Scenery Bum: Mitchum and the Movies

'I guess my ambition was...to be a bum.'

What can the fourteen-year-old Bob Mitchum have been thinking of when he boarded his first boxcar train in 1932, with little to show for himself besides a bundle of clothes and the memory of his mother's love? To be sure, he had chosen a life that promised no material reward and the prickliest sort of kudos. “Punk”, “hobo”, “drifter”, whatever solitary epithet that propertied society would pronounce on his kind was multiplied by the additional distinction of “scenery bum” bestowed on him by those long-established denizens of the American rail road, who could name a destination by the number on the train. Only a fool or a mystic would willingly suffer such tirades, in addition to the constant hunger, freezing temperatures, casual criminality, and desperate loneliness of the Depression-era outcast. Yet, in later years he remembered these experiences with a kind of holy wisdom. It is said that the view of the world that we acquire at fourteen outlasts the insights of every subsequent age. No other influence touches the divinity of adolescence, nor accompanies life's perplexity with the same unerring loyalty. The characteristics of class, culture, and nation are all expressions of this youthful entelechy. If anything was American about Mitchum it was his personal quest for freedom, and the knowledge of its hazardous terrain that he refined through his life as an actor.

During the period of travelling on the freight cars Mitchum was arrested and detained in Savannah, Georgia, for vagrancy – or poverty, as he recalled. Taken to work on a chain gang he escaped one afternoon and by hitch-hiking eventually made his way back to his family in Delaware. The incident in Georgia would not be his last time in jail; the law caught up with him again in 1949, when he spent fifty days in prison for possession of marijuana. The event solidified his reputation as an outsider, even more than Out of the Past, the 1947 picture that established his early cinematic presence as one of the leading actors of film noir. In that film, his private eye Jeff Bailey is like an innocent stumbling alone from one real-world truth to the next. Mitchum appeared not so much lost or betrayed as hopelessly estranged from the future. The stint in prison must have confirmed cinemagoers' anticipation about the actor. Certainly, what off-screen reputation brings to the table is already scented in the character: in Pursued (1947) Mitchum is the loner of a ranch family, failing to pay his domestic dues while reluctantly accepting a medal for military service. So many cherished notions of give and take expire for him with the toss of a coin. For the noir hero, bound by a shadowy fate, fortune is an everyday idol: something for which it was possible to work and to earn a dull, decent living. Mitchum was most in his element when the stakes were highest. The RKO pictures of his prodigious first decade as a screen actor all testify to his readiness to take, and lose, expensive risks.

Indeed, Mitchum shoulders burdens in all of his key works. He is the man from out of the past, the stranger with the hooded eyes and the dark secret. Conventional life evades him effortlessly and it is natural that he should have problems with the law. In von Sternberg's shimmering Macao (1952) he jokes, with less irony than at any other moment in that film, 'I'm not partial to the law.' A good screenplay touches rawer points of an actor's experience than a biography, and memories grew bolder by the time of Cape Fear (1962) – filmed in Savannah of all places. Mitchum plays the sadist Max Cady, who prefers to admire women from behind rather than in front. A near-haggard figure in a low panama hat, white shirt and slacks, he is like a crooner without a ballad. In that film, Gregory Peck's upright lawyer, the nominal hero, says of Cady, “You have to know him to feel the threat”. In doing so he outlines the familiar Mitchum characteristics: an inconspicuous man who harbours secret resentments. In accepting the role in Cape Fear, Mitchum took a risk which many of today's stars would not be willing to countenance (imagine a Clooney or a Crowe portraying such an irredeemable character). But Mitchum played most of the film as if he were the hero, thereby exposing not the flaw in the film's characterization of good and evil, but instead the damaging abundance of American law, in which it is even possible to arrest a person for something called lewd vagrancy.

Time and again, what Mitchum reveals by not telling is that he does not recognise ideological right and wrong. Many of his most memorable characters are thinkers who distinguish themselves through clarity of purpose in complex, morally ambivalent situations. Heroism lies in the ability to gracefully navigate the muddy waters. In Crossfire (1947), Mitchum plays the role of the best friend of an innocent soldier under suspicion of murder. That the slain man is a Jewish ex-GI adds topical colour to a conventional story, in which Mitchum is often seen in the background listening with an amused expression on his face. In such performances he showed how it was possible to be at the same time both within and outside the plot of a film; it was an unforgettable lesson that he had learned from life.

'All my lonely life I've loved you lovely stranger.'

During the 1950s, the decade in which Mitchum worked on his most memorable films, the guardians of the medium were considering how to combat the new danger to their viewing figures posed by television. Wider screens and sharper, more vibrant images, while going some way to distinguish movies from the compact and fuzzy pictures of the TV screen, also put an end to the shades of grey that were crucial to adequately rendering the ambiguous world of film noir. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) was the black-and-white exception that proved the rule. Mitchum, like everyone else, looked to broaden his horizons, and it was exactly in the middle of that strange American decade of secret whispers and glorious technicolour that he gave the most enigmatic performance of his career.

Night of the Hunter (1955) is one of the greatest films in which a great actor has featured. The scenario is that Mitchum's Harry Powell is a fraudster who marries and then murders widow Shelley Winters for her former husband's money. Pursuing Winters' now orphaned children through the night (in scenes which he himself directed), Mitchum does not so much exist in the darkness as merge into it. Although it is not irrelevant to the plot of the film, concentration on the psychopathic personality of Powell diminishes from the fact that Mitchum had here achieved the genuine indifference to surroundings that was lazily understood to be his defining characteristic as an actor. To “be indifferent” describes one who is only partially open to the fullness of the surrounding world. No one is more awake than the person who resists and seeks shelter from everything around them. Sleep is therefore a surrender to the world, to the extent that questions of “interest” and “engagement” in the inert props of cinematic reality can become dangerously superficial. In Mitchum's eyes sleep is the only true friend, and when trouble arrives he will find safety in rest; this gave him unfathomable reach as a screen actor, allowing him to put thoughts into viewers' heads that were beyond the reach of waking life.

Sleep arrests thought at the border of the dream-life. It is a reminder that despite our achievements we have not yet acquired the pass that will take us into this strange land. To understand Mitchum it is necessary to spend a night in his world. American cinematic conventions that were developing in the 1930s and 1940s were disjointed by his presence. Faulknerian melodramas such as Pursued lost their rural lustre, becoming dark meditations on the unknown and the enigmatic suffering it can bring. Even the twilit magic of Night of the Hunter could not contain Mitchum’s yelps and screeches as he runs off into the darkness after catching a bullet from Lilian Gish’s gun.

Although fearsomely expressive in Night of the Hunter, his voice still sounds as if it has emerged from some quiet recess in which his thoughts have had time to gather. The performance aspires towards silence, and it achieves this by the end. In all of Mitchum's work, speech runs through him like a stream, gentle yet inexhaustible. What resonates in the voice is a note of vulnerability, it quivers with recognition of adversity, as can be seen in his contrite north-western father trying to do right in River of No Return (1954). In a typically breathless scene from that film, his young son tells him: 'You're not afraid of anything, are you?', to which he replies, 'Not with you.' Like a good teacher, he measures his strength in the ability of his pupils to learn for themselves.

'The lines that nature gave us are the ones we should show.'

Great actors, in whom Mitchum never believed, are often regarded in terms of their adaptability to different kinds of role. Mitchum was never far from himself, or from what Joseph Losey once described as the “sensual contemplation” that he was uniquely able to bring to the screen. In addition to Losey, he also worked with the likes of Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Charles Laughton, and Howard Hawks. Each of these must have noted his apparent disregard for mundane realities, but Hawks was also one of the few directors who recognised that beneath the gloss of the hard-drinking raconteur “Bob Mitchum” lay one of the most conscientious and hard-working actors around. Much of his calm sprang from concentrated effort. He was particular about scripts and often re-wrote sections to fit the persona – not of his character but of the actor. In this way he restructured many films. It is no coincidence that the most watchable aspect of his work is himself – it is normally the most detailed and well constructed part of the film.

Mitchum wrote poetry, a fact of which many people who knew him were not made aware, although he was extremely proud of his work. He also early adopted a jazz hipster slang in his ordinary speech that remained with him to the last. Everyone was “dad”, scripts were “lyrics”, and things happened rarely as often as they “cooked”. Such an easy vocabulary brought welcome relaxation to stressful film sets, and provided reasons for people with good sense to think about things in a different way. His ability to deeply influence people without having to display force was and remains a rare quality among American actors. Although Mitchum often played tough men, the source of their toughness is always questionable. Experience is a literary rather than a lived quality in his characters. His view of the world moulded at an early age by harsh experience, he approached the artistry of performance without the neuroses of less travelled actors who struggled to prove their allegiance to suffering humanity through desperate heroism.

Just as his life evades received ideas about movie celebrity, so the attraction of his features lies hidden from everyday notions of beauty. Mitchum was not conventionally handsome, perhaps because he never fully revealed himself on screen. Instead, there is something pinched and withdrawn about his face, either caused by a deliberate effort or a subconscious resistance to full disclosure. His features give an impression of his being awake in a different way to everyone else. Even with these apparent restrictions however, he was capable of great and subtle variation. (In Cape Fear, Max Cady's face is asymmetrical, traditionally regarded as a mark of the pathological killer.) Mitchum's face, angelic and enigmatic in youth, becomes leonine and noble with age, as in The Yakuza (1974), one of his most underrated performances. In that film, set in Tokyo thirty years after the fire-storm of the Second World War, he is an ex-soldier who returns to settle a debt and to meet an old love. The ease with which he moves through the physical and emotional landscape of the film rests on his accepting nature. As with many of his best performances, Mitchum does not assume importance as the central character, and this time it is Ken Tanaka, the Yakuza of the film's title, who is a relic from another place and time.

The later films are mostly beneath his ability, yet there are fortunate gems such as Farewell My Lovely (1975), a dark comedy dressed as film noir, in which the tired eyes stir with some enthusiasm at the sight of the 'dragon lady', Charlotte Rampling. Maybe he had sensed the game was up when he made El Dorado (1967) with Hawks and John Wayne. Mitchum is sheriff J P Harrah, described by Wayne as 'a tin star with a drunk pinned on it.' Understanding that loyalty remembers good shots, Mitchum plays his role with as much uprightness as he can muster, thereby adding to the film's wistful humour. Mistakenly regarded as a re-make of Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), the difference becomes decisive in the contrasting performances of Mitchum and Dean Martin as the sobering drunks in the two films. Whereas Martin is youthfully stoic, even regaining some hope at the end of Rio Bravo, Mitchum is ruined and pathetic throughout, his hope not so much diminished as shot with wisdom, like morning sunlight exposed through ragged curtains.

None of these performances would be so affecting without the actor's generosity, however. His work with women in leading roles was uncommonly friendly, the dangerous attraction always rescued from logic by his intelligence and awareness of changing situations. In all the teasing exoticism of Macao what is most striking is not the romance but the camaraderie between Mitchum and Jane Russell. He professed to liking Deborah Kerr best of all his leading women, but he was wonderful with Jane Greer (or should that be Bowles) in their two pictures for RKO, Out of the Past and The Big Steal (1949), and he found the dangerous hope of a decent life with Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return. In talking about accommodation it should also be remembered that Mitchum's wife, Dorothy, lived a patient life with him through his years of sexy celebrity and rumoured adultery.

Still, women made Mitchum wonder. In the Belgian Congo, in between filming White Witch Doctor (1953) with Susan Hayward, he ruminated one afternoon on the travesty of women having to wear girdles. 'I believe a well-proportioned woman is an object of great beauty', he mused, before adding, 'I feel that the lines that nature gave us are the ones we should show.' Those lines can glimmer like unreachable galaxies sometimes. Mitchum was perhaps never closer to the centre of his being than in John Brahm's The Locket (1946), in which he is a portrait painter. At one point in the film he reveals, as if from another memory, 'I couldn't make a living during the Depression so I took pupils.' In this most lusciously complex of all noirs, flashbacks unfold across the terrain of the plot, allowing glimpses of the truth to appear like half-opened doorways. In the midst of a story of lies and double-dealing, Mitchum expresses the artist's need to do things for passionate reasons. He fears that Nancy, his love, is a thief – but that is only a call for greater faith. Their situation is epitomised in a scene in which the couple are together one night. They are in an empty bar, questions about her honesty hanging in the air; yet Mitchum is absorbed with myopic concentration on Nancy. With each kiss, he draws closer.