By Simon Thompson.
Robert Mitchum was a Hollywood actor who spent his career playing complex anti-heroes better than anybody else in the business. Uncommonly tall for the era when he was young, and with a deep booming voice, a combination of Mitchum’s intelligence and luck in working with directors who spotted his talent early, such as Jacques Tourner and Otto Preminger, allowed him to sidestep a career of being stuck playing goons and heavies.
In today’s world of curated stars and cinematic universes an actor as offbeat and hardboiled as Mitchum simply couldn’t exist, and that is truly a crying shame.
Why Mitchum’s career is so underrated however, is down to the simple matter of timing. Mitchum was a brilliantly unconventional actor, who was making his start in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, two of the most deeply conventional decades in the history of American cinema. Mitchum’s dualistic anti-hero persona was completely dissonant compared to the other leading men of his time, and by the time New Hollywood was in full swing during the 1970s Mitchum had aged out of the parts that were tailor made for him as a younger man.
A post-modern actor in an age of widespread cinematic modernity, Mitchum’s dualistic anti-heroes/villains with a code of ethics were complete anathema to casting agents everywhere. Ahead of his time, yet outflanked by it, you can see echoes of Mitchum’s style and star persona in a generation of leading men from Hackman, De Niro, Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman in the 70s to Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn in the 80s and then Gary Oldman, Michael Madsen and Tom Sizemore in the 90s.
Mitchum’s start in Hollywood was more of a slow burn than an explosive burst. The first three years of his career were spent playing bit parts in productions of varying prestige, until his breakout role in William Wellman’s The Story Of G.I Joe (1945). Made right at the end of the Second World War, the movie is a dramatisation of war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s experiences covering the American Army in Italy.
Although Mitchum didn’t play the leading role of Ernie Pyle, his supporting performance as an army captain was so strong that it earned him a best supporting actor Academy Award nod, and helped to make him a household name.
In the studio system era, stars would be pigeonholed into specific genres, and in Mitchum’s case that was film noir. Noir was a style of crime drama originating from the largely Jewish European émigré directors who came over during the 1930s-40s to escape the rise of Nazism, and who brought with them a style of filmmaking which incorporated moral ambiguity, distinct use of light and shadow, and a hidden sexual undercurrent. These were movies about tough cynical characters, often perpetrating or caught up in a web of lies that were beyond their ability to handle.
Beginning with Vincente Minelli’s Locket (1946), Mitchum became a key face in the burgeoning genre, with his unconventional features and resonant vocal delivery making him what Roger Ebert called years later the soul of noir. Working largely for RKO, which was not an especially prestigious studio by any means, Mitchum’s excellent work in the genre, especially Jacques Tourner’s Out Of The Past (1947) flew under the radar, unlike that of his contemporaries who were working for more auspicious studios, like Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield at Warner Bros.
After 1945, American audiences, hardened by the twin experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, couldn’t get enough noir, with it replacing the gangster films of the 1930s as the pre-eminent style of American crime movie. Mitchum continued to work steadily in noir for the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s, but the genre’s golden age ended by the mid-point of the latter thanks to a combination of more stringent pre-World War Two censorship coming back into play and a more optimistic and prosperous American public who no longer had an appetite for dark, pessimistic crime stories.
Mitchum began to branch out from noir during this period, starring in a westerns such as The Lusty Men (1952) and Tracks of The Cat (1954), comedies such as She Couldn’t Say No (1954), and the romantic war drama One Minute To Zero (1952). That isn’t to say he entirely stopped appearing in noir, with his role in Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1953) being held up retroactively as one of Mitchum’s finest hours in the genre.
The mid-1950s marked a turning point in Mitchum’s now well established career with his role as Preacher Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterpiece Night Of The Hunter. An adaptation of a novel by Davis Grubb of the same name, the movie tells the story of a religious fundamentalist serial killer Harry Powell, who, while serving prison time for car theft, meets a condemned murderer who tells him about $10,000 that he’s got stashed away. Once Harry is released from prison he begins to track down the money posing as a preacher and attempting to ingratiate himself with the condemned murderer’s family.
Night Of The Hunter is an alluringly strange and surreal mixture of horror, noir, southern gothic, German expressionism, and even at certain points, comedy, all tied together by the sheer charismatic menace that Mitchum radiates as Harry Powell. While today Night Of The Hunter is considered one of the finest American films of its era, at the time critics and audiences had no idea of what to make of such an original vision, and as a result it flopped commercially and was critically panned.
It’s fitting that Mitchum’s (an actor who was at least thirty years ahead of his time) finest hour is an avant garde opus, that needed the subsequent generation of young cine literate critics and filmmakers to turn around its overall legacy in the history of American cinema. The rest of the 1950s was a dull period for Mitchum’s career, as Hollywood was becoming safer and more homogenous than before, so the intense and flawed characters that Mitchum excelled at playing dried up until his starring role in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962).
Portraying the role of Max Cady, a released convict who stalks an attorney (Gregory Peck) and his family, Mitchum finally had a memorable role again after a long drought. Mitchum’s performance as Cady is terrifying, yet compulsively watchable, and so detailed that even the ways that he walks or smiles give the character a palpable sense of malice.
Cape Fear together with Charade are two of the best exemplars of a sub-genre known as the best Hitchcock movies that Hitchcock himself didn’t make. J. Lee Thompson’s direction, with his intense close ups as well as editing and score by Hitchcock regulars George Tomasini and Bernard Hermann respectively, adds to the overall Hitchcockian tone that the film is trying to achieve. But it’s Mitchum’s performance which anchors the entire thing, every single moment he’s on screen you can’t take your eyes off him – even when he’s being reprehensible – a true testament to Mitchum’s screen presence and ability as an actor.
The mid-1960s were an unexciting time for Mitchum and Hollywood as a whole. The best film he starred in during this period is Howard Hawks’s late career masterpiece El Dorado (1967). A semi remake of Hawks’s own Rio Bravo (1959), Mitchum plays an alcoholic lawman who teams up with a gunfighter (John Wayne) to defend a family of ranchers from a rival farmer who wants to steal their water. The movie was a critical and box office success, with the veteran star pairing and Hawks’s seasoned direction culminating in one of the last classical westerns, as the genre was beginning to change around them.
In the 1970s, disillusioned with Hollywood, Mitchum began to question whether or not he still wanted to be an actor. So when Robert Bolt’s script for David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter was presented to him, he seriously considered turning the movie down due to the demanding shooting schedule.
A retelling of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, relocated to World War I era Ireland, Mitchum plays a mild-mannered school teacher whose wife has an affair with a British Army officer behind his back. The role was a complete departure from the characters that Mitchum was so accustomed to playing, and as a result he gave one of the best performances of his career playing against type.
Although Mitchum and Lean clashed repeatedly on set, with Mitchum describing working with the director as being akin to “ constructing the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks”, Mitchum still admired Lean’s abilities as a director greatly, both from a technical standpoint but also probably due to Lean being one of the few directors, who had the artistic courage to cast him in the kind of role he would normally never have been allowed to play.
Ryan’s Daughter was nominated for four Academy Awards except, unjustly, a best actor nod for Mitchum himself, in one of the most egregious Oscar snubs of all time. Still, his performance put him back in the consciousness of Hollywood at large, and led to a fruitful period in his career.
The years 1967-1970 marked a sea change in Hollywood, which came to be dubbed by some as the Hollywood Renaissance. Thanks to a combination of the old studio system falling apart due to anti-trust cases stemming back all the way to the mid-1950s and the erosion of the ultra-strict Hays Code which limited violence, sex, profanity, and any other taboo topic, a new generation of filmmakers and actors was coming through. They grew up idolising Mitchum and through them he was finally allowed to make the kinds of movies which he was born to star in.
Peter Yates’s adaptation of George V Higgins’s novel The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974), were movies which placed morally ambiguous anti-hero protagonists at their forefront, in a way which had been unthinkable in American cinema for decades. Mitchum’s performances in both are terrific, as now well into middle age, his permanent cynicism and older appearance enhanced his gravitas and screen presence. Mitchum by this point didn’t have to ham it up in a scene to keep up with a younger generation – unlike Kirk Douglas or other contemporaries from his era, he outshone his much younger co-stars through a steely stillness.
The problem is that by this point time wasn’t on his side, as he was giving career best performances into his 50s, yet in a Hollywood landscape that was centred around youth and zeitgeist, his age marked him as a relic from a bygone era to increasingly youthful audiences. For example, The Yakuza,one of his best performances during this period was a box office failure, which writer Paul Schrader attributed to the changing audience demographic wanting to see a younger actor such as Robert Redford in the starring role.
In the latter half of the 1970s, Mitchum played Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe twice in adaptations of the books Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978). Mitchum by this point was sadly too old to play Marlowe, but the films themselves, especially The Big Sleep,are absolutely atrocious adaptations that completely miss the tone and sensibility that made Chandler’s novels so outstanding in the first place.
The 1980s were even more of a mixed bag for Mitchum than the previous decade had been. His starring role in a film adaptation of Jason Miller’s play That Championship Season (1982)was praised, but the film itself suffered from tepid reviews by critics and a lack of financial success. Mitchum spent much of the 1980s appearing in TV mini-series more than anything else, with leading roles in the World War II mini series The Winds Of War (1983), its sequel War And Remembrance (1988), and a cameo role in the American Civil War drama North And South (1985).
In a Hollywood landscape which had become all about youth and high concept blockbusters, Mitchum’s style of acting and age found him on the outside looking in for his last two decades. While continuing to work steadily and appearing in cameo roles in everything from the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged (1988), as a policeman in the Scorsese remake of Cape Fear (1991) and the cult classic westerns Tombstone (1993) and Dead Man (1995) his days as a leading star were sadly behind him.
Although honoured with a Cecil B. DeMille award in 1992 at the Golden Globes, Mitchum’s career has in recent years been underrated, due more than anything else to his best work being made inaccessible to younger generations of film fans, thanks to the demise of services like TCM and people moving away from terrestrial tv which used to play classic films regularly. Still, with his influence on subsequent generations of actors, and the sheer access to information that we have, Mitchum’s legacy is something that will never be forgotten. Critic David Thomson summed up Mitchum’s overall career best, when he wrote “Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.”
