{"id":39546,"date":"2025-08-06T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=39546"},"modified":"2025-08-05T09:40:00","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T13:40:00","slug":"happy-birthday-robert-mitchum-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=39546","title":{"rendered":"“These kids only want to talk about acting method and motivation. in my day all we talked about was screwing and overtime.” — Robert Mitchum"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nRobert Mitchum, Cannes 1954, photograph by Leo Mirkine<\/i><\/p>\n

It’s his birthday today. The greatest. <\/p>\n

Excerpt from Are You Anybody? An Actor’s Life<\/i><\/a>, by Bradford Dillman<\/p>\n

For the past fifty years Robert Mitchum has been captivating filmgoers with his sleepy demeanor. He was the first actor to be jailed for marijuana, and it\u2019s no state secret he\u2019s enjoyed a cocktail or two in his time. But his toughness is no pose.<\/p>\n

Before beginning a film with him, Henry Hathaway, a director acknowledged as a card-carrying sadist, felt impelled to explain himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen, Mitch,\u201d he said. \u201cI got this thing. Sometimes I get a little excited, call actors names and cuss them, but I want you to know it\u2019s nothing personal. It\u2019s just me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI hear you, Henry,\u201d Mitchum replied. \u201cI know how it is. I\u2019ve got this thing, too. See, whenever somebody calls me names or cusses me out, I haul off and bust him in the mouth. Nothing personal. It\u2019s just me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nMitchum in prison for marijuana possession, 1949<\/i><\/p>\n

Dillman shares another anecdote:<\/p>\n

Yet few know what an intelligent, articulate man Mitchum is, how charming he can be. He\u2019s also a prankster. When I worked with him on location in Hong Kong, our director was hearing-impaired. In the briefcase used for transporting his script he carried several hearing aid battery replacements. We\u2019d rehearsed a scene in an office, we were doing Take One, I\u2019d fed Mitch his cue, when he mouthed his response. No sound.<\/p>\n

\u201cCut.\u201d The director was pounding his ear. \u201cDamn,\u201d he said, removing the device, opening his briefcase to install a fresh battery. \u201cOkay, let\u2019s go again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take Two. I give the cue, Mitch mouths his line.<\/p>\n

\u201cCut.\u201d The director pounding his ear anew. \u201cWho makes these things, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

It took four takes for him to realize he\u2019d been victimized by an imp.<\/p>\n

The imp struck again during a scene in the lobby of the Hotel Peninsula, he and I seated at a table. Normally spectators keep a respectful distance as they observe the moviemaking process, but a blonde plumper spilling out of her pink pants suit couldn\u2019t restrain herself. Between takes she rushed over and did a five-minute number on how Robert Mitchum ruled her life, how jealous he made her husband, how her friends teased her about her crush. It went on and on, the actor grunting occasionally before pretending to nod off.<\/p>\n

The lady\u2019s moving lips were right in his ear when Mitch jolted awake. Feigning shock, he thundered, \u201cSuck what<\/em>?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nExcerpt from Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Director and star proved to be ideally matched. In [Robert] Mitchum, [Jacques] Tourneur had found the most expressive embodiment of his own cinematic aesthetic of eloquent, subversive resistance and oneiric sensuality. Tourneur loved Mitchum’s physical grace, the gliding, pantherlike movements, and his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence thrilled the director whose films were among the quietest<\/i> in the history of talking pictures. He savored Mitchum’s ability to listen<\/i> in a scene. “There are a large number of players who don’t know how to listen,” said Tourneur. “While one of their partners speaks to them, they simply think, I don’t have anything to do during this; let’s try not to let the scene get stolen from me. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five-minute speech. You’ll never lose sight of him and you’ll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn’t do anything. That’s how one judges good actors.”<\/p>\n

In Mitchum’s opposite, the sort who tried “not to let the scene get stolen”, Tourneur might possibly have been thinking of Kirk Douglas. With his explosive starring roles – Champion, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story<\/i> – still a few years off, Douglas was becoming typed for intelligent, urbane characters, supporting parts. As Whit Sterling, certainly among the most well-spoken and civilized of ruthless racketeers, Douglas gave a brilliantly controlled and charismatic performance, but he could not have been thrilled by another second fiddle part – especially second fiddle to Mitchum, who had already taken from him the lead in Pursued<\/i>. The two got along well enough off the set, but the rivalry would flare as soon as the cameras began to turn. Since Tourneur was not about to accept any obvious histrionics in his diminuendo world, Douglas was left to try and out-underact<\/i> Mitchum, an exercise in futility, he discovered. He tried adding distracting bits of business during Mitchum’s lines and came up with a coin trick, running it quickly between the tops of his fingers. Bob started staring at the fingers until Kirk started staring at the fingers and dropped the coin on the rug. He put the coin away. In another scene, Douglas brought a gold watch fob out of his coat pocket and twirled it around like a propeller. This time everybody stared.<\/p>\n

“It was a hoot to watch them go at it,” said Jane Greer. “They were two such different types. Kirk was something of a method actor. And Bob was Bob. You weren’t going to catch him acting<\/i>. But they both tried to get the advantage. At one point they were actually trying to upstage each other by who could sit the lowest. The one sitting the lowest had the best camera angle, I guess – I don’t know what they were thinking. Bob sat on the couch, so Kirk sat on the table, then one sat on the footstool, and by the end I think they were both on the floor.”<\/p>\n

Tourneur, no martinet, liked to give his performers a lot of freedom and waited out the one-upmanship antics with a weary grace. “Quoi qu’il arrive, restez calme<\/i>,” he liked to say.<\/p>\n

Actors were actors. One night he was screening the rushes of a scene with Mitchum and Douglas talking to each other on either side of the frame, and he was startled to see how Paul Valentine – placed in the background and without a line of dialogue – had craftily picked up a magazine and was flipping the pages with an altogether distracting intensity, hijacking the scene.<\/p>\n

“Oh, Paul<\/i>,” he said to the actor, “now I have to keep an eye on you, too?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nRobert Mitchum in 1958’s “Thunder Road,” a Gearhead Heaven type of movie<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

The duet in The Night of the Hunter<\/i> is one of the most memorable and frightening scenes in cinema. A standoff between two dueling brands of Christianity, one that’s about compassion and one that’s about judgment. The sides cannot coexist. One side has to win. It is a battle still raging in our culture today, and the duet in Night of the Hunter<\/i> is a chilling evocation of it. Whistler’s Mother with a shotgun vs. The Man Out There In the Dark.<\/p>\n

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