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."

'Young Billy Young" Coming to DVD

Source: Deseret News

Fox/MGM is releasing "Young Billy Young" (1969) with ROBERT MITCHUM and Angie Dickinson May 12. The film co-stars Robert Walker, Jr. and David Carradine.

Pre-order at Amazon.com

Broccoli Only Man Brave Enough to Wake Mitchum

Story at Times Online


Albert "Cubby" Broccoli is best known as the producer of the classic James Bond series. The BFI is celebrating with a two-month season of his films, starting on April 8. Here's an anecdote regarding Mitchum:

"On the Caribbean shoot for Fire Down Below, Broccoli was the only man brave enough to dump a bucket of water over a comatose ROBERT MITCHUM to wake up the boozy actor."

Two Mitchum Films Scheduled for LA Film Noir Series

It's time for Deadline: Noir City, the 11th Annual Film Noir Festival, held at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. This year, two Mitchum films will be shown:

April 2: Out of the Past -- part of a Jane Greer double feature with the rare The Company She Keeps.

April 11: The Racket -- a double bill with another Robert Ryan film, Woman on Pier 13.

Film Noir Schedule

American Cinematheque on Blogspot

Keely still singing classics from Rat Pack days

Story at SF Examiner.

"For Smith, those old songs have a lot of history. "Yeah, there’s about 40 men that I think of when I sing certain songs!" she says, laughing. "I used to think a lot about [Frank] Sinatra, but not so much these days. I think of [Prima]. I think of ROBERT MITCHUM, and a couple of other people I can’t tell you!"

She’s saving that for her autobiography, on which she has been working in a stop-and-go fashion."

Keely performs daily (except Mondays) at The Rrazz Room in San Francisco through April 5. She costarred in Thunder Road with Mitchum.

DVD Review: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

DVD Review at Filmcritic.com

"The fact that Coyle is so effective has much to do with the fact that he is played by Mr. Mitchum. Though not as transfixing as his monstrous preacher in Night of the Hunter, Coyle easily allows for one of Mitchum's best performances, a grounded, unsentimental study of a man as used-up and disposable as an empty can of Schlitz."

Pre-order
here at Amazon.com

'Fire Down Below' Screening in London

Fire Down Below will be screened April 11 and April 26 at London's BFI Southbank as part of a tribute to James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli.

Schedule information at BFI

'El Dorado' Part of Howard Hawks LACMA Retrospective

Story at LA Weekly

Better Late Than Never: Howard Hawks at LACMA
Retrospective surveys indomitable director’s final films

... Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo (1970) all star an increasingly monumental John Wayne and were scripted by Ms. Leigh Brackett, retracing the same paths to diminishing returns. (Hawks: “You’ve got fellows with guns, and one of them’s a sheriff ... there isn’t much you can do.”) Hedged in by outlaws, the Law waits on reinforcements. This involves rolling cigarettes, propping his leg on whatever’s handy, and generally bullshitting. Wayne nurses a gunfighter-turned-lush (real-life alkies Dean Martin or ROBERT MITCHUM) back to self-esteem and humors a procession of orn’ry ol’ crackers (real-life crackers Walter Brennan, Arthur Hunnicutt and Jack Elam). Hawks shows he can still turn a scene on a dime, as in... El Dorado’s shift from pastoral openness to the intimate suffering of a gut-shot kid (one of the toughest scenes Duke ever played).

Film Schedule at LACMA.org
El Dorado screens March 20.

First-Ever Film Footage of Mitchum?

Mitchum, with his own chest hair, we assume, in His Kind of Woman

Story at LA Times

Ladies and gentlemen, the UCLA Film & Television Archive Festival of Preservation has returned. This is the 14th UCLA festival, at one time an annual event and now held every other year at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. Though I've seen only parts of it, the most boggling program of the entire series looks to be "Behind the Scenes in Hollywood," which samples the archive's fascinating collection of cinematic flotsam and jetsam ... Here is possibly the first-ever 1942 screen appearance by ROBERT MITCHUM as a nameless extra getting hair put on his chest in a Max Factor promotional film called "The Magic of Make-Up." — Kenneth Turan

Note: Mitchum in need of extra chest hair? I recall reading that he was actually the first actor in Hollywood to refuse to shave his chest hair, ushering in a new age of ultra-macho movie stars. Mitchum's film debut was in 1943, so this footage would definitely pre-date that.

The festival runs from March-April. The Mitchum footage will be screened April 10.

UCLA Film & Television Archive Schedule.

‘Ryan’s Daughter Doc’ Nominated for Rose d’Or

Story from IFTN (Irish Film and Television Network)

The RTÉ documentary ‘A Bit of a Fillum: Ryan's Daughter in Dingle’ has been nominated in the Arts Documentary Category for the Rose d'Or International Television Competition 2009 to be held May 2-5, 2009 in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The Rose d’Or, held annually in Lucerne, offers four days of viewing the best in entertainment and television programming from around the world. ‘A Bit of a Fillum: Ryan's Daughter in Dingle’ documentary which screened on RTÉ One, 25th December last year, goes behind-the-scenes of the making of David Lean’s 1969 feature ‘Ryan's Daughter’ in Kerry and explores the effects of the arrival of an all star cast including ROBERT MITCHUM, Sarah Miles and John Mills had on the Kerry natives and the local economy. The documentary features footage from the RTÉ Archive and from the UCLA Ethnographic Program.

New Book on the Making of The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film, by Jeffrey Couchman (March 2009).

"The only film ever directed by the great character actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter failed miserably when it opened in 1955. But since then it has come to be recognized as one of American cinema's greatest masterpieces. Shot in glorious black and white, this poetic, highly stylized movie is half-Gothic nightmare, half-morality play, a pastoral film noir set along the banks of the serene Ohio River. Cahiers du Cinéma ranks it as the second most beautiful film of all time (after Citizen Kane and just above The Rules of the Game). In this enthralling 'biography,' Jeffrey Couchman traces how the cinematic classic came to be made."

From the Washington Post Book Review

Order the book at Amazon.com

The Friends of Eddie Coyle coming to DVD

Long unavailable, Mitchum's '70s crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle is coming to DVD May 19, 2009.

Pre-order here at Amazon.com

60 Years Ago: Mitchum Released From Prison

Story from DC Examiner

On this day, Feb. 25, 1949, actor ROBERT MITCHUM was released from a prison farm after a two-month sentence for marijuana possession.

In 1948, Los Angeles detectives burst into a small party and found Mitchum smoking a joint. Mitchum, who two years earlier had been nominated for an Oscar in “The Story of G.I. Joe,” reportedly said, “This is the bitter end of everything.”

Instead, it seemed to enhance his image as a rebel, and his next movies were box office smashes. Mitchum went on to define the film noir in classics like “Crossfire,” “Out of the Past” and in his portrayals of psychopaths in “The Night of the Hunter” and “Cape Fear.”

Clint Eastwood Talks Dirty Harry, The Greatest Movie Badass Of All Time

Story at MTV.com

"I guess they tried to get a lot of people for it. They tried Frank Sinatra and ROBERT MITCHUM and Steve McQueen. Then they finally ended up with Frank Sinatra," Eastwood recalled of the early '70s casting process for the original "Dirty Harry" film.

Other famous films that almost starred Mitchum