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The Smashing Pumpkins singer opens up about his spiritual journey, what the rise and fall of grunge felt like from the inside, and his current role model (ROBERT MITCHUM?)
A master director like Scorsese was well able to keep the tension going, but seemed unable to decide whether the prevailing mood in his remake should be irony or fear. And surprisingly, the film's weakest link is Robert De Niro.
As a result perhaps of his director's uncharacteristic indecision, De Niro's portrayal of cheery southern psychopath Max Cady quickly descends into an overblown caricature, and is about as scary as a trip to Santa's grotto. In fairness, De Niro has hardly ever been bad in anything, before or since, but his performance and Scorsese's film match up very badly against the excellent 1962 original.
Appearing in small parts in Scorsese's remake were the two stars of the first Cape Fear, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. Peck brought a sort of moral authority to every role, but it was Mitchum's sneering sadist Max Cady that made the original film so memorably disturbing, and perhaps he's the real difference between the two versions.
He and Robert De Niro couldn't have been more different in their approach to acting, and when they first performed together in The Last Tycoon in 1976, 'Mitch' made fun of De Niro's insistence on staying in character between shoots.
Throughout his long career Mitchum made light of his chosen profession and was fond of saying things like, "I got three expressions, looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead". But this bluster may have been a front because behind it all Mitchum seems to have been a dedicated and surprisingly versatile actor.
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From Italian Vogue:
From The Huffington Post:
This looks like a very cool new photography book of classic actors and rock 'n' roll stars:
There he was early in one of my all-time favorite films, “Out of the Past,” sipping bourbon in a little bar in Acapulco (or a Hollywood version thereof), waiting for the girl, thinking about how the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. But, baby, I didn’t care. I was thinking, man, that bourbon looks good.
So I paused Mitchum midsentence, went over to the liquor cabinet and then the freezer, and poured myself a Knob Creek on the rocks. And then another.
By the end of the film, whose labyrinthine, double-upon-triple-cross plot had baffled me with each previous viewing, I was even more hopelessly lost than usual. But so what?
So, no, Don, your great-looking old-fashioneds in great-looking bars in “Mad Men” didn’t get me started on this funny habit of mine. I’ve been matching my drinks to my movies for at least 15 years. I’ve done it with my wife, in groups, or (and I’m not ashamed to say this) alone. It adds a new dimension — Alc-O-Vision? — to the plot, the photography and, especially, the sense of immersion if the film takes place in the same country from which the drink in my hand originated.
Different spirits cause different results. “Out of the Past” paired with Knob Creek is mellow yet ominous. But try it with smoky Monte Alban mezcal backed by Negra Modelo beer, and it is vibrant and energetic. The opening Mexican scenes seem to stretch the whole way to the end, to the final quadruple-cross. And it all makes sense.
The first thing to know about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer's-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador's new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as "the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years"—a moderate claim compared with that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel, period. The third thing to know about The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that, as Lehane beat me to quipping, Eddie Coyle doesn't actually have any friends. When "my friend" is said in these pages, it is used with far less affection than in the case of a guy at a bodega or a coffee cart man addressing a patronRead the rest of the article at Slate.com
From Commentary Magazine:Of all the movie stars created by the Hollywood studio system whose films continue to be viewed, Robert Mitchum is the one whose artistic legacy is most problematic. Throughout much of his career, he was generally regarded less as an actor than as a personality, one whose hell-raising private life (among other once-scandalous things, he was arrested in 1948 for possession of marijuana) contributed to his reputation as one of the baddest of Hollywood’s bad boys. Many of his best-known films were trivial entertainments in which he played cartoonish heroes.
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Very sad to share the news that actress Jean Simmons has died of lung cancer at the age of 80. Simmons is well-known for her roles in Guys and Dolls and Spartacus, but ROBERT MITCHUM fans will also remember her as a femme fatale in the noir Angel Face. She also starred with Mitchum in the comedy She Couldn't Say No and The Grass is Greener.Hughes reportedly refused to lend her to another studio for the leading female role in "Roman Holiday" (1953), which made a star and Oscar-winner of Audrey Hepburn. Granger later wrote in his memoir that Ms. Simmons's relationship with Hughes deteriorated so badly that the producer cast her as a murderess in the drama "Angel Face" (1952), with Robert Mitchum, and reportedly ordered director Otto Preminger to be rough with her.
Preminger demanded repeated takes of Mitchum's character slapping Ms. Simmons, and the actress's face became redder and redder. Finally, according to Granger, Mitchum punched Preminger, asking how that take was, or "Would you like another, Otto?
