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

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 ...

New to DVD

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

• Agency (1979) with Lee Majors
• A Killer in the Family (1983 TV Movie) with James Spader, Lance Kerwin, and Eric Stoltz
• Rampage (1963) with Elsa Martinelli
• Two for the Seesaw (1962) with Shirley MacLaine

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

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.

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

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.