Something about Mitchum

Commonplace Newsletter #118

As I draw closer to the end of this Commonplace Newsletter project¹, I am forced to ask myself what else is there left to say? What topics or ideas or themes have I not yet covered that I would regret leaving untouched?

It’s a question I have been turning over in my mind for a couple of weeks now; while on the commuter train to work, while scanning groceries, while queuing at the post office ideas will come to me and I will rapidly realise that I have already written about them. Sure I could tackle them again, I could bring new insight to bear and perhaps more polished and persuasive prose but would this truly be the best use of our time here? I know that repetition is both an aid to understanding and something that the internet actively rewards² but still. Nothing leapt out at me, nothing had that spark.

So what was to be done? Like many writers I decided to tackle this problem of inspiration by completely ignoring it. I suddenly became obsessed- completely spontaneously of course- with cleaning my flat, with reordering and pairing down my books and clothes, with finally taming my scattered paperwork and computer files and email inboxes. As is often the case, it was in the midst of this busywork, this procrastination disguised as productivity, that providence gave me the answer. In a ringbinder at the top of my wardrobe I found a plastic pocket filled with scrawled on scraps of paper. Many were barely legible, many were reminders and aide memoirs that now made no sense at all- failures in their sole reason for existence. But one note was different. On one hastily torn out page from a notepad I had written:

Something about Mitchum.

Just three words

Something about Mitchum. The Man with the Immoral Face. The Original Hollywood Bad Boy. Old Trouble Himself.

So fade in the Old Hollywood orchestral blare and cut to our man Mitchum with his shadow-casting fedora and broad shoulders and cigarette-clasping smirk. Let’s see if there’s something here.

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‘Six books have been written about me and I’ve only ever met two of the authors. They get my name and birthplace wrong in the first paragraph. From there it’s all downhill.’ ~ Robert Mitchum

Terrifying things obituaries. As are eulogies, as any mourner will recognise. A life of hopes and dreams, of achievements and failures, of sins and good deeds, of spouses and offspring and losses and separations reduced to a few paragraphs, to a handful of bulletpoints and cliches and short hands.

Our man Mitchum, when filtered through such a lens becomes:

• The Original Hollywood Bad Boy, an actor who was jailed for a month in the 1940’s for the now laughable crime of smoking a joint.

• A man whose youth consisted of delinquency, truancy and vagabondage through Great Depression America. His father was killed in a railroad accident when Bob was a boy and at 15 Mitchum was put in a chain gang for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia. He escaped and the injuries sustained in the process nearly cost him his leg.

• An actor who stared in over 100 films across six decades and of whom critic David Thomson once said: ‘Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.’

• A philandering ladies man who nonetheless remained married to his wife Dorothy from 1940 until he died in 1997. They first met when Mitchum was 16 and she was 14.

• The recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but famously not the recipient of an Oscar or even a nomination barring a single supporting nod for the less-than-his-best Story of G.I. Joe in 1945³.

• A committed and unrepentant marijuana enthusiast, vodka drinker and Pall Mall smoker who perhaps unsurprisingly died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer.

And above all quite possibly the coolest, toughest and most authentic actor of his or any other era. A benchmark of mid-century masculinity, of fame without pretension or self-importance, of amused world weary cynicism, Zen-like in its insouciant unflappability.

An interesting guy, then. However the bullet points alone don’t account for the continual fascination that Mitchum holds for the likes of me.

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‘People can’t make up their minds whether I’m the greatest actor in the world or the worst. Matter of fact, neither can I. It’s been said that I underplay so much I could’ve stayed home, but I must be good at my job or they wouldn’t haul me around the world at these prices.’ ~ Robert Mitchum

Films are projections that we project ourselves into. Beyond the offer of entertainment and escape, films at their best can give us consolation and teachings, examples and counter examples of how to navigate aspects of life. They can give us wisdom even, an idea which may strike the contemporary multiplex goer as haughty if not demonstrably false, but one I stand by out of principle. In fact I believe that that final point that marks the difference between a 9 out of 10 and a 10 out of 10 film is a measure of how much the film in question has moved us and changed us. Craft, technique, production and entertainment value and talent will get you so far but the final step involves speaking to the viewers heart (not just their mind) and effecting a change. The film has to stay with them, to find a home within their heart.

Now, I know Mitchum would laugh at such highfaluting talk and would make cynical, self-depreciating remarks about both the film industry (they were ‘peddlers of horseshit’) and of the role that he himself had to play in it. (‘I have two acting styles, with and without a horse.’). But the fact remains that for virtually each of the six decades he was making pictures Mitchum starred in at least one 10 out of 10 picture, and several more that came pretty close⁴. He had a bigger range than he was given credit for and his somnambulist style and bar-brawler persona hid a real sensitivity and insight. His image was above all a smokescreen that concealed the fact that deep down he cared deeply. Though he didn’t speak about it much Mitchum had been a boyhood poet⁵ and the poet’s sensitivity and depth of feeling never left quite left him, try as he might.

The big hearted tough guy, the sensitive brawler, the faithful philanderer- It’s from these warring internal contradictions from which the best of his performances are born. This is what drew the audience in whether they quite realised it or not. And this is what still draws us in whenever we catch a prime Mitchum picture on late night TV or when we choose to settle on the sofa and screen a black and white classic on a rainy afternoon.

You see, no matter how still Mitchum is on screen- and he was arguably the first true screen actor (as opposed to the over-gesticulating, over-enunciating actors who came over from the theatre world to the movies)- his eyes and the tiny, almost imperceptible movements tell the whole story of everything that is going on inside of him. It’s easy to miss but it’s there. And it’s what made him the best at what he did.

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‘I went to the studio… and they said, ‘Bob, look. Every time we make a deal with someone it comes with another script we’ve got to buy for fifty grand, so we have a whole draw full of horseshit. Every studio has a horseshit salesman. Paramount has Alan Ladd; Warner had Bogart. You want more money, you let us know. But you’re our horseshit salesman.’ ~ Robert Mitchum

It would be remiss to not talk about the horseshit. Mitchum was in some bad films. There’s Michael Winners late ‘70’s take on The Big Sleep that has a past his prime Bob incongruously plodding around a dreary grey England instead of sun kissed L.A. Then there’s the Jeff Fahey/Bo Derek (allegedly) erotic thriller Woman of Desire, part of that wave of post Basic Instinct, post DePalma VHS mediocrity. And of course there’s Matilda, the infamous monstrosity starring Elliott Gould and the titular boxing kangaroo (which is blatantly a man in a costume, and a bad one at that). There are times in Matilda when you can see the obviously stoned Mitchum trying to keep a grasp on reality. You can almost hear his inner thoughts asking himself why he ever agreed to sign on to this picture.

Yet I can’t hold any of the dross against the man. He was in some awful pictures, some middling pictures and some pictures that he clearly starred in only for the paycheque or as a means of getting out the house. The fact he wasn’t precious about his filmography is part of his charm. He would claim that ‘getting all painted up and making faces, pretending to be someone else’ wasn’t as important as ‘building a bridge or digging a ditch or jacking up a tyre or something’. He understood that his appeal to the average moviegoer. ‘But he [the punter] sees me up there on screen and thinks- if that bum can make it, I can become president. I bring a ray of hope to the great unwashed.’

Alongside the stay-with-you-forever images and memories from those 10 out of 10 films, this is the main thing that I have always taken away from Mitchum. That jaded humility, that wit and humour, the refusal to get dragged down by it all, the refusal to allow yourself to get puffed up by praise and adulation. He never trusted the critics or the press and would laugh off good notices just as much as the bad ones. He never chased awards or prestige and remained an outsider, a working stiff who found himself in fantasyland and knew that it could all be taken away at any moment. He knew that horseshit came with the territory and he knew that legacy is something you don’t have a full say on. In Hollywood- a place of fakery and make-believe- he was the realist of all realists. And that’s something to learn from.

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‘You’re not gonna find a thing, except yourself.’ Robert Mitchum as Dan Milner in His Kind of Woman (1951)

So there it is, something about Mitchum. I find old Bob endlessly fascinating- I always have- but it seems that the more words I expend on the man the further I seem to get away from the essence. Maybe this too is part of the appeal, the mystery of it all. All biographies, whether magisterial multivolume hagiographies or brief and oblique sketches like this one, are an exercise in the biographer trying to understand something about themself through the conduit of the famous figure in question⁶. And I think Mitchum speaks especially to a certain kind of young man who want to try and reconcile the softer more poetic side of his nature with the side concerned with adventure and hedonism and cynicism and shadow. I’m not young anymore but that tension still resonates, at least the idea of it.

The silver screen is still where many people find their exemplars, for better or worse, heroes and antiheroes who risk and suffer and die so that we might learn from their mistakes. And there will always be one who speaks to you more than the others, be it for their relatability, their bearing, their otherworldliness, their charm or any other perceived attribute we ourselves may feel we are short on.

Mitchum on screen possesses a Greatest Generation strength and stoicism which has now all but faded from the collective imagination and the collective repository of reference and memory. He has it in spades without appearing stolid or worthy or humourless and and all undercut by a smirking sense of absurdity. The mixture is somehow fitting for these times. I can imagine a monochrome Mitchum beholding this world we have made for ourselves today and nearly falling off his barstool with laughter at the ridiculousness of it all. And knowing this somehow helps me to adopt- when needed- a similar position. Sure Bob knew about loneliness and pain, about the problems of being poor and the problems of being rich, but he also knew that you have to keep your cool and not let the bastards see you sweat. See, even though there is resignation to it and even though it may well be an illusion there is something to be said for the most famous line that Mitchum ever uttered on screen; the baritone growl where he told the femme fatale Jane Greer…

‘Baby. I don’t care.’

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1. To clarify, I will naturally continue to write and publish here but I think that after well over 100 issues The Commonplace Newsletters are naturally starting to fade out. My long neglected fiction calls to me, as does poetry, as does a more searching, free-form, observational non-fiction that is not tied to this current format, a format that I have been working under for over four and a half years.

2. Look at the most metrically ‘successful’ online writers- they have a given topic/theme/niche that they prolifically and punctually tackle again and again with metronomic consistency. Repetition is their friend, staying on track and to the timetable gets them to their destination.

3. ‘It’s commonly believed that there was really only one reason why Mitchum never received an Oscar and that was his refusal to toe the line. He wasn’t pliable, wasn’t controllable.’ Lloyd Robson, Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum.

4. For my money the crème de la crème is as follows:

‘40’s: Out of The Past (1947)

‘50’s: Night of the Hunter (1955)

‘60’s: Cape Fear (1962)

‘70’s: Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

‘80’s: (this was a fallow decade with Scrooged (1988) probably being Mitchums best outing)

‘90’s: Dead Man (1995)

And those that come just shy of the very highest level but are well worth your time include Crossfire, Holiday Affair, The Lusty Men, Angel Face, Heaven Knows Mr Allison, Thunder Road, The Sundowners, Two for the Seesaw, The Yakuza, Cape Fear (the Scorsese remake) and Tombstone.

5. And a good one at that, judging from the few scant snippets of poetry buried in his biographies.

6. When it comes to Mitchum, the most obvious example of this is Lloyd Robsons Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum, an overlooked Gonzo road trip of a biography quoted a few footnotes further up.