Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  He set up the screening for that evening. Mitchum sat by himself in the dark watching the two-thirds of the picture, and afterward, said Ray, “came out of the projection room walking about ten feet high.” A celebration was in order, and they went across the street to Lucey’s. Ray crawled for home some hours later, recalling that when he had last seen his star, Mitchum and some new pals—a pair of drunken FBI agents—were lurching about in the restaurant’s kitchen, Mitchum firing an FBI handgun at Lucey’s dirty dishes while the kitchen staff ran for cover.

  A key work in the postwar era’s advancing demythification of the Hollywood West, The Lusty Men (a Hughes-approved title; The Losers would have been more appropriate) depicted the pain and despair underlying the rodeo’s festive surface. Anything but conventional, romantic, heroic figures, the film’s cowboys are crippled, scarred, middle-aged, and mostly dim-witted men living a sleazy, nomadic existence in a world of cold-water trailers and domestic strife, men sustained by a few dangerous moments of “buzz” when they’re in the saddle, and the dream of prize money that will be squandered come morning. Evidencing the formula-driven thinking of assembly-line scenarists, the story itself and many of the dramatic ingredients were hardly groundbreaking—a rehash of Test Pilot, The Crowd Roars, Manpower, and all those two-men-and-a-woman-plus-a-dangerous-profession pictures—but Horace McCoy’s incisive and poetic writing of individual scenes (the author of They Shoot Horses clearly had a feel for life’s failures) and Nicholas Ray’s nuanced, artful direction gave The Lusty Men moments of lyricism and psychological resonance that set it apart from those earlier tales of risk-taking roustabouts. Though he would be best known for his films’ neurotic energy bordering on hysteria, Ray here obtained some of his most powerful effects from emotional restraint and simple staging, most memorably in Mitchum’s last scene. The offhand style and quiet underplaying only increased the scene’s emotional force: the broken cowboy sighing his last ironic aphorism (”Guys like me last forever”); and even more devastating (Ray repeating a bit from They Live by Night but to much greater effect here), the almost imperceptible cutaway to the young tomboy, Rusty, standing in the background and silently mouthing “I love you . . .” to the dying ex-champion.

  Typical of Ray’s work, the performances were all strong and three-dimensional, from the leads to the smallest bit parts, including, most memorably among the supporting players, a sad/funny turn by Arthur Hunnicutt and vivacious work by Eleanor Todd as a hilariously sexy lover of the rodeo, branding men with her teeth and guzzling from a phallically extended bottle of champagne. Only Arthur Kennedy, an excellent actor but looking more like a crafty traveling salesman than a potential rodeo champ, was manifestly miscast. Susan Hayward, too, was something less than authentic-seeming as a former Southwest tamale-joint barmaid, though her powerful and discerning performance more than compensated for her lack of a rustic personality. As to Mitchum (beefier than he had ever appeared on screen), he was both believable and superb, carefully tempering his charisma and sex appeal with a distant sadness that perfectly illuminated the character of Jeff McCloud as a man caught between past glory and a future of lonely failure, a man who has come to accept that life is a matter of “chicken today, feathers tomorrow.” He was as authentic-seeming a Westerner as Gary Cooper but unromanticized in a way Coop would never have allowed—Jeff blithely living off a friend’s hard-won winnings, coveting the same friend’s wife, then throwing his life away in a moment of wounded pride. Another portrait in his gallery of existential loners, outsiders, and drifters, McCloud was Mitchum’s subtlest and most enigmatic characterization to date.

  Mitchum and Ray: a marvelous pairing that should have continued. The director tried to land Mitchum for the Sterling Hayden role in Johnny Guitar over at Republic but got nowhere. They never worked together again.

  The Lusty Men received mostly excellent reviews, Mitchum heaped with praise, something he had not seen much of in the last few years. But as Jerry Wald feared, audiences didn’t know what to make of a drab modern Western with a tragic ending. Nicholas Ray was to say of the film’s characters, “They had all lived up to what they were supposed to live up to.” And so, in their way, did the public, staying far from anywhere the film played.

  • • •

  On March 3, 1952, Dorothy Mitchum gave birth to a third child. The seven-pound, ten-ounce baby girl was named Petrine after Bob’s much loved and recently deceased grandmother (it was a long way from frigid Norway to sunny SoCal; Petrine would eventually be trimmed to a perkier-sounding Trina). RKO dispatched photographers to record the baby’s arrival at Mandeville, flashing their bulbs as Daddy dandled the infant on his knee. It was good to let the press know Bob did something other than get into bar fights when he wasn’t working.

  The rest of the Mitchum brood, James and Christopher, were now ten and eight years old respectively. They were healthy, good-looking kids. Jim’s appearance was a perfect amalgam of his mother and father, though as he grew older and took on his father’s physique, people would speak of the two as dead ringers. Many thought Christopher looked like his mother, a resemblance that was accentuated by the feminine softness of his features and a gentle disposition. In adolescence the boys seemed to divide between them Robert’s twofold nature. Jim was the tough kid, an outdoorsman, liked to have fun, was drawn to acting, and acting up. Christopher was the quiet one: thoughtful and bookish, a good student, he dreamed—as his father had done—of becoming a writer.

  As a parent Mitchum would be both doting and distant. When the boys were young, especially, through the first decade of his success and with his own childhood deprivations still fresh in his memory, he was generous and attentive, eager to see them enjoy the luxuries and pleasures money could buy and experience the joys of a loving father that he had never known. When they were old enough, Mitchum took them on long hunting and fishing trips, camping and roaming in the wilds of California and throughout the West, wonderful memories for all of them. At home, the boys might not see their father for days at a time—weeks or months even when he was on location or in prison—but Robert did all he could to keep weekends for home and family, and Sundays were inviolate. Photos and home movies show glimpses of the endless California summers spent by the big swimming pool, or playing ball, or riding in go-carts, faces full of grins and high spirits. In time, as the boys grew older and used to their privileges, their father’s earlier impulses would fade. The past was done and Robert had new lives to lead. In the years ahead, the changing exigencies of moviemaking took Mitchum farther and farther away and for longer periods of time—ten, eleven months a year at his busiest. Dorothy would diligently try to maintain the family unit however she could, packing them all up and shipping out to follow the wandering movie star—to Greece, Australia, England, the Caribbean. But these visits, and Mitchum’s own sojourns back at the homestead, were only interludes of domesticity for someone who would pull off the rare trick of maintaining the vestments of both family man and wayward bachelor for most of the rest of his life.

  Jean Simmons had come to America to marry Stewart Granger. The young Englishwoman, acclaimed star of Great Expectations, Black Narcissus, and Olivier’s Hamlet, was not long in the throes of wedded bliss when out of the blue came news that her contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organization in London had been purchased outright by that rapacious admirer of full-breasted brunettes, Howard Hughes. Despite the presence of the strapping “Jimmy” Granger, Hughes quickly and shamelessly imposed himself on newlywed Simmons’s private life. “I realized,” said her then-husband, “that Howard Hughes, instead of wanting this lovely actress to make films for RKO, just wanted to screw her.” At first intrigued by Hughes’s mysterious methods and contemptuously amused by his lasciviousness, Simmons soon came to despise and fear the eccentric Texan. In addition to his unwanted personal advances, he seemed intent on destroying her prospects as a film star. The situation became so ugly and inescapable that, according to Granger, the couple actually considered luring Hu
ghes to their cliffside home and murdering him. In the end they took a more conventional means of redress and sued the man. The two sides came to a bitter standoff—Simmons agreed to appear in three more RKO productions, but all three would have to be completed before a specified, imminent date.

  A furious Hughes put his minions to work preparing quickie vehicles for the woman who had spurned him. Two of these, filmed back-to-back in May and June 1952, would costar Robert Mitchum. The first was released in 1954 under the Hughes-chosen title of She Couldn’t Say No (like so many of Howard’s titles, it sounded like it came in a plain brown wrapper). The story was of a wealthy woman (Simmons) returning to the small Arkansas town where the residents had generously taken care of her when she was a sickly infant, and the havoc that ensues when she tries to pay them back. Mitchum was cast as the woman’s bemused love interest, a lazy physician. Handed the script and a starting date, Mitchum promptly disappeared. He found the offered role embarrassingly bad and refused to have anything to do with it. It was only days before shooting was to begin that RKO tracked him down in Dallas, Texas, and wheedled his reluctant return. She Couldn’t Say No was intended to be a kind of Capraesque comedy of philanthropy a la Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Lady for a Day, a goal it missed by some distance due to a weak, mirthless screenplay and the fact that it was directed not by Frank Capra in his prime but by Lloyd Bacon in his dotage.

  The second of the Simmons-Mitchum projects was of considerably greater interest. Angel Face (given the generic title of Murder Story during its fleeting production history) was a black-and-white film noir, one of the last of its kind, as it would turn out, and the very last of Howard Hughes’s touching tributes to homicidal females.

  With only a brief window of eighteen days in which to squeeze out another feature with his despised star, Hughes knew he would need a fast and efficient director for the job, a disciplinarian who would crack the whip at the first sign of recalcitrance. Hughes decided the man for the job was Otto Preminger, a Viennese Jew and a sophisticated and liberal man in private life but reputed to be a pure Junker sadist on the set. An occasional film actor, he had portrayed Nazis on the screen more than once and quite convincingly. Darryl Zanuck, Preminger’s boss, agreed to loan the director to Hughes, and a screenplay was sent over at once. By Chester Erskine, it was based on the actual murder trial of a couple accused of killing the woman’s parents. Preminger read it and thought it a piece of scheisse. So Hughes drove over to Otto’s house at three in the morning and took him for a ride. They drove around the deserted streets of Los Angeles in the battered Chevy as Hughes told of his travails with Jean Simmons and begged him to take the job.

  “You hire any writer you want to, any number of writers to rewrite the script, as long as they are not Commies,” said Hughes. “Nobody will interfere with you and that includes me. Come to my studio tomorrow and you will be like Hitler.” In his whining, outraged voice, Hughes said, “I’m going to get even with that little bitch.”

  Accepting the assignment, Preminger turned to his agent brother Ingo for a writer, and Ingo told him he would send over “a genius” named Oscar Millard, screenwriter of Come to the Stable and No Highway in the Sky. Millard went to work. “Relations with Otto steadily deteriorated,” he recalled. Then Preminger—feeling there was no such thing as too much genius—hired another scribe, Frank Nugent, to finish the thing off. A sordid noir drama with an Electra complex subtext, Angel Face was about the beautiful, emotionally disturbed Diane Tremayne, unhealthily devoted to her father, a complacent, faded English novelist under the thumb of his wealthy, shrewish American wife. Summoned to save Diane’s stepmother after a suspicious accident, ambulance driver Frank Jessup falls under the sexual spell of the scheming young woman. He accepts a chauffeur’s position at the Tremayne manor, continuing his affair with Diane in secret. Jessup comes to realize that Diane is planning to murder her stepmother, though he is morally incapable of doing anything to prevent it. She rigs a car to plunge over a cliff with Mrs. Tremayne behind the wheel, but Diane’s father unexpectedly goes along for the fatal ride. The bereft daughter and Frank are both arrested for murder. A clever attorney has them married to attract sympathy and then convinces a jury of their innocence. Diane seeks salvation in her love for Frank, but the chauffeur rejects her, tells her he’s going away forever. Offering to drive him to the bus station, Diane recreates her parents’ fatal trajectory and sends the car backward over the cliff, killing them both.

  Preminger himself came up with the idea for the automotive murders. “That was taken from my personal experience,” he recalled. He’d pulled up past the lines at an intersection, reversed, forgot to shift back, hit the gas. “You see, I’m not a very good driver.”

  Herbert Marshall, Mona Freeman, Barbara O’Neil, Leon Ames, and Jim Backus were added to the cast. Fast-moving cinematographer Harry Stradling was borrowed from Samuel Goldwyn. The Lewis estate in Beverly Hills was rented for the role of the Tremayne estate. Filming began on June 16.

  The feud between the RKO mogul and Jean Simmons had grown ever more virulent. Inflamed by Hughes’s fetishist dictates concerning her hairstyle, Simmons had abruptly taken a pair of shears and hacked off her rich dark locks till what remained was a variation on the hairdo worn by Stooge Moe Howard. Wigs had to be quickly prepared to disguise the damage.

  Speculation as to just what sort of treatment Hughes had instructed Preminger to give Miss Simmons was fueled by the director’s gratuitously brutal behavior toward the actress. “He absolutely, totally destroyed me,” Simmons would remember. Shooting a scene at the studio, they reached a moment early in the script that required Mitchum to slap Simmons on the face. Mitchum effectively faked the blow, barely grazing the actress’s cheek. Preminger, standing just behind him, screamed, “No, no!” The camera was tight on her face, too close for such fakery, said the director. “Slap her for real!” Mitchum tried again. Preminger didn’t care for it. “Again!” Simmons braced herself, her cheek already flaring. The camera rolled; Mitchum slapped her. “No good! Do it again!”

  Jean Simmons’s eyes began to water from the impact. Mitchum thought she was crying. “Oh Christ,” he muttered.

  “Vunce more!” Preminger barked.

  Mitchum slapped her again.

  “Vunce more!”

  Mitchum spun around. “Once more?” he said and either slapped Preminger across the face, with just the force the director had been asking for, or very nearly did the same.

  Preminger scurried away. He demanded that Mitchum be replaced. He was told to go back and finish the picture before Jean Simmons decided to cut her nose off. Thinking this was not how they would have treated Hitler, Preminger readjusted his pride and returned to the set.

  “Well, do you think we can be friends?” the director asked the actor.

  “Otto,” Mitchum said with fiendish affability, “we’re all here for you.”

  Like Preminger’s other noir features {Laura, Fallen Angel, Where the Sidewalk Ends), Angel Face was cynical, perverse, and glamorously sleazy. However much or little the director had to do with it, the lead actors were extraordinarily good: Mitchum’s amoral, disengaged Frank Jessup was the most spookily apathetic of the star’s fatalistic noir losers, while Jean Simmons’s simmering, Siamese-catlike performance as Diane Tremayne was among the greatest of her career, though she would probably gag at the thought of it. Perfectly reflecting the circumstances of its production, the entire film quivered with an air of frustration and resentment—there is nary a shred of sympathy evoked for anything on screen, living or dead. The glacial final image—following Mitchum’s and Simmons’s berserk death scene—of a taxicab pulling up and idling before the ghostly mansion, is a moment of haunting emptiness like nothing else in the American cinema.*

  Barely a decade old, film noir, the genre that didn’t know its own name, had already reached a decadent phase. Like the Western, noir had become ritualistic, scavenging its own cliches. Seen with a harsh eye, Angel Face appeared rewove
n, put together from remnants of assorted earlier black melodramas. The aberrant female, the male patsy, the whiffs of incest and sexual obsession, the ironic deaths—all familiar motifs by now, though they had been shocking and fresh just a few years before. The film’s trial sequence was a wholesale purloin from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Leon Ames virtually recreating his role from the MGM version of the tale. Other elements were more than vaguely reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard and Where Danger Lives.

  The golden-age cycle of film noir that had begun in the early ‘40s with The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity was drawing to a close. Shadowy black-and-white crime dramas, filmed on artificial backlot streets and soundstages, would be fewer and farther between, replaced by genre works considered more up-to-date, more appropriate to wide screen and color. Femmes fatales and trench-coated crime solvers would now, for the most part, be relegated to the B movie ranks and to the ignominy of television. For Mitchum, anyway, whose close identification with film noir was almost unmatched by any other actor, Angel Face was the finish, if not the capstone, to an extraordinary ten years in cinema’s shadowland. His last moment on screen was a fitting nihilistic exit for noir’s great corruptible chump/hero: seated on the passenger side of an open-topped sports car beside his final fatal woman, pouring a glass of champagne as the vehicle screams into reverse and shoots them through space and to their just desserts.

  The African adventure story, yet another generic staple of big-studio-era filmmaking, had experienced a recent rise in prestige after the critical acclaim and popular success of King Solomon’s Alines, starring Stewart Granger, and The African Queen with Bogart and Hepburn, both films shot in color and on dangerous “Dark Continent” locations. Otto Lang, an Austro-Serbo-Croat alpine sportsman and Darryl F. Zanuck’s skiing instructor at Sun Valley, Idaho, had followed Zanuck back to Hollywood and became a movie producer at 20th Century-Fox—quite a good one at that, his credits including Call Northside 777 and Five Fingers. Lang was eager to make a film of a book he had read, White Witch Doctor by Louise Stinetorf, a fictionalized memoir of the relationship between a saintly old missionary woman and her young novice working with the tribes of Central Africa. Zanuck agreed to purchase the film rights. Lang was delighted, sure that the touching and unusual story would make a memorable motion picture. With enthusiasm he arrived at the first preproduction conference with DFZ, where Zanuck told him the following: “We do not want a picture based on the ‘exploits of a woman missionary’ struggling for courage in the African jungle. We want a picture about two interesting people, a woman missionary and a white hunter, a story full of physical excitement, physical violence, and sex. We do not want a picture about a woman struggling with . . . locusts and other depressing things.”