Star of the Month

Tuesdays | 47 Movies

Three of my favorite line readings in film were spoken by TCM’s Star of the Month in January Robert Mitchum. They are each spoken in the same movie, Out of the Past (1947), considered by many to be the quintessential film noir, which kicks off the first of five Tuesday night prime time tributes to Mitchum.

You know the score: Mitchum’s Jeff, a  detective, is hired by Whit (Kirk Douglas), an amoral gambler, to find Kathie (Jane Greer), the fataliest of all femmes, who shot Whit, left him for dead, and, Whit says, absconded with $40,000.

The first great line, delivered as only Mitchum can, comes after he’s met Kathie and had second thoughts about bringing her back to Whit. “Did you miss me?” she asks during a nighttime rendezvous at the beach. Jeff says, “No more than I would my eyes.”

The second comes after the couple are reunited, all bitter and no sweet. Kathie shot Jeff’s partner, ran out on Jeff (with that $40,000, by the way) and returned to Whit.  Kathie plays the “Can’t you even feel sorry me?” card. No dice. Jeff says, “Just get out, will you? I have to sleep in this room.”

The third comes at the climax of the film, when, after all the double crosses and betrayals, all pretense is dropped, and Kathie tells Jeff she’s running the show. “You’ve only me to make deals with now,” she says. And Jeff gives my favorite Mitchum line, “Well, build my gallows high, baby,” which, fun fact, is the name of the book that inspired the film.

Years ago, when Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were paired for the unlikely PBS movie review series, Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, (later rebranded to Siskel and Ebert), Chicago magazine interviewed the rival critics. When asked if there was an actor for whom Ebert could not be impartial, he named Robert Mitchum. He later reflected on this after Mitchum died in 1997, just one day before another screen icon, James Stewart.

The death of Stewart, remembered as a national treasure, seemed to overshadow Mitchum’s, just as Elvis Presley’s passing  in August 1977 overshadowed the death of Groucho Marx three days  later. Ebert pondered that there was no equivalent to Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) in Mitchum’s prolific canon. “He embodied a completely different kind of character on the screen: Harder, wiser, darker,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic wrote. “No matter what your age was, Mitchum always seemed older than you were, just as Stewart always seemed boyish…When he drank in a movie, the way he picked up the glass let you know he wasn't keeping count.”

Mitchum was Ebert’s favorite movie star because, he wrote, “He represented, for me, the impenetrable mystery of the movies. He knew the inside story. With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart.”

Mitchum tends to be overlooked and ranked just outside the pantheon of the screen’s greatest movie stars from the studio system era. In its ranking of the 25 greatest male screen legends of the 20th century, the American Film Institute placed Mitchum at 23, just behind Sidney Poitier and ahead of Edward G. Robinson.

Mitchum downplayed his profession. In a 1971 interview with Dick Cavett, he said he found acting to be an “embarrassing” way to make a living, “getting all painted up and making faces.”

Film historian David Thomson raised some eyebrows (including Mitchum’s, reportedly) when in the first edition of his “Biographical Dictionary of Film,” he stated that Mitchum was one of the three most important screen actors, along with Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck.

“How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?” he wrote. “Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods…To look at the span of his work… is to see a professional at home in many genres, periods and accents. You can never catch him cheating, coasting, or looking phony.”

TCM’s January 23 Mitchum line-up is particularly illustrative of this: He portrays one of the screen’s most terrifying stalkers in Cape Fear (1962), a battle-hardened WWII soldier who develops feelings for a nun (Oscar-nominee Deborah Kerr) with whom he is marooned on a Japanese-occupied island in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), a moonshiner in Thunder Road (1958) (which inspired Bruce Springsteen to write his classic song of the same name) and a divorced lawyer who falls in love with a dancer (Shirley MacLaine) in Two for the Seesaw (1962).

In 1973, Rolling Stone, once the barometer of what’s hip in popular culture, put Mitchum on its cover. The profile was titled, “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” There’s a great quote from actor Peter Boyle, his The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) costar: “You know what the 2001 theme is? That’s the sound of Mitchum waking up.”

Three of Mitchum’s films - Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Out of the Past and The Night of the Hunter (1955) have been inducted into the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films. Mitchum never got an Oscar. He was nominated only once for Story of G.I. Joe. But he worked not only prolifically, but with distinction late in life. Some of his richest characters and most compelling performances were achieved when he was in his fifties (Farewell, My Lovely from 1975), sixties (That Championship Season from 1982) and seventies (War and Remembrance from 1988).

David Lean, who directed him in the historical romance Ryan’s Daughter (1970), told Rolling Stone, “Mitchum is at last being recognized as the gifted actor he has always been. He is a master of stillness. Other actors act. Mitchum is. He has true delicacy and expressiveness, but his forte is his indelible identity. Simply by being there, Mitchum can make almost any other actor look like a hole in the screen.”

You can read Mitchum’s bio here. But he himself distilled his essence in his monologue when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 1987:

“Live TV – I guess that’s supposed to scare me. Like if I screw up, I may miss out on that 110th movie. And I’ve done a lot of movies, and I remember them all, too. One of my first appearances in films was with Laurel and Hardy. I think it was a comedy, but that’s what I thought of Winds of War, too. So, who knows what’s gonna happen tonight? All I know for sure is, in 90 minutes, I go to a party. That sounds good to me. Let’s face it – there’s not much I haven’t seen in this world, and there’s even less that I haven’t done. In fact, after this show, there will be nothing I haven’t done. So, stick around.”