Robert Mitchum was an actor whose excellence was most memorably showcased in
films that were, with the exception of Night of the Hunter, of distinctly
lesser excellence. Cape Fear was made into a sort of logical test of the
truth of this proposition by Scorsese's re-make: substitute De Niro for
Mitchum in the Max Cady role and watch the picture inexorably collapse. Out
of the Past, The Big Steal, Farewell, My Lovely, Macao, Angel Face, etc., all
have their points, but they have their magic in Mitchum's on-screen
registration of their various and sundry episodes. His famous
sleepy eyes, his famous deliberate movement (the way, for instance, he oozes
down the streets in Cape Fear) give the viewer the impression that he is
casing the film more than acting in it. Lee Server quotes a bobby soxer in a
Photoplay article from 1945 who got it right: "He has the most immoral face I
have ever seen."
Lee Server, as a biographer, is about midway between the tabloid
gongorism of a Charles Higham and the MGM values of a Donald Spoto. He tries,
in this book, to incorporate certain tics of wild man biographer Nick
Tosches: the women as broads routine, the throwing in of the odd interior
monologue, the Ratpack tough talk. Although these peculiar flowers of
rhetoric are seemingly intended to produce an insider atmosphere, they
invariably convey a truly 'burb inauthenticity, like the pinkie ring on a
Rotarian. Otherwise, Server contents himself with grinding out that version
of English peculiar to Hollywood's flaks: "Mitchum's brooding, darkly sexual
characterization in Pursued would anticipate the supposedly groundbreaking
style brought to the screen by
Marlon Brando and later still by Elvis Presley;" "They [Robert Mitchum and
Shirley MacLaine] frolicked with the Masai, 'commiserated' with the whites
still whining about Uhuru and Mau-Mau, and drank;" and (my favorite), "Trina
[Mitchum's daughter] had gone through a period as an aspiring writer, then as
a burgeoning photographer." In flak prose, you will notice, it is
connotation that counts, while denotation takes first wife status - a dim and
receding memory of some long gone responsibility.
Robert Mitchum hit the road, like many kids, during the Depression. He
ended up charged, at the tender age of 15, with vagrancy in Savannah and was
duly remanded to a chain gang, which is how they did things back then (and,
in Alabama at least, do things still). After other railroad adventures,
Mitchum found his way to California. In 1940, he married Dorothy Spence.
The two constants in his life were set from then on: his self-image as a bum,
trotted out for public consumption even when he'd become a millionaire
several times over; and his wife, who would remain behind on whatever piece
of real estate to which the Mitchums had title and would raise the two boys,
Jim and Chris, and the girl, Petrine, while Robert got loaded, made movies,
got loaded, fucked, got loaded, brawled, and got loaded. An
endless pissfactory, which, by the time he had reached reactionary lion
stage, in the 1980s, had chemically altered the charming traits
- his stories, his funniness, his sense of himself as a "poet with an axe" -
into an interminable boorishness.
For the first ten years of his acting life, Mitchum was a contract player for
RKO, interrupted only by a stint in the army in 1945 and a
stint in jail in 1949. It was during this period he made the first film that
brought him to public attention, G.I. Joe, and the series of crime melodramas
and westerns which shaped his character for the film-going public - a hip
gorilla, a beast with an attitude. He was chesty, he was unpolished, and as the subtitle of
Server's book goes (taken from a line in Out of the Past), baby, I don't
care. The stint in jail, perversely enough, added to his allure. Mitchum was
caught with two blonde starlets and a number of joints. Server has a bit of a
scoop concerning the arrest - he claims to have found the submerged
connection between the starlets, Mitchum's ex-money manager, a fraud named
Paul Behrmann, and an elaborate shake-down machine run by the LA Vice Squad
for a LA hood, Mickey Cohen.
RKO was run by Howard Hughes during the better part of Mitchum's contract.
Hughes ran the studio an absentee, omniscient plantation owner. The
omniscience came from Hughes extensive use of ex-FBI agents to do his spying;
the planteur mentality expressed itself in Hughes' exploitation
of the contracts of various actresses to extract sexual favors from them, or punish
them if sexual favors were refused. Mitchum's early films, with their
paranoia and their lighting (films 'lit by matches,' Mitchum said), were
scarily in synch with Hughes' Manichean Weltanschauung, in which the heroes
tended to sadism, the bad girls tended to bustiness, and their conjunctions
were fatally laced with impotent husbands and Colt .45s.
After Mitchum became a free agent, he made his best film, The Night of the
Hunter, in 1955, and put in his best performance in Cape Fear, in 1962. In
the fifties, Mitchum was Mailer's hipster, the man who
'cultivated the psychopath in his soul.' But Mitchum, like Mailer, decayed in
the sixties. His psychopathic virtues became the common currency
of the counter-culture. Mitchum smoked dope, got drunk, had an affair with
Shirley MacLaine for a while, performed in overstuffed and unnecessary dramas
for a while for instance, Ryan's Daughter), "frolicked" in Vietnam, which he visited as an
entertainer and returned from with the weird notion that he had been inducted
into the very esoterica of the war by the armed forces, and accumulated the
usufructs of stardom - a ranch, a couple million dollars, alienated children.
It was in this decade that his freewheeling comments about Jews and Niggers
become, well, non-hip.
Server's biography valiantly chugs from location to location and becomes, as
is the way of Hollywood biographies, an album of forgotten movies, enlivened
with late night anecdotes about bad behavior. Mitchum smuggles dope into
Britain. Mitchum gets into a brawl in an Irish pub, he meets hard cases in
Japan making The Yakuza, he makes a fool of himself to reporters, he attacks
a camera woman, he winds down. The man who supposedly was so aloof from the
Hollywood scene that he could hop a bus and disappear anytime becomes the man
so addicted to work that he even retails the last scraps of his authenticity,
selling his voice to the Beef Council of America for ads, and starring on an
ABC sit-com.
Throughout his career, he clung to an image of himself as a bum - a man who
"didn't give a damn about being a movie star." Server doesn't pause to
consider the imago of the bum. Mitchum's political trajectory from a
sympathizer with the downtrodden in the forties to the neo-fascist (with his expressed
suspicion that Hitler was a Jewish put-up job) in the eighties is not just a
case of man aging into conservatism, but is a classic expression of the bum
ideology, which can shift left or right and still remain true to its essence.
It is a mistake to consider the bum equivalent to the poor man - poverty is
merely a transient condition for the real bum. His defining characteristic is
a deep-seated contempt for all labour - his feeling that labour is always a
disguised form of slavery. The Lumpen-proletariat, as Marx noticed, is not
the natural ally of the working class, but of the charismatic leader - the
man who has power without seemingly working for power, whose power comes from
the calculated use of shocks and coups. Mitchum's often expressed
idea that film acting was a form of automatic behavior - "just paint eyes on
my eyelids and move me in front of the camera" - was simply the bum's
ideology in filmic terms, a pre-emptive defeatism that denied the reality of
the work entailed by acting. It was also a sly move that trumped the star's
glamour while adding to it the role of the truthteller, the man who never
bullshits. Server spends a lot of time in the book quoting directors and
actors making the obvious point that Mitchum did not sleepwalk through his
roles, but this isn't really in need of proof. There is something in
Mitchum's contempt for the merely human, the merely intermediate, to which middle class America has no good reply, except jail or the horror show. In the one, that contempt is
buried in the social equivalent of oblivion, in the other it is remembered
endlessly and endlessly loses. It was Mitchum's genius to make that loss
seem deeply, deeply cheap.
Reviewed by Roger Gathman
