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 Robert Mitchum's is the cool with
a fourth dimension, the cool that conquers time as well as space.
The man may age (though you'd hardly know it), but he just doesn't
date. It's not just that his face, with its heavy lids and cherub
mouth contained in an inverted triangle climaxing at the cleft
chin, seems as primordial as the heads the space gods reportedly
left on Easter Island. It's that Mitchum is always contemporary.
Just when you've forgotten all about him, he turns up again,
right on time, or a little ahead, with the perfect attitude.
This has been going on for forty years.
Loyal dogface in 1945 (The Story of G.I. Joe), big
city hard guy in 1947 (Out of the Past), he was already
an urban cowboy in 1952 (The Lusty Men), had defined the
essential all-American automotive desperado by 1958 (Thunder
Road), and embodied the ultraviolent psycho who trashes every
last family value by 1962 (Cape Fear). In 1973 (The
Friends of Eddie Coyle) he had the balls to demonstrate just
how tragically an average-Joe all-American hustler could run
out of gas.
He was a good twenty years ahead of his time in 1948 when
he became the first celebrity to get himself busted for pot.
Unlike those who followed in his footsteps, Mitchum actually
did time, sixty days on the L.A. sheriff's honor farm. "It
was just like Palm Springs," he said on release, "but
without the riffraff."
Unlike many movie stars too fastidious to dirty their images, Mitchum
has never cared whether he was an unsympathetic character. He's not
the kind of guy to look at a script and whimper, "I didn't like
the people." Like the mad reverend in Night of the Hunter
(1955), he's got LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE on the other. Take
your pick. He doesn't need you to root for him. At his lowest ebb, he's
still too real for that.
Born in 1917, Mitchum formed his character a long time ago,
before everybody was famous for fifteen minutes, before artists
had to win the approval of vast publicity engines to know that
they were real. Mitchum was a fourteen-year-old poet ("No
love beckons me save that which I've forsaken") when he
ran away from home in Bridgeport and hit the road in the Depression.
He rode the rails, shipped out, dug coal in Pennsylvania, and
rolled drunks on the beach in Santa Monica. He was conversant
with jail long before he was nailed with a joint in his mouth,
having served at the age of fifteen thirty days of an indeterminate
sentence for vagrancy on a chain gang in Chatham County, Georgia.
"To this day," the Saturday Evening Post reported
in 1962, "he refers to [policemen] derisively as 'the fuzz,'
an uncomplimentary slang term."
Yet his film career, inaugurated by his appearance as a foil to Hopalong
Cassidy's virtue in Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943), seems to have
been inevitable. Not only a natural actor, but a powerful story-teller
and gifted (though largely unpublished) author of plays, poems, and
stories, Mitchum could probably have made it as an artist in any era.
He would have regaled his Cro-Magnon mates 'round the first campfire,
plucked the lyre among the Greeks, or done Shakespeare when it was the
going language. He was born too soon to be Bob Dylan, but he did go
calypso- his sleepy visage decorates a Caribbean barroom scene on the
cover of his Capitol LP Calypso ... Is Like So, still available
at select outlets, on which he performs tunes the likes of "Mama
Looka Boo Boo."
No doubt Mitchum can be an asshole with the best of them.
In the "booze and broads" sweeps, big Bob is a welladvertised
second-to-none. Why, one time (he told Rolling Stone)
he found himself so drunk in the office of "wetlipped, sybaritic"
David 0. Selznick, that after "David's last conquest or
victim was shown out... I finally just hunkered myself off to
the side and pissed on the rug." Babes? A million have lined
up to garner the precious bodily fluids of this prime stud. Has
the Mitchum fist floored heavyweight fighters, soldiers, sailors,
Shore Patrols? You betcha. Kirk Douglas himself only narrowly
escaped Mitchum's wrath after taunting him on the set of The
Way West (1967). The duel of the cleft chins never came off
because, Bob asserted, "as far as Douglas is concerned,
all I have to do is whack him one between the horns and it'd
be over."
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Yet Mitchum's movie characters never seem designed to promote assholism.
Mitchum's evil side is clearly marked as such. He doesn't sanctity bullies
or wrap them in the American flag, as "Duke" Wayne was wont
to do. Mitchum turned down the role of Dirty Harry--a "Thrifty
Drug" conception, he called it. He took the role of the victimized
Eddie Coyle in preference to that of the hit man who does Eddie in.
And when he played the studio boss of The Last Tycoon (1975),
generously supporting Robert DeNiro, none of his contempt for the breed
infected the part itself.
Mitchum's loyalty is to the characters he creates, never to
the film he's in. He's more like a mercenary than a patriot ...
the kind of revolutionary who quietly skips town as his comrades
set up the Politburo. "When I look at a script I try to
see how many days I'll gel off," he says.
In fact, Mitchum has never dominated an era or a mood the
way superstars generally do. He's never been that central. He
is much more elusive, with something radically uncommitted in
hi,, nature, especially when it comes to the grand schemes of
others.
And maybe this has been a shrewdway to go. The great superstar:
become extinct when the climate changes. You saw everything they
were or were going to be. Not Mitchum. He keeps a portion of
his charisma to himself. Behind the reams of blarney he spouts
there are still secrets. There are still characters he hasn't
played. In retirement age, the kid's still got potential. He's
so cool time can't get his number.
Get Mitch quick: Thunder
Road; Night
of the Hunter; Cape
Fear; The
Last Tycoon. Out of print and sight: The Friends of
Eddie Coyle. Sing along with Mitch: Calypso
...Is Like So
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