Psycho Stepfather Supreme: Night of the Hunter

"A re-do of The Stepfather? It only led me to my archive of demented dads, a movie (and real life) character I'm fascinated by. From the anti-Atticus Finch figures of Bigger than Life to Lord Love a Duck to Paper Moon, varied degrees of problematic parenting are always interesting. But for those special psycho stepfathers, however, no one should ever forget the biggest, baddest, most brilliantly baneful step-dad of all time: Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell in Charles Laughton's genius, Night of the Hunter."


Read more at :The Huffington Post

"Ryan's Daughter" Sequel

Story @ Independent UK

The critics loathed it, and the public just ignored it. When Ryan's Daughter was released in 1970, it proved such a box-office dud that many blame it for stalling the director David Lean's career for 10 years. Now it is considered one of the British director's best and most popular films. It is an unrepeatable classic – only now they want to do it again.

Sarah Miles, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Rosy Ryan, is writing a script and undertaking research in Ireland for a sequel. Yesterday her agent said: "She is writing a script and there is a producer for a film, but it's very early days."

Classics from the vault: Thunder Road

Story at Examiner.com

... Thunder Road is the kind of movie that sticks in the minds of its viewers for years after seeing it. It’s the first film maverick director Jim Jarmusch* ever recalls seeing, at the age of six at a drive-in theater. As he related in a 1992 interview in Film Comment, despite being a huge Mitchum fan he never saw the film again, so indelible was the childhood memory in his mind. Bruce Springsteen named the opening track of his 1975 Born to Run album after the movie, although he never even saw it – he only saw the film’s poster in the lobby of a theater.

Thunder Road airs Tuesday, July 21 at 6:00 PM ET on Turner Classic Movies.

*Jarmusch later directed Mitchum in his last film, Dead Man.

Oscar-winning actor Karl Malden dead at 97

Story at CNN.com

Veteran actor Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire, has died at age 97, his manager said Wednesday.

Among Malden's films is the 1967 western The Way West, costarring ROBERT MITCHUM and Kirk Douglas.

Jean Simmons Admits Mitchum Affair

From NewKerala.com

London, Jun 24 : English actress Jean Simmons has opened up about her affair with late American actor ROBERT MITCHUM.

Simmons, 80, and the tough-guy actor had acted together in the Fifties in films such as Otto Preminger's 'Angel Face' and Stanley Donen's 'Grass Is Greener'.

The actress had previously spoken only about her fondness for her late co-star, but she now has revealed that there was more than just friendship between them.

"All right, then - Robert Mitchum," the Daily Express quoted her as saying when asked if she had off-screen dalliances.

"He was a real man. He was a ladies' man and a man's man. He was also extremely bright, despite those sleepy eyes," she added.

Jean added that she admired other Hollywood leading men.

"I had two big loves: Spencer Tracy, whom I adored, and Larry Olivier," she told Saga magazine, "but they were not sexual relationships."

NY Times on El Dorado, Friends of Eddie Coyle

Story at New York Times

The veteran Hollywood directors still working in the ’60s sometimes seemed to be addressing the decay of the studio system that had nurtured them. Decay is very much the subject of Howard Hawks’s penultimate movie, the 1966 western “El Dorado,” but less the decay of golden-age Hollywood than the decay of age itself....

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) Think of Boston and images of genteel, picturesque beauty come to mind: swan boats gliding across the pond at the Public Garden, a Paul Revere statue nobly silhouetted against the sky. There’s none of that in Peter Yates’s cold, damp and piercing modern noir from 1973, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” Its chief visual feature is the sad-eyed, beaten-down mug of the low-level hood Eddie, played by ROBERT MITCHUM. But that’s enough. ...

George Hamilton recalls working with Mitchum

Story at Daily Mail (UK)

Gorgeous George Hamilton's tantastic tales: The actor recalls Elvis, Marilyn and JFK in his new autobiography.

An excerpt about Mitchum:

I worked with ROBERT MITCHUM on the 1960 film Home From The Hill and I never saw any star care less about being one. Bob could talk your ear off, but the one thing he didn't want to talk about was his lines or the film. He liked to get drunk and then sing songs - sea shanties, cockney ditties, Australian football songs, anything.

What he would usually say to me was: 'Gettin'any?' He was. Bob would send me to buy him liquor. On my first run back to his hotel room, I found him 'entertaining' a lady. He motioned me to open a bottle and hand it over. I was honored to be of service.

When he wasn't having sex, he'd sit in a rocking chair wearing just boxer shorts and alligator cowboy boots while casting for imaginary trout with a fishing rod.

He drank a lot and smoked a lot of dope. He also took a lot of pills, which he kept in his own leather doctor's bag. One night I asked him for something to help me sleep. He handed me a pill he called a 'nighty night' - and I slept straight through my call the next morning and on into a second day.

Bob once said to me: 'They think I don't know my lines. It's not true. I'm just too drunk to say 'em.'

The studio once sent a manager to keep Bob in line, but the minute he walked into the hotel room, Bob punched him, knocking him through the door.

For years, Bob sent me Mother's Day cards. I was never sure why, but he gave me confidence that you could always be a star in Hollywood on your own terms."