by Lee Server
Robert’s devotion to Laughton and the project had begun to fade by the final week of the thirty-six-day shoot. Gregory: “Laughton had a keen thing for Mitchum, and Mitchum said all this shit about how he loved Charles, but he was on drugs, drunk, and what have you, and there were times when Charles couldn’t get him in front of the camera. He put us through a lot of hell on that. The picture went two hundred thousand dollars over budget.” To Gregory, Mitchum at times seemed uncomfortably like the character he was playing. “He was a charmer. An evil son of a bitch with a lot of charm. Mitch sort of scared me, to tell you the truth. I was always on guard. He was often in a state, and you never knew what he would do next. He would be drunk or in a fight with this flunky he kept around, and kicking him all over the place. I came from the world of the theater and I had never seen anyone quite like this.”
One day they were shooting an exterior scene at the Lee ranch in the Valley. Shelley Winters arrived late, coming from rehearsals for a television appearance. Mitchum arrived staggering. Laughton said nothing but phoned his producer for help. “What the hell, Paul,” he said, “we can’t shoot. Mitchum is so high . . . it’s just not possible.” The thing was—Mitchum insisted on working.
Gregory, ever mindful of the production’s strained budget and all that he and Laughton had riding on this initial effort, hopped into his car and sped to the location. He would recall having words only with Mitchum, though Shelley Winters recollected also receiving a tongue-lashing from the producer. “He was running around the set screaming about how much it would cost if the stars delayed like this all through the picture,” she wrote. “Gregory’s screaming unnerved me. . . . I was hoping somebody would shut him up. Good acting cannot be performed in an ambiance of chaos and pressure.”
Gregory confronted Mitchum. “He was all puffy-eyed. Could barely see. I said, ‘Mitch, sweetheart, you’re in no condition to go on camera.’”
Mitchum said, “What the fuck you mean I’m in no condition?”
Gregory said, “You’re in no condition. You’re all puffy-eyed!”
Mitchum raised his eyebrows—though drooping eyelids did not follow. He seemed to ponder for a moment, considering this red cape of authority that had just been shaken in his face. Then, said Gregory, “he opened his fly and whipped his dick out.”
The door to Gregory’s Cadillac convertible was wide open, and Mitchum moved over behind it to urinate. “I stepped back to give him some room. I thought he was trying to hide behind the door for modesty’s sake.” But no. “I looked back and see that he is pissing on the front seat of the car where I had been sitting. It went on and on, filling up the seat with piss. I stood there. I couldn’t believe it, that’s all. And then he put his cock back in his pants and turned around with a look on his face like that was just the dearest thing he had ever done in his life! He staggered away, and I stood there looking at the seat of my car. Finally I closed the door and went over by the crew and got one of the prop boys. I said, ‘I wonder if you could get me a sponge or something. I just had my car seat baptized by Mr. Mitchum.’”
Nearly five decades later, thinking back on that day of infamy—nothing like it in the theater!—Paul Gregory would start to laugh. “He was . . . a funny guy, I’ll admit it. Funny in many ways. Oh, I wanted to kill him. . . .”
Gregory and Laughton went to view the finished film for the first time, by themselves, in a tiny screening room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The producer was amazed by the artistry and creativity displayed. Mitchum was remarkable, Gish wonderful . . . but . . . what to think . . . seeing it all cut together now he hadn’t expected the film to be quite so odd, so . . . out of the mainstream. He thought perhaps Cortez had been an overwhelming influence, too far out, offering Charles too many possibilities. The lights had gone up and the two sat there. “You had to be careful what you said to Charles. He didn’t believe you if you said it was wonderful, and he would have killed you if you said you thought it was awful. But Charles and I had had a relationship for about six years by then. I was not one to bullshit him. I looked him right in the eye and I said, ‘Charlie, they’re not going to know how to sell this picture.’ And he said, ‘Oh, my god, why, old boy?’ I said, ‘It’s . . . they’re going to call it an art film, a picture for the art houses. And I think we’re going to be in trouble. It has nothing to do with the fact that you did a fantastic job, but I think it’s going to be a tough sale.’ Well, he hadn’t dreamed of such a possibility. But I turned out to be right. The fact that The Night of the Hunter was not a commercial success devastated him. He went into a slide, a depression that lasted for about seven months and ended with our breaking up our partnership. We had contracts for him to direct The Naked and the Dead, and he was just out of sorts, couldn’t do it. And I had to go on and do something with it; I couldn’t just sit there. Terrible how it turned out. He never directed another film, of course. . . . He was a terrific guy. I loved old Charlie. . . .”
It was one of those rare Hollywood films—like Citizen Kane, King Kong, The General, and few others—that seemed to come out of nowhere, following no tradition or precedent, a work of astonishing originality. Laughton had reconceived Davis Grubb’s dark, often savage novel, with its switchblade killings and carved-up hookers and other niceties, turning it into something equally strange but airier, like a fractured fairy story or folk tale, beginning with the opening moments—the disembodied Miz Cooper reading Scripture as she floats among the stars—and on to the enchanted river journey with its scuffling bunny rabbits looking on and the final Grimm battle of the surrogate mother and father. It was the story as it might have been drawn directly from a loopy child’s imagination—direct, say, from the mind of strange, wild-eyed Pearl. The film’s odd, multilayered sensibility invoked the lost world of Griffith, the Manichaean-Victorian melodrama of Way Down East and Broken Blossoms, even as its insidious black comedy and strange satire anticipated the “put-on” and “sick” humor of the ‘60s, of films like Lolita and Dr. Strangelove and Psycho. Mitchum’s performance—a bone thrown to all those critics incapable of appreciating his usual subtly nuanced naturalistic acting—was a grandly unbuttoned, theatrical piece of work unlike anything he had ever attempted or would ever attempt again. Whether greasily charming his backwoods admirers, preaching the tale of “left hand/right hand,” singing various renditions of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” contemplating the murder of a burlesque queen, making his psychotic hog caller’s cry of” Children!” or taking a pratfall like some diabolical Keystone Kop, Mitchum’s wonderfully sinister, appalling, ridiculous Preacher Harry Powell was the powerful, crucial fulcrum in the film’s risky imbalancing act. There would be many who would call it his best performance, and sometimes Mitchum would agree with them.
Despite the audiences’ indifference and the tepid enthusiasm of reviewers at the time, the film would go on to achieve classic status, eventually, decades later, showing up in critics’ polls of the greatest movies of all time. Francois Truffaut, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, wrote of The Night of the Hunter, “It makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers.”
Charles Laughton was done with film directing, but he would remain a Mitchum enthusiast for his remaining years, speaking of him warmly to a reporter just months before his death in 1962: “He is a literate, gracious, kind man with wonderful manners and he speaks beautifully—when he wants to . . . Bob is one of the best actors in the world . . . a great talent. He’d make the best Macbeth of any actor living.”
Stanley Kramer was Hollywood’s most distinguished independent producer, with a string of box office and/or critical hits that included Champion, Home of the Brave, The Men, The Wild One, and High Noon. At a time of Red scares, blacklists, and avenging superpatriots, when Hollywood seemed to be covering its head and running in fear from subjects concerned with American social problems and matters of conscience, Kramer made them his specialty. A high-minde
d liberal humanist, Kramer’s productions were predominantly dramatic explorations of timely and controversial topics such as race, the handicapped, delinquent youth. Even his Gary Cooper-starring horse opera, High Noon, was a blatant if metaphoric attack on McCarthyism. Kramer ignored the truism that Western Union, not Hollywood, was the place that delivered messages, but his pictures were tough, dynamic dramas, and he always kept an eye on the box office. An excellent overseer with a keen instinct for fresh talent (Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Carl Foreman), Kramer nonetheless longed to move into the auteur’s chair. And now the time had come. For his directorial debut he chose to make a film out of Morton Thompson’s popular novel about doctors and the nurses and patients who loved them, Not as a Stranger.
While Kramer had made his reputation with small, high-fiber, low-budget films using new or little-known performers, he decided to launch his directing career with a two-million-dollar all-star—Robert Mitchum, Olivia DeHavil-land, Frank Sinatra, recent Oscar winner Broderick Crawford—extravaganza derived from 1954’s thickest and most melodramatic best-seller—948 pages of C sections, stitches, and sex. Not that it was a project without a socially relevant subtext. The Thompson novel had provoked readers with its scathing expose of the medical industry, and Kramer declared that his film was likewise going to pull no punches in depicting the private lives of the “men in white.”
Hard to fathom now, with the novel so long unread and forgotten, but Not as a Stranger would top the best-seller lists for two years running, and the prospect of its adaptation to film was cause for much excitement and speculation across America. Like the debate over who would play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, readers and media folk pondered the proper actor for the role of Dr. Lucas Marsh, the “brilliant physician who must learn to be a human being.” It became apparent after the casting choice was made that there was at least one person whom readers did not want for the role, and that person was Robert Mitchum. Columnists reported hearing from “thousands” of readers deploring the casting and printed some of the more outraged letters. “What in the name of heaven have they done to that sensitive part that a burly, crude lead such as Mitchum would even be considered?” went one irate missive. And another: “I found Lucas Marsh a quietly intriguing and intelligent man; he is the kind of man I married. Lew Ayres or Cornel Wilde could do the part justice. How shocked and distressed I was when I read they had chosen Robert Mitchum of all people to play this nice fellow!” On the face of it, the novel’s driven, neurotic Dr. Marsh did seem better suited for—well, if Cornel Wilde was not available, someone along the lines of a Brando or Montgomery Clift, and not the king of apathy and cool; but Stanley Kramer saw Mitchum’s powerful, unemotional presence in his vision of Dr. Marsh and he stuck to his choice despite the outcry.
Kramer put his trusted and estimable team of Edward and Edna Anhalt to work on a script (author Morton Thompson, briefly consulted, died, an apparent suicide, while the movie was in production) and they began transforming the nearly one thousand pages in the book to a manageable if still unusually long 173-page script. The Anhalts updated the story from the 1920s and lopped off hundreds of pages about Lucas’s Dickensian childhood. In advance of filming, and in pursuit of a detailed realism for the medical scenes, Kramer hired a team of technical advisers—doctors, surgeons, and registered nurses—to watch over the production and the performers and keep all hospital procedures scrupulously authentic. In further pursuit of this goal he arranged with several area hospitals to allow himself, Ed Anhalt, Mitchum, and several others to observe a variety of actual operations and to follow some doctors on their daily rounds.
Mitchum, Sinatra, and Crawford attended a hospital theater autopsy similar to one staged for the first scene in the film. Seated among a small group of hovering medical students, they watched as a pathologist ripped the sheet off a corpse, inserted a scalpel, and opened the body from throat to pubis. Broderick Crawford immediately got up and headed for the exit.
“Where you going?” Sinatra asked.
Crawford said, “Malibu!”
At the Veteran’s Hospital in Los Angeles, Mitchum, DeHavilland, Kramer, and Anhalt, all in full surgical costume, stoically observed a number of operations—an appendectomy, a gastrectomy, the removal of a tumor from the spinal cord. “Everybody was surprised and, if you ask me, disgusted that none of us got sick,” said Mitchum. As one surgeon stood poised to make his first incision, he told Bob and Olivia, “If you faint, I’d appreciate it if you faint backward.” This line and a number of incidents the group observed went straight into the screenplay. Kramer and Mitchum watched an operation on a man with a gangrenous intestine. When the patient was wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon told him, “These two people here”—Mitchum and Kramer—”are observing your operation for a movie they are making.”
“Oh?” said the man on the operating table. “What’s the movie?”
“Not as a Stranger,” said the surgeon, through his surgical mask.
“Oh, I read that. Who’s playing Dr. Lucas?”
“Robert Mitchum.”
“Robert Mitchum? You got to be kidding. . . .”
Paying no heed to such critics, Mitchum stayed the course Kramer had prescribed. Technical adviser Dr. Morton Maxwell worked closely with the actor, answering his many questions and teaching him the mechanics of the profession, giving him instruments to practice with at night—on Dorothy or the kids, presumably. Morton said he was “astonished at the speed with which Bob Mitchum learned to percuss a chest wall, tie sutures, and handle surgical clamps. . . . Bob learned in hours what it required medical students weeks to master.”
But Mitchum and his colleagues were not quite ready to take the Hippocratic Oath, as they proved soon after the hospital training period ended and filming of Not as a Stranger began. Kramer had unwittingly loaded the picture with a number of Hollywood’s most ferocious drinkers. “Mitchum, Sinatra, Brod Crawford, Lee Marvin—every one a teetotaller!” said Ed Anhalt, gleefully recalling the well-lubricated cast. “Myron McCormick? Broadway actor played the anesthesiologist in the picture? He’d fall asleep during a take, wake up screaming, and fall off the set! I’m very fond of Stanley, but he was a good boy, didn’t drink, and . . . Stanley had no idea what he was getting into with this mob.”
“It wasn’t a cast so much as a brewery,” said Robert Mitchum. The tippling would begin early, and by late afternoon the sets at the California Studios would become a full-blown bacchanal. Fights, with fists and food, erupted at a moment’s notice. One day the gang toppled a trailer. On another occasion they broke through the side of a dressing room. Telephones were ripped from the walls. It reminded Stanley Kramer of that picture he had produced about the motorcycle gang taking over the town, only that time the gang was working from a script and he could count on a happy ending.
One day Broderick Crawford went berserk. The scrawny but fearless Frank Sinatra enjoyed needling the huge, powerful Crawford, likening the actor to the retarded character, Lenny, in Of Mice and Men. “He could be mean, Sinatra,” said Anhalt. “Why he was so mean to Brod, I don’t know. And you didn’t want to make Brod lose his temper if you had any sense.” Crawford—Mitchum called him “the Crawdad”—took all the needling he could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece, and . . . eating it. Someone screamed, “My God, Crawford’s eaten Sinatra’s wig!”
“Mitchum tried to pull them apart,” said Anhalt. “He liked Brod, and he liked Sinatra, too. And like the Good Samaritan he ended up getting socked for his troubles. And Sinatra took off, disappeared, having instigated the whole thing. So Mitchum’s fighting with Brod, and Brod throws him through the window onto the balcony outside. Mitchum was big and strong, but Brod was even bigger.”
The Academy Award—winning Crawford began choking on the fake hair he had ingested. Someone ran in with technical adviser Dr. Maxwell, and they attempted to make Crawford vomit the hair clump up. Anhalt said, “I don’t know whether
they were trying to save him or save the hairpiece, because it was the only one they had. Anyway, it was mangled and they couldn’t use it, so filming had to be postponed for I don’t know how long, until Sinatra could be fitted for a new toup.”
At the end of one exhausting day—blissfully without incident—Kramer dismissed the cast with a polite request: “Tomorrow morning we shoot one of the most difficult scenes in the picture and I want you all clear-eyed and no hangovers. Please . . . everybody promise me you’ll go straight home now and get a good night’s sleep.” They promised. Kramer stayed late working with the film editor, then wearily got into his car and headed for home. He stopped at a red light on a seedy corner not far from the La Brea studio and saw a violent commotion outside a bar. He blinked a few times before he realized what he was looking at. It was three, no, four members of his cast, one of them lying sprawled on the asphalt, two in a ferocious fistfight. The light turned green and so did Kramer, cursing to himself and laughing mirthlessly; he drove on and didn’t look back.
The refined Olivia De Havilland, hair dyed blonde and having to speak all her lines with a “yumpin yiminee” Swedish accent, was subject to practical jokes, roughhousing, and “fanny pinching” (per Kramer) on the set, yet remained a figure of calm amid all the chaos. Anhalt: “She would never react to any of it. But I would feel bad and say to her, ‘You know, they don’t mean half the things they do or say.’ She said to me, ‘I know that. They don’t bother me. I’ve been around drunks.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”
The other woman in the cast, Gloria Grahame, making her third film appearance with Mitchum, had entered the “toilet paper under the upper lip” phase of her career. “She put tissue under her lips because someone told her a thrust upper lip was sexy!” said Stanley Kramer. “See what I had to cope with?” After many hours of shooting, the toilet paper would begin to wad up with saliva, making her dialogue incomprehensible. When Mitchum tried to kiss her in the film’s big passionate love scene, he found flecks of wet tissue coming out of her mouth. And she smelled funny. “She’s a nut!” he told people.