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