Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  The contrast between the characters of Cady and lawyer Sam Bowden was mirrored somewhat by the personalities of the two stars. Peck was a straight arrow, took the job of acting seriously, was thorough, analytical. Mitchum liked to make a show of being off the cuff, mocked seriousness. As if to emphasize that parallel, Mitchum did some taunting of his more regimented costar. “Peck,” said Ray Gosnell, “always requested there be no distractions off camera. No one standing around in his eye line when he was doing a scene. So if there were grips or people standing around where he could see them, we always needed to clear them all out of the way. Mitchum always thought that was a joke. One time we had cleared the sight-line area for Peck to do the scene and Mitchum arrived to put on wardrobe for a scene and he went right over to where Peck could see him and started stripping, taking off all his clothes. I think it was just a gag; he was trying to see if he could shake him up.”

  What might have made the teasing more difficult to take was the realization that Mitchum was stealing the picture. “From the first time Peck gave me the book to read, he said that he would be playing the lawyer, and he said that Cady was probably the better part,” said Thompson. “And when Mitchum signed on, Greg had a feeling he might run away with it. And as we came to shoot the film, his fear was being realized—Mitchum’s characterization was so strong. But this was Peck’s film company and he had hired Mitchum, and I know that Peck was very fond of Mitchum as a person and admired his performance all through the film. He never let it get him upset or felt any jealousy or anything like that, always full of praise for Mitchum. And you know he gave a magnificent performance against a character that was far more colorful.”

  Weather conditions and various dissatisfactions brought the Cape Fear company back to Los Angeles sooner than expected. Interiors were shot at Universal, the last-act scenes aboard the boat and in the water filmed in the studio lake and on the coast around Ventura. Now they were shooting the film’s most violent and emotionally charged scenes, and the nature of these became reflected in the atmosphere on the sets and particularly in the man playing Max Cady.

  Mitchum said to J. Lee Thompson, “You know, I live a character. And this character drinks and rapes.”

  “That gave me pause, you know. And he did fulfill some of that. And when we had the violent scenes, he did work himself up. When he was playing one of those scenes he looked at you like he was going to kill you. You had to watch him because he really played the part. You had to be careful to control him—not the acting, but he might go over the top physically. There was a scene with Barrie Chase, where he’s being very rough with her. And I had to stop filming at one or two points to let things cool down. But I was certainly glad to get it all on camera. Barrie Chase was frightened of him; I know that because she told me so. She admired him, as everyone did. But, you know, he made people frightened.”

  The climactic battle in the water between Peck and Mitchum took days to film, shooting at night on Universal’s back lot lake. “It was freezing cold,” Ray Gosnell remembered. “We put these warmers in the water, but you know there’s no way of keeping a lake warm. And the actors had to wrestle in there for the better part of a week, at night.”

  “Mitchum enjoyed those scenes, I think,” said Thompson. “He liked getting in the water and having that fight with Greg. I’m not too sure about Greg liking it, because he was on the receiving end. He had to be forced underwater, and Mitchum kept him under there for quite a long time. We devised a code so that Peck could come up if it was getting too much for him. But sometimes Mitchum overstepped the line. I mean, he was meant to be drowning Greg, and he really took it to the limit. We had to send a man in to get Greg up. It was a bit of a worry. But Peck took it marvelously; he never complained. I expected there to be some outburst from Peck, but he was a real sport about the whole thing. And it looked marvelous on film.”

  Cape Fears most violent sequence, the last scene to be shot, involved Max Cady’s brutalizing and sexual assault on Bowden’s wife, Peggy, well played by Polly Bergen, whose usual elegance and poise made her violation and reduction to hysteria in these moments all the more frightening. Thompson, Bergen, and Mitchum all sensed the electric possibilities in the scene. Everything had been building to this, Cady’s ultimate, horrible explosion of sadistic fury, meant to bring the audience to a peak of dread and anguish before the climactic release of the final battle and the—not triumph, but bare survival of good over evil. Mitchum roamed the set, bare-chested, sweating, building himself into a rage. There was no joking with the crew, tossing away a cigarette, and “Roll ‘em” this time. “He was like a fireball,” said Thompson. “You felt any moment he would explode, an eruption. We got ready for it, and we talked over the action. But there was no rehearsal. I thought we should just do it. We just talked it over a bit what they should do and added things, invented on the spur of the moment. And I improvised the business with the eggs. To crack the egg on the chest, the symbolism of it. Mitchum liked that very much.”

  The camera turned. Mitchum’s fury was released.

  “He just. . . lost it,” said Polly Bergen.

  “It went much further then we were ever able to use,” said Thompson. “He smeared the eggs over her chest and down over her breasts and so forth.”

  Mitchum’s flailing arm hit a cabinet, ripping his hand open. Dripping blood from his fingers, he grabbed Bergen by the shoulders and thrust her against the cabin door. The door was fixed to spring open, but as the actress remembered it the catch had come down and Mitchum simply broke it open, using her back as a battering ram. “His hand was covered in blood, my back was covered in blood,” she said. He slammed her into the other room and continued the assault. The director called, “Cut!” Called it twice more, then people rushed onto the set to break it up. “We just kept going,” said Bergen, “caught up in the scene. They came over and physically stopped us.”

  Mitchum realized what he had done, Bergen said, and took her in his arms, rocking her gently, saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. . . .”

  Then, according to Mitchum’s less warm and fuzzy recollection of the moment, she told him, “Don’t apologize . . . I dig it!”

  Hollywood was in a transitional phase in the early ‘60s, the prim standards of the previous thirty years fading away, but the moral watchdogs were not yet ready for anything as dark and transgressive as the Cape Fear put together by Thompson, producer Peck, Mitchum, screenwriter James Webb, composer Bernard Herrmann (a brilliant Hitchcockian score, seething with menace), and the rest. The censors demanded that all use of the word rape be removed. They insisted that Mitchum’s lascivious leering at young Lori Martin be cut to the bone. The assault on Polly Bergen and Mitchum’s original use for an egg had to be similarly reduced to little more than an ugly implication and not the ejaculative horror they had shot. “They made us cut so much,” said Thompson. “If we had made it a few years later we could have gotten it through, I think, but not then. Censors wouldn’t stand for it. Would have been much stronger otherwise. Still, pretty good picture, I think.”

  Critics—some of them—thought it sadistic, repellent, “close to pornography,” though few could deny it was spectacularly effective entertainment, a relentlessly gripping thrill ride, or that Mitchum’s raping, murdering, dog-poisoning Max Cady, performed with absolute conviction and a quality of self-righteousness (Mitchum would reveal that, until things got out of hand at the end, the way he read the script was that Peck was the bad guy), a portrait of redneck monstrousness with his imperious strut and his fat cigars and natty Panama hat and his face of smiling hatred, was a stunning and utterly unforgettable creation.

  “It’s Bob’s picture,” said Gregory Peck, a gentleman. “Best performance he ever gave.”

  In the mid-’50s, Darryl F. Zanuck, the youngest of the original golden age moguls, had abdicated his throne at 20th Century-Fox and run out on his family, going abroad to produce his own films under the DFZ banner and to salve a midlife crisis with a seri
es of Parisian mistresses. The DFZ productions that followed would be a mixture of dull exotica (Island in the Sun, Roots of Heaven, The Sun Also Rises) and debacle (Crack in the Mirror, The Big Gamble), and Zanuck was at a creative nadir and considered something of a has-been when he decided to make a film of Cornelius Ryan’s nonfiction account of the June 1944 Allied invasion of France called The Longest Day. Zanuck quickly began to envision it as a sweeping, spectacular production, the war film to end all war films, and not incidentally a certain vindication and return to glory—at the least a last hurrah—for the tarnished Hollywood tycoon. Zanuck and his team put together an amazing collection of vintage and recreated military materiel and won the cooperation of American and French military commands for the use of equipment and working troops numbering in the thousands. For the film’s most elaborate sequences, Zanuck commanded an operation very nearly as large as the actual D day invasion itself.

  Spending freely, calling in favors, and making full use of any performers under contract to Fox, Zanuck tried to fill even the smallest of the more than sixty parts in the film with a name actor, everyone from Henry Fonda, Jean Louis Barrault, and Richard Burton (who flew to Paris for forty-eight hours during a weekend off from shooting Cleopatra in Rome), to teen idols Tommy Sands, Paul Anka, and Fabian. In truth, though, the long cast list contained only two major stars at the time of the filming in 1961, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum could arguably lay claim to having the film’s leading or at least most substantial role. As Gen. Norman Cota, Allied commander of the Twenty-ninth Infantry Division at the bloody Omaha Beach assault where 7,400 American troops were lost, Mitchum would be seen in the tension-filled sequences prior to the invasion and then in the thick of the most spectacular and rugged fighting on the beach. And Mitchum would have the last, perfectly understated line in the epic picture, spoken to his driver after a final glance at the horrible carnage of victory: “OK, run me up the hill, son.” Mitchum’s powerfully assured and believable performance made General Cota the embodiment of the film’s vision of heroic democratic invaders—humane, fearless, modest, and indomitable.

  In November, when Mitchum arrived in France to shoot his outdoor scenes, Zanuck’s D day had been under way for several months. He had now virtually taken over the He de Rey, two hundred miles south of Normandy in the Bay of Biscay. The filming had become the focus of great excitement throughout the country and had involved at some point almost every figure in French culture and politics up to and including Charles de Gaulle, who released to Zanuck the use of one thousand commandos brought back from the Algerian War and had threatened to imprison a group of oyster bed owners who had complained that some of Zanuck’s forces were destroying their crop of crustaceans. The White House, Congress, and the Pentagon were also de facto advisers to the film, debating the degree of military cooperation, ultimately contributing two hundred fifty troops and millions of dollars’ worth of hardware. Zanuck’s principal director for the beach invasion scenes was Andrew Marton, best known as a second-unit man, a specialist in outdoors and action footage. Zanuck had also hired Ken Annakin for the scenes involving British troops and then, pleased with the work he was seeing, gave him other things to shoot, including the French-language scenes involving Zanuck’s latest girlfriend, Irina Demick.

  The low-lying He de Rey was often flooded, and the hotel where much of the Longest Day people were housed was provided with wooden planks on the floor so guests could go in and out without getting their feet soaked. This was as nothing compared with the conditions on the actual beach-side location (filling in for Normandy’s Omaha) where at times the water hit like a crashing express train and the air was filled with stinging, needle-sharp sea spray.

  On the day Mitchum began filming the arrival at Omaha, it was miserably cold and rainy, the seas rough. Mitchum and thirty others—actors, soldiers, and stuntmen—waded into the icy water to board a landing craft, which then motored back to the position in deep water where the sequence would begin. Unfortunately, things did not work out so expeditiously with the other landing vessels. There were delays getting the troops aboard, and one craft could not be operated properly and another one had to be brought up in its place. Meanwhile, Mitchum and the others swayed biliously in the rough seas, straining to figure out what was going on back on the beach. Some people got sea-sick and threw up everywhere. One man, a soldier, Mitchum claimed, kept accidentally firing his rifle and at one point discharged a blank cartridge directly into the star’s backside. Mitchum grew furious as the delay went on. What was the problem? It looked like some of the soldiers didn’t want to get their feet wet. And over on the beach, Mitchum said, he saw two generals watching the show only until they got a little chilly “and asked for a good fire to keep warm.”

  At last they were all in position and the filming began. Because of the difficult conditions, the use of military personnel and equipment, the long hours that would be required to load the boats and turn them around again or to replant the explosive charges laid out along the beach, it was crucial to get a good take or something close on the first try. This proved even less easy than was feared. At the signal for action, the beach became a scene of pure chaos. Just the moment before Mitchum leaped out of the landing craft, an explosion went off in the sand. The charge had been planted too near the water—or the tide had shifted—and when it went off it sent a giant plume of sea into the air and then down over everything in the filming area, soaking the camera recording the scene. Realizing that they were about to lose Mitchum’s entire landing, Andrew Marton jumped up, tore his shirt from his pants, and wiped the splashed lens dry while the scene went on uninterrupted (Marton claimed he had moved so quickly they lost only four frames of film). The commander of each landing craft had a separate camera crew trained on his group, and forseeing the confusion that would occur, Marton had attached to each main camera the name of each main actor. “That’s your location,” he told them, “and whatever you do, whenever you give your orders, you stop there. That’s your own camera and you play your scene to it.” The gimmick worked perfectly until Eddie Albert lost track of his sign and began stumbling around in confusion. Marton again refused to stop shooting, and ultimately much of the footage of the confused Albert remained in the finished film. “It looked perfectly natural!” said the director.

  Both Mitchum and Albert were highly praised by Marton as he recollected to Joanne D’Antonio the trying circumstances of what was indeed a very long day: “Mitchum and Eddie Albert had to be in very cold water; they stood by and were absolutely marvelous. They knew they were doing something which was as close to reality as you could get without getting slashed to pieces.”

  Later, apparently still angry over the delay in shooting the invasion, Mitchum reportedly made some intemperate remarks to United Press correspondent Robert Ahier, recounting his uncomfortable hours in the landing craft and blaming it all on the cowardice of the participating American soldiers. “The sea was rough,” said Mitchum, “and these troops were afraid to board the landing craft to go to sea.” He also cast aspersions on the observing brigadier and major generals and their desire for a “good fire to get warm.” Newspapers ran the UPI write-up with headlines like this: “GI ACTORS ‘AFRAID OF SEA,’ MITCHUM SAYS.” In Washington, where some members of Congress and officers at the Pentagon had already expressed reservations about the advisability of offering military cooperation to Hollywood hucksters, the shit hit the fan. Zanuck, in a panic, released a statement discrediting the entire story, followed by Mitchum’s own official rebuttal: “The statements attributed to me in my interview with the United Press are false and a complete distortion of what I did say. . . . I have the highest respect and admiration for the soldiers who participated with me in the landing scenes on the He de Rey. To quote me as saying that they were afraid to board the landing craft borders on the ridiculous.” A new round of headlines followed. Typically: “MITCHUM DENIES HE LABELED GIS SCARED.”

  With the difficult battle scenes shot
(many of them creatively and magnificently) and out of the way, and Zanuck having spent his budget and now dipping into his personal funds, the interiors were completed with dispatch at the Boulogne Studios in Paris, the American stars flown into town on a clockwork schedule, put through their paces as quickly as possible, then flown home again.

  Ken Annakin: “I went out to visit Andrew Marton when he was in the midst of shooting on Omaha Beach. And Mitchum was there and we chummed it up, slapping of backs, that sort of thing. And I watched what Andy was shooting, wonderful stuff, never been done better. I learned quite a bit from him because, having seen what he was doing, when it came to my stuff I knew I had to at least equal him. By the time we got to the interior stuff I had been on the picture for nearly four months, doing the British scenes and finishing up all the French scenes. And there was never any question of Marton doing any studio stuff—he was a great expert on locations. So I was doing the interiors. We had two marvelous French camera crews. And each American star came back, including Mitchum. We isolated his stuff, and when he became free he came for three or four days in the studio. He came on knowing his lines; it was a job, and he was an ideal person to work with.”

  Zanuck considered The Longest Day his greatest single effort in the movie business and a personal triumph. Compelled by his obsessive attachment to the production, Zanuck expressed an unprecedented desire to assume the director’s reins, at least symbolically and for a few moments only. He told Annakin that, although he was very busy upstairs, he thought he would “love to come down to the floor and say, ‘Action,’ and, ‘Cut,’” if Annakin didn’t mind stepping aside. “Why the fucking hell should I do that?” said the Englishman to his wife. She convinced him there was no harm in it, and after all they were having a very nice stay in Paris thanks to Mr. Zanuck. And so Annakin would work with Mitchum on scenes and then—on three occasions—wait for Zanuck to come down to the set and say, “Action,” and, “Cut,” after which, very pleased with himself, the producer would return to his upstairs office. Mitchum, who said he had worked with directors who had done even less, expressed no objection to the former mogul’s little play act.