Friday, December 10, 2010

Happy Holidays, From Robert Mitchum!

Happy Holidays from ROBERT MITCHUM!

Here's a still from his underrated but wonderfully charming Christmas movie 'Holiday Affair.' He plays a store clerk who gets fired just before Christmas because he doesn't report pretty comparison shopper, Vivien Leigh. Soon, he's swept up in her life and that of her little boy, who desperately wants a toy train set for Christmas.

Read more about 'Holiday Affair.'

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

RIP Leslie Nielsen

In all the kudos for the late Leslie Nielsen (who died November 28), I doubt anyone mentioned his role in 'The Amsterdam Kill,' a 1977 thriller about the international drug trade, starring ROBERT MITCHUM. It's a low point in both their careers and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but diehard Mitchum fans (and, apparently fans of "Golden Harvest Trash," as it's labeled in the Youtube trailer below.

If you've ever wanted to hear Mitchum dubbed in German, now's your chance! His German voice double is actually quite good! And the film is re-titled "The Tiger From Taipei."



Nielsen would go on to reinvent his career as a comedian with 'Airplane!' just three years later and in the '80s, Mitchum would go on to make 'That Championship Season' and the TV miniseries 'The Winds of War,' which introduced him to a new generation.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

'Night of the Hunter' One of 'Ten Creepiest Movies Ever'

Happy Halloween!

Seattle Times critic John Hartl lists 'The Night of the Hunter' as one of his 'Ten Creepiest Movies Ever,' along with other classics like 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'Psycho' and 'The Innocents.'

Remember, the Criterion DVD/Blu-Ray edition of 'Hunter' is coming out November 16.

Isn't this still (at left) cool? Found it at cinemaisdope.com, as its Vintage Movie Wallpaper of the Day.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Billy Corgan's New Role Model: Robert Mitchum

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?)

Corgan: "Robert Mitchum always struck me, at least how he came across as an actor, he was a man who was comfortable with both his grace and his darkness. If John Wayne was the hero version of that, Robert Mitchum is the darker version of that. He's the darker hero. He's the guy who's not sure whether he wants to fuck the chick or go home to his wife. He's gotta sit there and smoke a cigarette and think about it, you know what I mean? He's closer to my archetype of being conflicted by the forces of the world but really wanting to make the best of it."

Read the full interview at LA Weekly

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

'Night of the Hunter' Coming to Blu-Ray


No surprise that 'Night of the Hunter' will be the first ROBERT MITCHUM movie released on Blu-ray. The special edition will feature lots of extras and will also be available on DVD. Look for it November 16.

Here's some of the bonus features:
-- New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
-- Audio commentary featuring assistant director Terry Sanders, film critic F. X. Feeney, archivist Robert Gitt, and author Preston Neal Jones
-- Charles Laughton Directs "The Night of the Hunter," a two-and-a-half-hour archival treasure trove of outtakes from the film
-- New documentary featuring interviews with producer Paul Gregory, Sanders, Jones, and author Jeffrey Couchman
-- New video interview with Simon Callow, author of Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
-- Clip from the The Ed Sullivan Show, in which cast members perform live a scene that was deleted from the film
-- Fifteen-minute episode of the BBC show Moving Pictures about the film
-- Archival interview with cinematographer Stanley Cortez
-- Gallery of sketches by author Davis Grubb
-- New video conversation between Gitt and film critic Leonard Maltin about Charles Laughton Directs "The Night of the Hunter"
-- Original theatrical trailer
-- A booklet featuring essays by critics Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow

Full article here at IGN

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The Star Who Made it Look Easy


From The Irish Independent

While surfing channels recently I came across a late-night screening of Martin Scorsese's 1991 thriller Cape Fear. Like most people I'm a huge admirer of Scorsese's films but have always thought this is one of the worst of them -- and as I watched it again my worst suspicions were confirmed.

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.

Read the rest of the article here.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Interesting Interviews: Reminiscing with Robert Mitchum


From Cinematical.com

It's safe to say that once God made ROBERT MITCHUM, he then turned around and broke the mold. The late actor was a one of the kind talent -- a fantastic performer who was every bit as interesting when he was just being himself. He was the antithesis of today's celebrities -- Mitchum didn't care about fame in the slightest. A tough guy actor who often made you believe he was more than capable of doing everything he'd done onscreen in real-life, Mitchum was always a great interview. While surfing around, looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across this Salon piece from back in 1997. In it, author Dick Lochte reminisces about the actor's career after his passing and shares excerpts from a four-hour chat -- one filled with vodka, no less -- they'd had twenty years earlier. It's a great piece of writing, made memorable by Mitchum's characteristic candor and humor. Don't expect any politically correct answers in this one.

Full interview at Salon

Thursday, July 1, 2010

NY Screening of Bruce Weber's 'Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast'

From Italian Vogue:
On June 21st, 30 Rock star and Emmy Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin hosted a special sneak peak of fashion photographer Bruce Weber's latest film, Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast, (the title comes from a 1967 album by singer Julie London) a beautifully shot documentary examining the life of the movie star with the tough guy looks and a cigarette always in his hand, ROBERT MITCHUM

The film also reveals never before seen studio recordings of Mitchum, a notorious Hollywood bad boy who starred in films like The Big Sleep and The Last Tycoon, singing. Filmed mostly in black and white, the movie is narrated by New Orleans rhythm and blues musician Dr. John and features revealing interviews with Mitchum, his brother John and many of his friends.

... Weber is most famous for his erotically charged photographs of semi-nude All-American boys, but he is also an Academy Award nominated director who has turned his movie camera in 1988 on jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost (which earned him the Best Documentary Oscar nomination), on his herd of beloved pet dogs and on teenage boxers in Broken Noses in 1987.

Weber is attracted to not only male physical perfection, but to beauty's flipside: damaged, wayward souls, so Mitchum, who often played anti-heroes and was called by film critic Roger Ebert "the soul of film noir," is the perfect subject.

From The Huffington Post:

The big question of the night, how did Weber get such candid footage from interview-phobic Mitchum who eluded the invitations of Barbara Walters, Dick Cavett, and Larry King. Weber, in signature head scarf, is disarming and sly, telling how he sent beautiful women with gifts to Mitchum's door ...

Through Weber's lens, the Hollywood tough guy of Westerns and noirs, the creep in the original Cape Fear with deep cleft chin and eyes at half mast emerges as a shy, modest, non-celebrity jamming sweetly off-key with Dr. John, Marianne Faithfull, and Rickie Lee Jones ...

Saturday, June 19, 2010

New to DVD

Robert Mitchum movies that are new(ish) to DVD:

Mitchum in New "Match Prints" Photography Book

This looks like a very cool new photography book of classic actors and rock 'n' roll stars:

Jim Marshall and Timothy White made an odd couple. White is a stylish shooter of celebrity portraits. The gruff Marshall ("I only photograph artists I like, where I get the trust") has taken some of the most iconic shots in rock & roll.

"We'd dress differently. We'd look differently. There's 20 years difference in our lives, our careers, everything. But there was this affection. There was this love that we had for each other, that this book came out of."

The book, called "Match Prints" (HarperCollins) is the product of Marshall and White's 24-year friendship.

It was a photograph White had taken of actor ROBERT MITCHUM that started it all: "My image of Robert Mitchum, which Jim just loved. He just really loved this picture a lot," said White. "And then, of course, [he] pulled out this image of Jim Morrison that was just uncanny. Just, you know, it was the exact same position, holding the cigarette the same way."

As they went through each other's work, they noticed more and more similarities.

Rest of the article at CBS News

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Pairing a DVD and a Drink Takes Care



From the NY Times:
I COULD blame Don Draper, but if it was anyone’s fault, it was ROBERT MITCHUM’s.

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.

Read the rest of the article at the NY Times.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

You must read (and watch) Eddie Coyle

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 patron

Read the rest of the article at Slate.com

Saturday, May 1, 2010

The Star Who Didn't Care

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.

Read the whole article.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Jean Simmons Dead at Age 80

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.

She was married to actor Stewart Granger and under contract to movie mogul Howard Hughes. "I was married to Jimmy (Granger's real name was James Stewart), so Hughes remained at a distance," she recalled years later. "But those movies! So terrible they aren't even on videocassettes." Of course, Angel Face has benefited from the resurrection of many film noirs that were overlooked in their day.

The Washington Post gives this account of her time with Hughes:
Ms. Simmons was wildly miscast in a series of lurid dramas and second-rate adventure and historical films ....

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?


Good to know she had Bob on her side. RIP, Jean