Robert Mitchum

 

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (1917-97) had a big mouth, a strong independent streak and extreme discipline when it came to his work. Still, when asked to summarize his accomplishments, it mostly came out like this: “People think I have an interesting walk. Hell, I'm just trying to hold my gut in.” Or: “The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.” Or, “I never changed anything, except my socks and my underwear. I took what came and did the best I could with it.” These ironic comments, directed at himself, display the same lightness and nonchalance that Robert Mitchum’s on-screen genius was based on. According to Charles Laughton, he was “the greatest actor in the world” – and probably the most underrated as well, at least in terms of ‘official’ recognition.

 

He was sweet and wonderful, but never talked about it. He was moving, but never seemed to move. He radiated humor and intelligence in front of the camera, and then acted as if it was all just sleepwalking. He pursued a wide variety of creative endeavors and put on the mask of the commonly cynical employee. The figure that emerges from these apparent contradictions is one of the richest inventions by a performer in the history of world cinema. With a selection of 30 of his films, the Austrian Film Museum pays tribute to “the beauty of that man” (Lee Marvin) and to the enigma of his effortlessness which has no equal among film actors. David Thomson’s entry about Mitchum in The Biographical Dictionary of Cinema ends with a single word paragraph: “Untouchable.”

 

Mitchum’s attitude and image, a mixture of pragmatism and machismo, was undoubtedly influenced by the hobo life he led as a teenager. When he was two years old, his father, a railway worker, died in an accident. At age 12, Mitchum ran away from home and by 15 he was working on a chain gang. He began to work odd jobs (including boxing) and to smoke marijuana – a lifelong passion which he later called the “poor man’s whiskey.” In 1936, he settled in California, made his first contacts in the theater and began writing short plays, poetry and songs. In 1940, he married his childhood sweetheart, Dorothy (a bond that lasted until his death) and took an assembly-line job at Lockheed Aircraft, where he worked until he was forced to quit due to temporary blindness and a nervous breakdown. It was then, in 1943 – and rather accidentally – that he stumbled across the movies.

 

One year and 20 bit parts later, Mitchum got the lead role in William Castle's marvellous B-thriller, When Strangers Marry, a sort of preview of his imminent status as the "soul of film noir" (Roger Ebert). In 1945, his breakthrough came with William Wellman's World War II classic, Story of G.I. Joe (1945), for which Mitchum received his only Oscar nomination. His role in the film – an officer who hides his own fear and exhaustion to support his men – reflects the shimmering minimalism of his own work: hidden behind the poker face are genuine pathos and extraordinary wisdom.

 

And then, in the postwar heyday of film noir, Mitchum began a run that remains unmatched. It was here that he first presented a series of character types which would remain formative throughout his career: all of the "losers and loners, hunters and wanderers" (Michael Althen) who prowl not only in the urban jungle, but also in psychological Westerns (such Pursued or Blood on the Moon) or in romantic comedies with a criminal twist, where the sparks fly between Mitchum and his partners (The Big Steal with Jane Greer, or His Kind of Woman with Jane Russell). As a loser who pursues the illusion of a second chance, usually because of a femme fatale, Mitchum became iconic: in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, Otto Preminger's Angel Face, Josef von Sternberg's Macao or Nicholas Ray's rodeo-melodrama, The Lusty Men. This phase at Howard Hughes’ RKO, from 1945 to 1954, was rich with masterpieces and Mitchum's 1948 stint in prison for marijuana possession did not slow his rise to stardom; rather, the episode fit his image well.

 

Mitchum's routine self-contempt is belied by a filmography full of roles that he chose very smartly and interpreted with a great deal of subtlety – especially in the fifties and early sixties. His interplay with Deborah Kerr (chemistry at first sight: "We could have read the phone book to each other") lends John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison a strange sense of lightness, his encounter with Marilyn Monroe imbues Preminger's River of No Return with mythic splendor, and his murderous preacher in Charles Laughton's fairy tale wonder The Night of the Hunter (1955) is itself one of the great cinematic myths. That same year he passed up several “plum parts” (for instance, in Giant) to act in Richard Wilson’s small western, Man with the Gun, because he felt that he could give a specific face to the material: a basis for the mysterious Mitchum-nimbus, which he further developed as a lonely Westerner in Robert Parrish's The Wonderful Country and as the patriarch in Vincente Minnelli's masterful melodrama, Home from the Hill; in William Wellman's superb snow-ballad, Track of the Cat, Mitchum had previously rehearsed both character types.

 

With the singular moonshiner road movie, Thunder Road (1958), Mitchum realized his passion project as writer, producer, composer of the title song, and lead actor – "at the white-hot intersection of fact and legend" (Richard Thompson). Having already recorded a calypso record in 1957, he now also tackled his own "Ballad of Thunder Road." This no less fascinating second career as a singer and songwriter was a short one, while Mitchum in his later work "became the Buddha of American cinema: sleepy, massive, wise" (Michael Althen). In this respect, the last word on the Mitchum myth is Peter Yates’ disillusioned gangster film, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), with Mitchum as an underworld loser, a betrayed veteran who trusts no one. Nonetheless, he grows sleepy after getting drunk with a friend on the way home from watching a hockey match. When his eyes close, it means death.