sunken cheeks and frog eyes of his Loony Tunes caricature, and he retaliated against his own shrunken form by self-sabotaging his own appearances. The genial Robert Osborne was one of the best and most sensitive interviewers of movie stars, but baby, Mitchum didn't care. Chatty and amusing in the wings and commercial breaks, he clammed up once the cameras were rolling, offering only monosyllabic answers.
As for acting, what's the big deal? "Read the lines, kiss the girl, cash the check, and that's it." That wasn't it: He was virile and pliable, dangerous and curiously passive, and his moral ambiguity or at any rate moral inertia foreshadowed the more explicitly anti-social anti-heroes who would come later. On the other hand, he also made a couple of languorous calypso albums - and I don't believe you'd make a second one if you didn't, at some level, care. But Mitchum turned a screenwriter's line into a credo and then a curse: Baby, I don't care. When he died on July 1st 1997, he was careless enough to let Jimmy Stewart die on July 2nd, and thus the bigger, more beloved star consigned Mitchum to the "And also..." category in the news. They were two American archetypes, one boyish and earnest and determined to prove that It's a Wonderful Life, the other lazily shrugging that, well, it's a life, and the best you can expect from it (according to Shirley MacLaine's summation of the Mitchum philosophy) is that the roof doesn't leak. In Wonderful Life, Stewart played George Bailey, who wants to leave town and put his life behind him; in Out of the Past, Mitchum played Jeff Bailey, who did just that - and then finds his past pursues him and consumes his future.
Of that terrific cast, Kirk Douglas is still with us - a stroke-ridden centenarian who still turns out an inspiring self-helpish book once every couple of years. For a while, Douglas fancied himself a novelist, and was mocked for it by the crueler critics. But in the Eighties and Nineties Douglas had more to show for the second and third strings to his bow than Mitchum did for the first. What remains is that first stellar performance in Out of the Past - a noir film with all the trappings (cigarettes, trenchcoats) that transcends them to become the ne plus ultra of the genre, and a true masterpiece.
They remade it in the Eighties as Against All Odds, with Jeff Bridges and a Phil Collins theme song. Jane Greer agreed to the mother role. Robert Mitchum knew better.
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BTW: I never understood the acclaim visited upon Night of the Hunter -- except that bi-coastal types who'd read too much Mencken could add it to their "Southerners are evil" file. The film looks so great, they could call it "Gothic" and therefore "Art." Yes, it is gorgeous to look at and a Grimms tale transposed onto early twentieth century America -- but that's why I find it sort of... unAmerican. Of course, the director was a foreigner :-) Imagine an American director making a similar film about England. Would British viewers/critics embrace it so? I can't picture that.
Not a native southerner, but raised in the South and living there when I saw "Night of the Hunter", it's hard for me to imagine setting it anywhere else. I didn't think Mitchum's "Evil Southerner" was intended to tar southern culture, but if it was so intended, it also was nicely offset by Lillian Gish's "Good Southerner". He certainly played the Devil, and it still gives me the creeps.
Mitchum looks so uncomfortable at that picnic. Maybe that's the point.
Well, Mark, I think you're a bit harsh re Mitchum's career. Out of the Past is a great film noir, no doubt about it. But I hesitate to say it was the best film or performance of his career. I especially liked his playing against type in Ryan's Daughter (1970). In that film he played a mild-mannered, non-violent widowed school teacher who unwisely marries a former student because he was lonely and she had a big crush on him, and the marriage had problems. However, like The Godfather, Ryan's Daughter has a near perfect ending, which I won't divulge. Another "against type" performance was his turn as a brilliant medical student in Not As A Stranger. And I have never forgotten his destroyer captain trying to outsmart Kurt Jurgens' submarine captain in The Enemy Below ("I didn't know, next time I won't throw you the rope.....I think you will.") Just last night I saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the first time and thought it and Mitchum were terrific. I'll take another commenter's recommendation and try to see The Yakuza. Well, this is all to say that Mitchum was one of a kind, and I'm grateful for many of the movies he left behind.
I just watched "The Enemy Below" last weekend and, yes, Mitchum displays the finesse of under-acting that garnered so much misunderstanding. Basically he is pitted against Jurgens (whom Bardot called the Normandy wardrobe) and is forced to deal with his conscience during the course of the film. Not an easy task for any actor to portray.
I put "The Enemy Below" in the category of great WWII naval movies that only fans of the genre are aware exist. What I found quite poignant was the shared respect the captains have for each other when Jurgens must surrender, just two men put in harms way by political decisions completely out of their control.
The film is ostensibly a vehicle for Jurgens and Mitchum is the secondary player initially -- the respect and rivalry between the two officers is not only poignant but the rapport, whether intended on the set or not, brings out the best in each actor. No women in the film, and a true man's film, "The Enemy Below" is one of those movies that endures because it was chock full of the individual against destiny, against duty, acting for duty -- I guess a broad would only have distracted from the focus!! But there was a Woman -- she's laying at the bottom of the ocean! How would you rate "Run Silent, Run Deep?" Gable and Lancaster are not quite as evenly matched, and the movie is a real weepie, at least for me. But the themes of loyalty, honor, courage, fortitude and justice are all there too. Don RIckles shows his acting prowess too.
Richard, This is not a WWII naval film but a submarine movie that I find superb: "Ice Station Zebra" What with the Ruskie flaps going on everywhere here in the USA, it's a timely flick! Also, Rock Hudson puts in what I believe is his best acting performance (aside from the real-life role of hiding his true sexuality); Patrick McGoohan steals the show; Ernest Borgnine is Oscar-worthy; Jim Brown really does ACT; and the entire arctic wardrobe is, from a female perspective, drool-worthy. Also fascinating is the huge departure from the Alistair MacLean book, improving it also huge-ly. The minor characters are top-rate too and the technical aspects of the film are well-done. The score by Michel LeGrand is grand. It's a summer film that I watch during the Calif. heat waves. All of that ice, I find comforting. Global freezing of the 1970s returns!
RSRD is one of my all time favorite submarine movies, great book as well. Being a retired submarine sailor I'm a tough critic. Some of the later movies like Crimson Tide and the Hunt for Red October are entertaining, but unrealistic. My mates and I watched both and laughed at the Hollywood hijinks , but when we saw Das Boot, no one was laughing. DB is probably my favorite sub movie for it's realistic humanity. The U Boat Navy is one of my favorite subjects primarily due to the incredible sacrifice these sailors made for a hopeless and horrible cause. There were very few radical Nazis on those boats, mostly submariners just trying to survive. They suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the German military in WWII: 734 boats lost (relates only to the Atlantic) 28,000 crew men (service wide, out of a total of 40,000). One of my favorite books on the subject is : Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner which is now out of print and hard to find. I've served on US Fast Attack submarines during the height of the Cold War and while our living conditions would be considered luxurious compared to WWII boats, they were anything but. I've been on the U 505 and many US WWII attack boats so I know the difference-the Germans had it rough. When your facing death in an Iron Coffin you're just another sailor drowning.
I've been a Mitchum fan since my early teens, watching "Heaven Knows Mr. Allison" and "River of No Return" on NBC's "Saturday Night At The Movies". He was as good a tough guy as they come. "Night of the Hunter" scares me to this day, but I'm proud to say I saw "The Yakuza" in a theater when it was released. It's still the best of its genre. That I'd never heard of "Out of the Past" is an embarrassment which will be soon corrected.
You might enjoy David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter" where Mitchum plays a non-tough guy with compelling credibility. The nudity is typical of the 1970s films but it does add to the forest ambiance. All my girlfriends were going gaga over Chris Jones in the film, but I thought Rosy (Sarah Miles) was nuts for flocking to the shell-shocked nut, the Major played by Jones. To each her own!
I find myself disagreeing with Mark for the first time on a judgement about the arts. You have written off Mitchum's later career, or at least left out the movies of his later career, but he made at least two great movies in the 1970s: "The Friends of Eddy Coyle" and "The Yakuza". I think you may have written about the great adaptation of George Higgin's great novel. Actually, I think you may be the reason I saw the movie in the first place. But I think "The Yakuza" is a masterpiece that no one knows about. It is one of the handful of movies whose scenes come to mind when I think about what is the right thing to do in my personal life. It is one of those movies that has become part of the "furniture of my mind" as George Orwell said of those books that become a permanent part of you. One of the scenes that comes to mind and often reproaches me is the first scene between Mitchum and the great Japanese actor Takakura Ken. Mitchum shows up in Ken's life after being absent from Japan for 20 years. Ken has a good reason to hate Mitchum but he also owes him a debt and that comes first. When Mitchum tells ken his problem Ken immediately agrees to help, but casually mentions that he may not be able to help much because his relationship with the Yakuza has ended. Mitchum, who knows enough to understand that Ken's helping him will very possibly get Ken killed says, "I can't ask you to do that," to which Ken answers with a slightly quizzical tone, "You already have." He means that Ken has an obligation to help Mitchum and as soon as he knows about Mitchum's problem he has an obligation to do something about it whether Mitchum asks him to or not. It is very Japanese idea, that your obligations don't depend on words. Asking someone if they want your help is a way of getting them to let you off the hook. Even letting Mitchum talk about letting Ken out of his obligation would be dishonorable. You know you have the obligation and you either fulfill it or you don't. The plot weaves these very different ideas of obligation into the action of the film that is entirely natural. Unlike most of these East meets West movies there is something to be said for both sides of the arguments and the Japanese philosophy that comes into the play is not some dopey, Southern California Eastern Mysticism. The two actors both do very little. You can barely see their facial expressions change, but they say so much with the smallest gestures. Also, there is a great sword fight at the end. These aren't the typical one guy dancing around and cutting down 50. It unfolds very slowly, building tension with long standoffs where deciding where to place your left foot seems to take forever and each decision of how to shift of your weight could result in instant death. Mitchum, fortunately, has the foresight to bring a shotgun. Anyway, I think these are great performances that stand up against any in his career and I think people should be aware of them.
Preach it, brother. "The Yakuza" should have taken an Oscar for photography, at least. Maybe also direction and dialogue. Honor above all.
Amen!
Ahhhh. Mitchum. They don't make heart-throbs like him anymore, and I guess his fractured childhood added to the throb of that heart. i never met my father-in-law who died at a too young age, but he was a dead ringer (ouch) for Mr. Mitchum. Similar personality type too. I have visited the town of Bridgeport (near South Lake Tahoe) in the 1990s and the place looked pretty much the same as the movie version. And this movie is in my top 5 of the Favorites. Film noir at its best. Mitchum before he became so solidly type-cast that he really didn't care, and Kirk Douglas in his s.o.b role to women that would be banned by today's Hollywood, at least in public. I read Jane Greer's comment that the initial scene with the 2 actors (Douglas & Mitchum) was a competition as to who could get lower to the floor! So, is there anything today that can even compare with this one? Of course, no. But this is why a post like this one is For The Record, and a home run.
Pursuant to your comparison between the 2 Bailey's, I think that Stewart is closest to his true self in acting the brother out for justice in "Winchester 73" but Mitchum did not easily permit the camera to come that close to him. Maybe in "Heaven Knows Mr. Allison" he did, but the real Robert was someone only he knew and perhaps a few others did too, off-screen, very off-screen. Another mega-man star who became known only as the Image was Clark Gable. I've read Capra's take that the real Clark Gable was very close to the Peter Warne character in "It Happened One Night" -- I tend to agree with that opinion, but I am very biased because my father was like Gable & Warne. Old Hollywood loved to take a scintilla of the personality an actor and use it like a cloak over him or her. The grave misfortune of modern film is that most "actors" and "actresses" have so little of a true self to begin with; the cloak is more like a hack-off piece of Saran Wrap. But the liberals want their Hollywood that way -- all mirror, no smoke!!
Debra, I'm a big Jimmy Stewart fan and I have to take issue with your saying that the real Jimmy was Winchester 73. I think of the W73 Jimmy as kind of angry and obsessed. Someone who knew him well - maybe it was Capra - said the real Jimmy was more like George Bailey than his many other film roles, and I believe it. I don't know that the W73 Jimmy would choke up over his dead dog on the Johnny Carson show. Despite his being a true war hero and brave as hell, this is a guy who had a real heart. Also, a really fine husband. Who else could have resisted Grace Kelly? Not her other co-stars (Bing, Bill Holden, Clark Gable, etc etc). He was kind of a ladies man in Hollywood before his marriage but not after. Oh, I could go on and on about Jimmy. Mitchum was also a one wife husband (57 years until his death) but I believe he wasn't quite able to resist the legions of women who were susceptible to his charms.
I said that Stewart was closest to his truest self, not the "real Jimmy" -- and I do not see the W73 character as angry and obsessed. Although he was in "The Naked Spur." I see the W73 Stewart character as pursuing justice at a horrible cost until the woman played by Shelley Winters (in a fantastic portrayal) acts as a catalyst to effect change in him, to a point where he would have cried over a dead dog. Everyone has a dark side, even me. To look at James Stewart as merely the "aw shucks guy" -- is to be very simplistic. Big heart, yes. Steely character, yes. He mellowed with time. As for private lives, that's their business.