Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “Bob,” said Laughton, “we have a story here we are hoping to turn into a little film, and I would very much like to talk to you about the leading role. The character is a bit different. He’s a terrible, evil . . . shit of a man.

  “Present,” said Mitchum.

  Charles Laughton, the man Laurence Olivier described as the acting profession’s only genius, was in the midst of a professional revitalization as the director of a series of theatrical triumphs—the powerful all-star readings of Don Juan in Hell and John Brown’s Body and the imaginatively conceived Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Just four years earlier, Laughton had been drifting, appearing in increasingly undemanding roles and ignoble fare (suffice it to say, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd). Then a young William Morris agent named Paul Gregory saw Laughton on a live television show reading from the Bible, found it a stunning experience, and came to the actor with an idea for a series of similar dramatic readings in a theatrical setting. The national tour of this one-man show was a considerable critical and commercial success, and Gregory and Laughton continued their alliance—now a formal partnership—with more elaborate and equally successful productions. Late in life, Laughton was revealed to be a great, original directorial talent, compared with the young Orson Welles for his dazzling creativity.

  After their success on Broadway, the team of producer Gregory and director Laughton were eager to return to Hollywood and make a motion picture that would be as unique and memorable as their acclaimed works for the theater. An agent friend in New York sent Gregory the prepublication galleys of a novel called The Night of the Hunter by West Virginia native Davis Grubb. Gregory felt at once that the material could be turned into just the sort of startling and unexpected film he and Laughton were hoping to make. He rushed the galleys over to his partner, and Charles instantly agreed with his assessment. “You’ve got your finger right on my pulse,” Laughton said. “I would love to direct this.”

  The strange, brilliant novel was an American Gothic, written as if by some collaboration of William Faulkner and H. P. Lovecraft, mixing a rustic tale of terror with gallows humor and experimental prose. In the Depression-ravaged South, a psychopathic evangelist named Harry Powell, a charismatic black-clad preacher with the words Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles, wanders the back roads doing a peculiar version of the Lord’s work, killing stripteasers, whores, lonely widows, and other wantons. Grubb wrote: “Sometimes he wondered if God really understood. Not that the Lord minded about their killings. Why, His Book was full of killings. But there were things God did hate—perfume-smelling things—lacy things—things with curly hair—whore things. Preacher would think of these and his hands at night would go crawling down under the blankets till the fingers named Love closed around the bone hasp of the knife and his soul rose up in flaming glorious fury.”

  In prison for car theft, the preacher meets Ben Harper, a condemned man who, broken by the hard times, had robbed and killed to feed his family. Harper is executed while his ten-thousand-dollar swag remains missing, and Powell goes off to acquire it. He cozies up to the widow Harper and her children, Pearl and John, marries the widow, kills her, then turns on the children, who are the keepers of the secret of the hidden loot. John and Pearl barely manage to escape, fleeing upriver where they are taken in by the eccentric old Miz Cooper, mother hen to a houseful of stray children and outcasts. Preacher Powell pursues them, and by nightfall he lays terrifying siege to Miz Cooper’s house. But goodness prevails. Miz Cooper traps Powell in her barn and turns him over to the police. In the jailhouse for murder, Powell is seized by an angry mob and lynched.

  Having purchased the rights to the novel, Gregory and Laughton pondered the proper casting. “Right away I thought of Mitchum,” said Paul Gregory. “He was a man who could project great charm, and yet there was a sense of evil lurking there under the surface. Charles asked me if I saw anyone for the role of the preacher and I said, ‘There’s one American actor I think could do a good job with this, Robert Mitchum.’ And Laughton said, ‘Jesus Christ! That’s right. He’d be wonderful. I can see him, yes. . . .’ And we decided to waste no time. Charles knew him slightly and he came to my office and called him at home.”

  “Present,” Mitchum said.

  Laughton asked him if he might have time to take a look at the novel.

  “I’m just twiddling my thumbs here. Sure, send it over, I’ll take a look.”

  Mitchum read it that very afternoon, sprawled in a lounge chair beside the pool. He loved it—Davis Grubb’s corrosive take on the world, the fiendish humor, the portrait of a rural, near-medieval South that rang true to his own Depression-era wanderings there, the whole subversive attack on religious hypocrites and nut cases and psalm-singing yahoos. Said Julie Mitchum, “Bob told me he was going to do that one to show people not to follow some character because he’s got a Bible in his hands, or because he’s got his collar on backwards, to alert people to these kinds of characters. And he was always very sympathetic to the exploitation of children, always very sympathetic to the innocence of children. He thought this would get that out there.” But were they really going to be able to make a picture about a wife-murdering, child-stalking maniac of a preacher, doing his evil deeds in God’s name? Well, if they were, Mitchum decided, he wanted to be in on it.

  He went over to Laughton’s house the following Saturday afternoon to discuss the project. Laughton called Paul Gregory immediately afterward. “He was on the ceiling with excitement about Mitchum. He said that Mitchum had been wonderfully enthused, had so many ideas to offer.” Mitchum quoted from the book by memory and at one point got up before his adoring host and began crashing about the living room, acting out the love/hate sermon, the story of “right hand/left hand,” knuckles upraised. “Of course,” said Gregory, “they had had quite a few drinks.”

  Mitchum visited Laughton frequently in the months ahead, coming for lunch or dinner. According to Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, the two were a natural team: “They were kindred spirits, both what you call rebels, with no respect for formal religion or Hollywood society.” Lanchester, always prone to a snit when her husband was fawning over another man, thought Mitchum a bit of a poseur, trying overly hard to convince the couple he was no dumb cowboy. “Charles knew enough to let a person have his head if he wanted to appear to have an intellectual approach. I don’t know, maybe Bob Mitchum is very bright, but I never heard such a lot of words—big, long words, one after the other. Perhaps he felt insecure with Charles and he was only trying to impress him. . . . Charles was patient with him because Mitchum was going to be one of his children.”

  An agreement was made to begin filming in August, giving Gregory and Laughton time to finance the picture and prepare a screenplay and allowing Mitchum to conclude his term at RKO. Gregory took the project to the studios. Warner Bros, turned him down. Columbia was interested in the material and Laughton as a director, said Gregory, “but Harry Cohn just absolutely wouldn’t go with Mitchum. He wouldn’t even discuss it with Mitchum.”

  A deal was finally made with United Artists, the “nonstudio” studio, offering a meagre $595,000 for the whole production.

  At some point in the months before filming began, Laurence Olivier entered the picture, suddenly eager to play Preacher Powell under Laughton’s direction. The idea was not unexciting, and Laughton didn’t know what to do. “Larry” discussed it with Laughton’s partner. Gregory felt they had the right person with Mitchum, but he ran it up the flagpole at the studio. He found that United Artists “would not be interested in putting up any money for The Night of the Hunter with Larry Olivier.”

  To write the screenplay, there was brief consideration of setting Davis Grubb to the task. “He was an odd man, to say the least,” Gregory remembered. “Number one, he said he could only write on a train. And he refused to travel other than on a train or a bicycle. You could hardly get him into a car. And he was . . . troubled. Very troubled. He never spoke much. Only
thing I remember, he asked, ‘Do you know Tennessee?’ I said, ‘Tennessee? Well, I know a few things, through a friend of mine.’ He said, ‘Oh, tell me about it!’ He said he was curious about Tennessee, liked to read about it. Hmm. Other than that, I can’t remember him ever saying a thing, only that he liked the movie. He thought it was true to the book. Of course it was.”

  So Grubb went home—by rail and pedal, presumably—to Philadelphia, but Laughton stayed in touch. He had learned that Grubb was an amateur sketch artist who liked to draw scenes and caricatures of the people he created in his fiction. Seeing the value in such visualizations by the hand of the author himself, Laughton had him send them to Hollywood and phoned him up begging for new ones throughout the production, sometimes specifying that Grubb draw in the exact expression on a character’s face that he’d had in mind while writing a particular scene. The writer produced over a hundred of these pen-and-ink drawings for the film. “I declare, perhaps immodestly,” Grubb said, “that I was not only the author of the novel from which the screenplay was adapted but was the actual scene designer as well.”

  Gregory and Laughton settled on another literary figure to write the screenplay: James Agee, the acclaimed critic and novelist who, pertinently, had written the classic study of Depression-ravaged Appalachia, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and had one notable screenwriting credit for The African Queen. Unknown to Laughton and Gregory at the time they hired him, The African Queen had been largely rewritten by John Huston and Peter Viertel, and Agee was currently well into the last phase of his alcoholic self-destruction. “That was our first big flub,” said Paul Gregory. “He was drunk all the time. And he couldn’t get along with Charles. It was just terrible.” At first Agee worked at Laughton’s house, going out by the pool each day with a typewriter and a bottle of Jack Daniels. When Laughton couldn’t take any more of the puking and passing out, they moved Agee to Gregory’s place at the beach. Then to a hotel. Gregory: “He was a wonderful writer. But the poor man was tormented by something. I don’t know what. At times he would cry for hours. I went and sat with him at his hotel one night, and he just sobbed and sobbed. I thought he might commit suicide. I had never seen such behavior.”

  Agee refused to show anyone a page of script until he was done, then turned over something the size of a New York phone book (Grubb’s novel was slender) and full of unfilmable descriptions, stream of consciousness, and indications for frequent cutaways to old newsreels. Time and thirty grand unpleasantly wasted! Laughton ended up writing most of the screenplay himself, though he wouldn’t take a credit. Agee was dead before the picture was released.

  Laughton imagined Hunter having a deliberately archaic look, something like the early silent films he had seen as a youth. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art he screened a number of D.W. Griffith’s works and became reacquainted with the singular artistry of Lilian Gish. They took tea together in Manhattan, and he offered her the part of Miz Cooper (his wife, Elsa Lan-chester, having already turned it down—she didn’t want to be near him in a “hypersensitive” situation). He told Gish, “When Griffith was making those films, audiences sat bolt upright on the edge of their seats. Now they sit slumped over, feeding themselves popcorn. I want to make them sit upright again.” For the role of the doomed widow, Laughton and Gregory had one actress in mind from the beginning: Bette Grable. She hemmed and hawed, unsure of her availability, uncertain of the strange project. Laughton and Gregory remained hopeful of signing her until a few weeks before filming was to begin. Reluctantly, they considered a list of other actresses, including Teresa Wright, before abuptly offering the part to Shelley Winters, the zaftig blonde from Brooklyn, and a student in Laughton’s advanced acting class. Mitchum objected. “She looks and sounds as much like a wasted West Virginia girl as I do,” he said. “The only bit she’ll do convincingly is to float in the water with her throat cut.”

  Mitchum favored shooting the picture on authentic Appalachian locations, but this was vetoed as too expensive. Besides, Laughton had something other than authenticity in mind. Filming would be done on stages at Pathe and Republic studios and at the Rowland V. Lee ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Laughton proteges Terry and Dennis Sanders were sent to film second-unit material along the Ohio River.

  To photograph the movie, Laughton hired a cinematographer he had gotten to know in Paris on the set of The Man on the Eiffel Tower (and became reacquainted with in Hollywood shooting—yes—Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd), Stanley Cortez. Nicknamed “the Baron,” the elegant brother of silent star Ricardo Cortez was an extremely creative technician, best known for his amazing work on Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, who nonetheless found himself most of the time shooting B picture junk. Cortez met with Laughton every Sunday for six weeks before shooting began, showing him how the camera worked, piece by piece, lens by lens. In turn, Laughton found prints of Griffith’s silents for Cortez to study.

  Though he had been making movies as an actor and sometime producer for nearly thirty years, Laughton approached his directorial debut as if it were to be his first moment on a film set. He considered no element of the enterprise unworthy of his attention, for all that it was not a luxurious production, and the strained budget and tight shooting schedule left him little time for rehearsals or for much advance work on the production design. Mitchum was not legally available to them—still with RKO—until three days before filming began. Laughton had to depend on inspiration, luck, and teamwork.

  “I have to go back to D. W. Griffith to find a set so infused with purpose and harmony,” wrote Lilian Gish. Said Stanley Cortez, “Every day the marvelous team that made that picture would meet and discuss the next day’s work. It was designed from day to day . . . so that the details seemed fresh, fresher than if we had done the whole thing in advance.” As soon as filming concluded in the evening, Laughton, Cortez, set designer Hilly Brown, and assistant director Milt Carter regrouped at the Frascatti Inn on La Cienega to consider the possibilities for the upcoming sequences. Some scenes came together only hours, even minutes before they were to be shot. Laughton encouraged contributions from everyone involved. Mitchum delighted him with clever suggestions and bits of business that were instantly incorporated—like the idea of speaking his lines inside the prison cell while hanging upside down from his bunk. A creative synergism developed among the artists and technicians that allowed scenes to blossom and achieve sudden, unexpected new levels of expressiveness, as when a last-minute adjustment of a few lights before shooting Preacher’s murder of his wife turned the A-frame bedroom set into the outline of a church with shimmering spire. Freed of any allegiance to realism or the favored stylistics of the day, Laughton’s technical team was encouraged to employ visual tricks that had fallen out of favor in the naturalistic Hollywood of the ‘50s. They made flamboyant use of shadows and silhouettes. Some sets were built in perspective for artificial, dreamlike vistas. Instead of a time-consuming, expensive crane shot of a boy outside a basement window, Cortez offered to zero in with a mechanical iris, a device that had rarely been used since the coming of sound—the look was pure Griffith.

  Laughton could barely contain himself. “He was such an inspiring figure,” said Cortez. “You were ready to do all you could to give him what he wanted. You didn’t care about the hours spent. You were not working for the paycheck, you were working to help Laughton, to help him achieve all that he wanted.” To reveal the dead Shelley Winters seated in her car underwater, Laughton desired a bright, ethereal image, her hair floating like seaweed, and a slow, unbroken camera movement rising to the water’s surface. Cortez went all over town trying to find a water tank that his lights could penetrate sufficiently, settling on the one owned by Republic Pictures. A platform suspended by a crane held eight blinding Titan sun arcs. Wind machines had to be carefully employed to blow the hair and weeds without making waves. The camera operator and an assistant worked underwater in scuba gear. The amazingly lifelike dead Shelley Winters was a wax dummy.

>   As for Mitchum, he, too, gave Laughton everything he wanted—and more. In the spirit of Laughton’s eccentric and expressionist approach, he abandoned his usual low-keyed behaviorial style in favor of intense theatricality, eye-rolling flamboyance. The director confided to Lilian Gish that he had to hold Bob back lest he go so far with his inspired malevolence that he ruin his career, making women and children run when they saw him. (”I think,” said Mitchum, “I was still fairly despicable.”) Laughton felt such confidence in his star that he even allowed Mitchum to take over direction of the film on a couple of occasions, scenes involving little Sally Jane Bruce and Billy Chapin, though in truth Laughton was only too eager to have someone else work with the children. He was not simpatico with the young actors and thought the boy a perfect little monster. “Charles was not able to get through to them,” said Paul Gregory, “and thought that maybe Mitchum could talk to them and make them a little more relaxed.” Mitchum theorized that child actors instinctively sought direction from the adult actors they worked with and that it was natural and less confusing for them if an actor actually did give the directions. “Mitchum got along great with the kids and they got some damn good footage,” said Paul Gregory. “Charles told me how very tender he was with them.”

  Neither Mitchum nor Laughton seemed to be particularly tender with Shelley Winters. “Shelley was such a good actress,” said Reva Frederick, “but sometimes she would have little screaming jeebies over something and Robert used to not be tolerant of that kind of attitude. And Charles . . . the way he dealt with her . . . Once she was making a scene over a piece of wardrobe that didn’t fit or something, or she thought it didn’t fit, and Charles just walked over to her and slapped her across the face. He said, ‘Stop it!’ And we were all like, ‘God, did I just see what I saw?’ And Shelley just blinked and snapped to and went back to the work.”