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

'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

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.