Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  For Mitchum, Pursued was yet another proving ground. Though he had made four features since G.I. Joe thrust him into the big time, this was his first real lead in an A production. And it was a performance, and a role, requiring a dramatic leap beyond the behavioral naturalism of his previous characterizations. Jeb Rand, as written, was a ripely melodramatic part—the character is, after all, literally haunted by ghosts from his past—erupting with outbursts of passion, fear, and violence. Mitchum compellingly adapted the part to his own strengths, playing down the hysteria in the material—one could imagine a very different approach from Kirk Douglas—giving a kind of voluptuous passivity to Rand’s enigmatic resignation in the face of a malignant, seemingly inexorable fate. The part was Mitchum’s first romantic lead, and the actor was presented in a way guaranteed to set the bobby-soxers’ hearts racing: an alluring object of desire, a figure of power and sensuality with his heavy-lidded, “immoral face,” the glistening dark pompadoured hair, the massive physique towering over the low-angled camera, and an unusually flamboyant wardrobe (puffy-sleeved white shirts, extravagant Indian blanket coat). 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.

  Pursued itself proved to be inarguably influential. Niven Busch’s introduction of dark themes, classical allusions, and Freudianism to the horse opera plus the film’s baroque style helped to launch the era of the so-called adult and neurotic Westerns, a range of distinctive films from High Noon and The Gun-fighter to Johnny Guitar, Forty Guns, and One-Eyed Jacks*

  Mitchum returned to RKO to take his first real lead in a major production at his home studio. It would become another great vehicle for the young star—and ultimately one of the two or three most important films of his career—though typically, even at this late date, he was not the first actor RKO considered for the part.

  Daniel Mainwaring had been writing mystery novels since 1936. He wrote private eye stories set mostly in the California hinterlands (the rural, central region where he grew up) and published them under the pen name of Geoffrey Homes. They were among the best works of their kind, but they had never enjoyed more than moderate success. For years Mainwaring worked a day job as a publicist at Warner Bros., until in 1943 he broke into screenwriting, churning out scripts for Pine-Thomas (Bob Mitchum’s low-budget employers, the Dollar Bills). Scripting even B-minus movies paid considerably more than he had ever seen from his crime fiction, and he would soon turn his back on book writing and stick to screenplays for the rest of his life. But Mainwaring had one last novel in him, not another series detective story but a one-shot—this time his hero wouldn’t live to detect again.

  It’s the story of a private eye and his search for a missing girl and all that happens to him when he finds her. A sprawling story, it moves from the author’s beloved California mountains to New York, Acapulco, and Nevada. The novel was called Build My Gallows High, and it was published by Morrow in 1946. William Dozier of RKO bought the book (for twenty thousand dollars) prior to publication and the author with it. After a George Gallup poll found that the title Build My Gallows High sounded too unpleasant to American ears, the studio changed it to something less provocative though no less poetic: Out of the Past.

  Mainwaring went to work on a screenplay, condensing some elements from the original, expanding others, creating an elaborate narrative structure with multiple flashbacks—there was simply no avoiding those flashbacks in postwar melodrama—and voice-overs, including a long section narrated by a young deaf-mute. Producer Warren Duff then hired the legendary James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, to take a crack at it. Cain changed characters’ names, removed every last shred of lovability from the femme fatale, added a few more murders, and came up with a simpler two-part structure with one long flashback sequence narrated by the hero. Warren Duff was hoping to have Jacques Tourneur direct the film—Tourneur had done Experiment Perilous for him the previous year. He showed the director both scripts, and Tourneur made several suggestions. Duff assigned a third writer, Frank Fenton, a veteran RKO scenarist and script doctor (and occasional novelist) with a string of “Falcon” and “Saint” mystery movies on his resume. Fenton removed most of Cain’s additions and excesses, streamlined Mainwaring’s draft, revised and polished, and wrote new dialogue for nearly every scene. Main-waring may have taken a final pass at the thing—in any case, under his Homes pen name he was the only one of the three contributors credited on-screen.

  Here was what these assorted hands came up with:

  In a small town in the mountains, Jeff Bailey leads a quiet life running a gas station and fishing on the river with his local sweetheart, Ann. A black-clad figure from his past—Joe Stefanos—drives into town one day and tells him that an old friend, wealthy criminal Whit Sterling, wants to see him again. Ruefully accepting the inevitable, Jeff agrees. He decides the time has come to let Ann know the truth about himself, and on the long drive to Whit’s Lake Tahoe compound he tells her the tale. Once a New York private eye named Markham, not Bailey, Jeff took a job from Sterling—to search for the gambler’s missing girlfriend, Kathie Moffett, who had shot him, stolen forty thousand dollars of his money, and disappeared. Jeff follows leads across the country and then to Mexico, where in an Acapulco cantina he finally crosses paths with the alluring young woman. Not letting on why he’s there, the detective becomes romantically involved with her. Kathie eventually realizes that Jeff has been sent to bring her back, but by then he is fully smitten.

  As they embrace on the tropical beach, Kathie begins to protest her innocence of Sterling’s charges, but Jeff cuts her off: “Baby, I don’t care”

  After nearly being found together by Sterling and Stefanos, the couple flee to California, keeping a low profile until they are discovered by Jeff’s treacherous ex-partner, Fisher, now employed by Whit. Tracking the pair to a backwoods cabin, he tries to blackmail them. Kathie shoots him dead, and before Jeff can react she is gone.

  Finishing his sordid story, Jeff sends Ann home and goes in to see Whit. To his shock and disgust he finds Kathie there, returned to the fold. Sterling wants Jeff to make up for his betrayal and to avoid being turned in for Fisher’s murder by helping him with another job: grabbing some incriminating documents from a blackmailing accountant named Eels. After exchanging a few bitter words with Kathie, Jeff goes off to San Francisco, meeting another Sterling confederate—comely Meta Carson—who aids him in the scheme to separate Eels from Whit’s tax records. But Jeff deduces that he’s being set up as a fall guy. Eels is killed, and Jeff is implicated, but he gets his hands on the tax ledger, hoping to barter his way out of trouble with Whit’s help. Kathie is found to be calling the shots on the double-cross, but when she begins to plead his forgiveness and remind him how things had been in Mexico, Jeff finds himself weakening again. He hides out in the mountains, where Joe Stefanos is sent by Kathie to kill him. Instead, Jeff’s deaf-mute friend, The Kid, hooks Joe with a fishing line and plunges him to his death on the rocks. Jeff returns to Whit for a final deal—a cash settlement and the Eels death pinned on Joe in return for the tax ledger. Sterling agrees, but when Jeff returns for his money he finds the racketeer dead, shot by Kathie for a second and final time. She tells Jeff they will go away together—”You’re no good for anyone but me.” Jeff seems to numbly accept his destiny, but while Kathie is getting ready to leave, he makes a phone call and the pair drive straight into a police roadblock. Realizing Jeff is responsible, Kathie shoots him and the car crashes, leaving them both dead. Some time later, a stricken Ann asks The Kid if Jeff had really intended to go away with the woman from his past. To spare her being haunted by what might have been, The Kid nods his head, knowing it is a lie.

  By his own admission, Daniel Mainwaring had swiped elements of Build My Gallows High from The Maltese Falcon, the gold standard for detective thrillers (big and small echoes of the earlier book and film can
be heard throughout Out of the Past), and so it was not surprising that the writer would suggest the screen’s Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart, to play Jeff Bailey. Producer Warren Duff, another Warner Bros, veteran and friendly with the actor, concurred. Mainwaring went to see Bogie on his boat at the marina in Newport and left a copy of the script. Then Warners nixed it, claiming the star was booked for the next year. There was talk of offering the part to Dick Powell, a profitable Philip Marlowe for RKO a couple of years before, and reuniting him with his Murder, My Sweet director, Eddie Dmytryk. But in the end, the meaty role was assigned to the studio’s rising young tough guy actor. And about time. Out of the Past was his first starring vehicle at RKO since West of the Pecos.

  With Mitchum in the lead, Duff and Executive Producer Robert Sparks opted to cast all the other principal parts with young and relatively fresh faces. As the smooth, deceptively even-tempered racketeer, Whit Sterling, Kirk Douglas, in his third film role, was the highest-paid member of the group, taking home $25,000 for two-and-a-half weeks’ work (Mitchum, on salary, earned a mere $10,333.33 for his ten-and-a-third weeks with the production). It would be the motion picture debut for stage actor and director and former ballet dancer Paul Valentine, the husband of sumptuous stripper Lili St. Cyr, and at the time of his hiring still known as Val Valentinoff, cast to play Whit’s equally smooth and oddly attentive henchman Joe Stefanos (a handsomer and more charming equivalent of The Maltese Falcons “gunsel,” Wilmer). Dickie Moore, one-time child actor, still adolescent-looking in his early twenties, would enact the small but memorable role of the deaf-mute, The Kid. Just out of the veterans’ hospital, still recovering from a rare, crippling virus, Moore would spend four weeks with a tutor learning the rudiments of sign language.

  The part of Kathie Moffitt, the story’s motivating force, its irresistable Circe, was assigned to the beautiful RKO starlet Jane Greer. She was just twenty-two in 1946 when Out of the Past went into production. Only four years in Hollywood and Greer had already had more than enough colorful and bizarre experiences for one lifetime. While still in high school Jane—nee Bettejane—had worked as a vocalist at the Del Rio Club in Washington, D.C., and as a model, posing for a recruitment poster wearing the newly restyled uniform of the Women’s Air Corps. Legendary industrialist-test pilot—movie producer—owner of Trans World Airlines, compulsive-maniacal skirt chaser Howard Hughes had seen the girl on the poster and sent his team of talent scout-pimps to find her and bring her to California at once. Bettejane and her mother were put up in a Hollywood apartment, all expenses paid, and waited there under “house arrest” for four months until Greer, desperately bored, began slipping out at night to have a little fun. On one of her secret jaunts she met Rudy Vallee, the middle-aged actor-bandleader, former recording sensation of the Jazz Age. They began going out on dates. Only then was she summoned to meet her mysterious benefactor, Mr. Hughes. It was the middle of the night, and Greer was dragged out of bed for a rendezvous in a dirty old screening room. Hughes told her he had people following her, knew everything she had been doing with Vallee, and ordered her never to see him again. Greer told him he had no right to tell her what to do, and Hughes angrily dismissed her. Vallee continued his pursuit, and at last the eighteen-year-old, would-be actress agreed to be his wife, to Hughes’s disgust.

  When the marriage turned rocky, Hughes came back into Greer’s life, this time pouring on the charm. He wooed her like a high school boy, taking her to the carnival, riding the merry-go-round with her, and winning her some kewpie dolls at the midway games. They began a love affair. But before long the high school suitor act faded and Hughes’s erratic behavior—for instance leaving her alone in a restaurant for an hour while he disappeared to wash his clothes compulsively in the men’s room sink—proved too much for the teenager. She went back to Vallee, who was eccentric and a bit kinky—he had a fetish for dying Jane’s hair jet black, painting her face milk white, and dressing her in black lingerie, black stockings, and black spike heels that made her teeter—but at least he was predictably weird. A year later, though, the marriage ended, and Greer then wed a considerably more stable and younger man named Edward Lasker, an entertainment attorney and aspiring producer.

  RKO had signed her to an acting contract in 1945. With her dyed black hair she was invariably considered for heavies—bad girls—and stardom eluded her. Then producer Joan Harrison thought of her for the part of a glamorous New York adulterer in the noirish murder mystery They Won’t Believe Me.

  Harrison told her, “I want to test you. But I want to test you as Jane Greer, not as Gale Sondergaard” (the raven-haired Spider Woman from the Sherlock Holmes series). “I want to put a soap cap on your head. It lightens your hair, doesn’t make it blonde, but lightens it, gives it life. Because your hair is dead.” They made the hair change and tested her with star Robert Young. Harrison said, “The difference is astounding. Now you look like a human being, like a beautiful young woman. You’ve got the part.”

  Her appearance in They Won’t Believe Me, Greer felt, turned RKO around in her favor. When the role of Kathie in Out of the Past came up, she was thrilled that they didn’t want to shoot a test, simply told her she had the part. She was even more pleased when she read the script. “It was a great, great part,” Greer said. “Anybody would die for a part like that. The way they build her up before you even see her. It was like that Alan Ladd thing, Whispering Smith. The whole first half is all ‘Who is Whispering Smith?’ and ‘Boy, you never met anyone like Whispering Smith!’ And by the time little Alan Ladd shows up, five feet four or something, he looked six feet nine. In my story it was ‘She shot me, she took my money, but don’t hurt her, I just want her back.’ And then the next guy sees her falls instantly in love with her. This is some kind of woman. How can you go wrong? It was a part made in heaven.”

  • • •

  On Saturday October 19, at seven-thirty in the morning, a sedan left the RKO lot in Hollywood and headed for the town of Bridgeport, California, 356 miles away in the eastern Sierra Mountains. Inside the car was the assigned director of Build My Gallows High, Jacques Tourneur, and his key technical personnel, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, head grip Tom Clements, and assistant director Harry Mancke. The crime drama was the second collaboration for Tourneur and Musuraca, whose teamwork had created the exquisitely evocative atmosphere of the first of Val Lewton’s groundbreaking horror films, Cat People. Jacques Tourneur was the French-born son of Maurice Tourneur, an acclaimed Euro-American director of pictorially rich silent films. Jacques had grown up in Hollywood and returned as an adult, working his way through the ranks from directing second units and short subjects to B features. The success of Cat People and its marvelous follow-ups, I Walked with a Zombie and Leopard Man, elevated him to A picture assignments at RKO. His first two of these, a war film, Days of Glory, and a Gothic suspense story, Experiment Perilous, netted mixed results, but on a loan-out to Walter Wanger at Universal, Tourneur directed another unique and consummate work, Canyon Passage, among other things one of the most beautiful color films ever made. Tourneur was a director of style and delicacy, and though he could dissolve into wispy anonymity with hopeless material, under the best of circumstances his films possessed an ethereal mysteriousness unlike the work of any other commercial filmmaker. That morning, on the long drive to Bridgeport, Tourneur had no great enthusiasm for the assignment at hand. He found the plot rather confusing, but it was sexy and adult stuff by Hollywood standards and looked to offer some good opportunities for a few pleasing visual grace notes, s’ilplait a Dieu and with the help of his comrade behind the camera.

  Nick Musuraca, Italian by birth, began his life in the movies as the chauffeur of early film pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. He became a cinematographer in the 1920s and had been shooting for RKO from the studio’s inception. Noted for his moody underlighting (a recent credit was The Locket), his name is frequently invoked as one of the inventors of the film noir style—indeed Musuraca was director of photography for the
1940 RKO release Stranger on the Third Floor, often cited as the very first film noir. His penchant for shadows actually had less to do with any feeling for noir’s dark deeds and paranoid atmosphere than with his dedication to simplicity and realism over “technical window-dressing.” For Musuraca, complicated lighting setups were compensation for a lack of perfection. “All too often,” he said, “we’re all of us likely to find ourselves throwing in an extra light here, and another there, simply to correct something which is a bit wrong because of the way one basic lamp is placed or adjusted. . . . If, on the other hand, that one original lamp is in its really correct place or adjustment, the others aren’t needed. Any time I find myself using a more than ordinary number of light sources for a scene . . . I’ll find I’ve slipped up somewhere, and the extra lights are really unnecessary. If you once get the ‘feel’ of lighting balance this way, you’ll be surprised how you’ll be able to simplify your lightings. Usually the results on the screen are better, too.” In addition to providing a showcase for his skill with low and natural-source lighting, Out of the Past offered Musuraca a chance to display his now less well-remembered skill with outdoor photography. Like Pursued—that “black” Western—Out of the Past was an anomaly: a film noir full of spacious, sunlit exteriors.

  In the small rural town of Bridgeport, the Out of the Past people took over most of the available accommodations, rooms and cabins at a couple of no-frills motor courts intended for visiting fishermen and hearty hikers. On the weekend, Tourneur and his crew toured the locations: the courthouse, a service station, the highway, and the forest and granite cliffs around Lower Twin Lake. On Monday a fleet of cars and buses from the studio arrived carrying cast, more crew, equipment, wardrobe, props, and stand-ins. Robert Mitchum, still in Hollywood, was scheduled to arrive later in the week. Meanwhile Tourneur began shooting the film’s opening and closing scenes, the coming into town of Joe Stefanos (excitingly filmed with the camera mounted on the moving car), and the wistful coda after Jeff’s death.