Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (25 page)

Saving more time and money, everything in the film was shot on standing sets—offices, bedrooms, and staircases that had been used before in a hundred B movies and looked it.

There was a feeling of common cause among many of the people making
Crossfire,
pleased to be part of a film attacking bigotry and, in the metaphoric big-picture political sense, skewering right-wing intolerance. (Screenwriter Paxton would note that “a character like Monty would qualify brilliantly for the leadership of the Belsen concentration camp. Fascism hates weakness in people. . . .”) Dmytryk and Scott were left-wingers and at least briefly “card-carrying Communists”; Schary, Paxton, Bob Ryan, and Young all FDR liberals. Mitchum, like Groucho Marx, professed to be wary of any club that would have him as a member. And in light of subsequent ugly accusations hurled at
him in years to come—charges of making anti-Semitic and variously “insensitive” statements—his very participation in the film would come to be viewed by some as ironic. Dmytryk, though—who
would
observe changes in the actor’s attitudes in the 1960s—here found him to be sympathetic and in synch with the movie’s humane theme. “Very much so. He hated bullies and spoke very much in favor of the working man. He had seen a lot of things done to people who were down and out by people with a little power to back them in his hobo days, and that stayed with him. I once heard him talking to a reporter on the set. She asked him why he was doing this picture and he told her,
’Because I hate cops.’
What a thing to say. I don’t know if she printed it or not, but what a thing to say to a reporter!”
^*

However much Mitchum may or may not have endorsed the film’s noble mission, it did not affect his desire to make a little mischief. Everything was so grim and dimly lit on the set that Mitchum perhaps thought it his duty to lighten things up. He had a new toy, an air-powered BB gun, and occasionally stalked the sets and dressing rooms, firing off rounds at his coworkers. Steve Brodie, who played Floyd Bowers in the film, got shot in the leg. It gave him a huge bruise that he said lasted forever. Dmytryk’s status didn’t exempt him from becoming another target. “I was sitting on the set and it hit me right in the fanny. Shot by a BB gun. I looked around and caught Bob standing on the sidelines pretending not to be there.” Brodie, a practical joker himself, would later get revenge, sneaking into Bob’s dressing room and coating his clothing with a toxic powder that made a person do a kind of Saint Vitus’ dance when it touched the skin.

There was another stalker on the
Crossfire
set, Gloria Grahame’s creepy and abusive husband, actor Stanley “Stash” Clements, a diminutive figure with a snarling Brooklyn accent who got movie roles as jockeys and young toughs. As Grahame’s career was taking off toward stardom and his sputtered nowhere, Clements took out his frustrations by beating her, threatening to shoot her with a shotgun, attempting to kill her mother with a knife, that sort of thing. After each incident Gloria would forgive him and they would have a long, violent, sexual reunion. Bob would hear from brother, John, how he would be called well after midnight to run over to their apartment when the situation
got dangerous and disarm Stanley and knock him out. Bob thought Gloria sweet and talented but wacky, and he kept away from her private life. Grahame had lately been trying to dump Clements permanently but without much success. The way he hung around the
Crossfire
set pestering and intimidating his wife, and her ambivalent feelings, were strangely similar to the situation Gloria’s character was going through in the movie. Perhaps the parallels added something to her great performance as Ginny, the caustic, disappointed bar girl. It took just three days to complete and earned her an Oscar nomination.

Three weeks after filming began, just ten weeks after Dore Schary had first agreed to make it,
Crossfire
was in the can, a tough, uncompromising movie, bluntly revealing an ugly American underbelly. There had been nothing quite so raw made in Hollywood since the uninhibited pre-Code days of the early talkies. The economizing, the stripped-down mise-en-scene, the secondhand sets, the speed with which it was shot, far from compromising the project, all seemed to work in its favor. The dark, depopulated look of the film evoked a bleary, hungover, four-in-the-morning world. The compressed story line and no-nonsense staging produced a rare immediacy—it played as if in real time, as if it had all been filmed in one clammy all-night session.

Each one of the three Bobs performed memorably. Robert Young, always an undervalued movie actor, projected a probing intelligence and moral fortitude as the tough but humane police detective. As the designated messenger for the film’s explicit political and moral stand against racial hatred, he did his best to underplay the explicitly message-laden portions of the dialogue. Mitchum’s world-weary sergeant perfectly fit his persona—a smart, cynical, hard-boiled former newspaperman, sleepy but sharp-tongued, reluctant to get involved, wary of authority. Keeley is spokesman for the film’s existential and poetic currents, seeing the nightmarish events in noirishly fatalistic terms as part of a general uncertainty and malignity that has infected them all.

“What’s happened?” the hunted Mitchum asks in the dark back row of a theater balcony. “Has everything suddenly gone crazy? I don’t just mean this; I mean everything. Or is it just me?”

“No,” Keeley says, “it’s not just you. The snakes are loose. Anybody can get them. I get them myself. But they’re friends of mine.”

Whatever his marquee value, the studio chose to give Mitchum second billing to Robert Young, a man at the end of his career as a movie lead. It didn’t matter. Mitchum knew that in terms of impact, the picture belonged to the guy billed third, Robert Ryan: his Montgomery, seething, unctuous, animalistic—like a rat suddenly exposed beneath a rock—was a fantastic, daring piece of work. That was the way to do it when you played the bad guy, Mitchum thought: no compromise, take it all the way down the line.

The film was a spectacular success. Earning $1,270,000 in profits, it was RKO’s biggest hit of the year and one of the most acclaimed films in the studio’s history. Reviewers in near unanimity hailed it as a benchmark for Hollywood’s supposedly growing maturity, raved over the filmmakers’ skilled mingling of strong message and riveting entertainment. It was awarded a Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, topped most publications’ Ten Best lists for the year, and received five Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actor and Actress (Ryan and Grahame). It won no Oscars, as it turned out, but this probably reflected external circumstances affecting the final vote. The Best Picture award went to that rival message picture with the similar theme, Darryl Zanuck’s
Gentleman’s Agreement
—it was the year of anti-anti-Semitism.

And it was the year of anti-anti-Americanism. The death of the invincible President Roosevelt had unleashed the dogs of reaction in the nation’s capital, and the growing “Cold War” had done the rest. The anxiety felt by Americans in regard to world events, such as the encroachments of the Soviet Union and Mao’s Red Army and the rising tide of anticolonial revolution in Africa and Asia, was to be ruthlessly exploited by big business interests, anti-Communist zealots, and right-wing politicians on the make to create a long-lasting, poisonous atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion, and hate. A Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee had been charged with rooting out subversive influences in U.S. society. In search of publicity for their efforts, the committee set their sights on the glamorous motion picture industry, and in the autumn of 1947 the assault on Hollywood began. At the studios there had always been an ebb and flow of political tensions between the ranks, occasionally flaring into bitter civil wars, as in the various fights to establish the screen guilds and unions. Overall the big studios had tended to operate as relatively forgiving, laissez-faire kingdoms where the talent of the employees ultimately counted for more than their particular crackpot ideology. On some level the moguls realized that it took all kinds to make hit movies, and in the peculiar assembly line artists’ colony that was Hollywood there had always been room for right-wing crazies and limousine Leninists alike. Until now.

As the HUAC hearings began in Washington, ten of an initial nineteen so-called unfriendly witnesses were subpoenaed to give testimony. Of the ten, only two were not screenwriters—producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, the producer and director of a current hit film some of the committee members regarded with particular contempt. Said Joan LaCoeur, future wife of Adrian Scott, “Adrian . . . and Eddie Dmytryk were subpoenaed not because they were important in the Party or because they were big names but because of
Crossfire.
Two or three weeks before the subpoenas came out, federal
agents came to the studio and demanded to see
Crossfire.
It was totally because of the content that they were subpoenaed.”

A kind of unified approach had been agreed upon by the ten—a decision that was subsequently considered a disastrous mistake. They would stonewall the committee’s prying and—they believed—unconstitutional questions about their political beliefs, and each would read a speech extolling their version of American patriotism and decrying the evils of the HUAC. They were not allowed to read the speeches; after a few sentences the gavel sounded. Some of the witnesses were obstreperous, hard to silence, and had to be dragged away. Dalton Trumbo shouted, “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp!” Scott and Dmytryk remained relatively composed, Dmytryk in particular grimly fatalistic as he saw his place in the world crumbling. When asked if he was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, Adrian Scott said, “I believe that I could not engage in any conspiracy with you to invade the First Amendment.” Dmytryk also refused to answer the questions posed. In turn the committee did not permit him to read his statement about the attempt being made to censor a screen that had just begun to express its “responsibilities to the people of this nation and of this world.” Even as Dmytryk was being silenced by a pounding gavel, citizens across the country were buying tickets to see
Crossfire.
The film seemed to hover over the proceedings as a kind of rebuke to the congressmen, some of whom no doubt thought the Robert Ryan character had gotten a raw deal. Screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, another of the ten, invoked the film in his prepared speech: “I wish to address this Committee as a Jew, because one of its leading members is the outstanding anti-Semite in the Congress and revels in this fact. I refer to John E. Rankin. . . . I am struck forcibly by the fact that this committee has subpoenaed the men who made
Crossfire,
a powerful attack on anti-Semitism. . . .”

You couldn’t buy publicity like this, they were saying back at RKO, with their heads in their hands.

The ten—the “Hollywood Ten”—were cited for contempt and handed sentences of up to one year in prison. “I was the hottest director in Hollywood,” said Dmytryk, “and I was going to jail.”

On November 24, the same day the Ten were being cited, Dore Schary reluctantly joined a group of moguls and board chairmen from the various studios meeting at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. Concluding that the movie industry could not afford to be seen as soft on Reds in the current volatile climate, the group issued a collective statement of intent, a virtual oral massage to the backsides of the committee members, to wit: “We will
forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist. On the broader issue of alleged subversives and disloyal elements in Hollywood, our members are likewise prepared to take positive action.”

It was the beginning of the witch-hunt years in Hollywood, an ongoing industrywide purge of suspected Reds. The film colony split into an assortment of warring factions, the superpatriots and fascists of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals proferring their blacklists and loyalty oaths, the concerned liberals of the Committee for the First Amendment ineffectually marching on Washington, and the leftists and progressives fearfully awaiting their subpoenas or forced to go underground or to squeal on their comrades and try living with that.

In later years, when asked about the blacklist in Hollywood, Robert Mitchum would speak only a few cryptic, hipper-than-thou words to the effect that he had seen it all coming, and what did you expect? He would recall with contempt how it had been “chic” for people in the movie business making huge salaries to call themselves Communists, how it had amused him to see someone like Eddie Dmytryk sitting on the set reading the
Daily Worker,
reveling in a fashionable concern for the common man. But Dmytryk had found Mitchum to be sympatico in those days, before it was dangerous, and the actor had been friends with leftists and soon-to-be blacklist victims such as Trumbo, director Joseph Losey, and writer Howard Koch. Mitchum, Losey, and Koch had even planned to collaborate on a theater project in 1947, a political play called
The Glass House.
“He was an interesting man. Smart. Spoke very knowledgeably of the political climate at that time,” said Koch, the screenwriter of
Casablanca
and
Sergeant York.
“I think people tend to see him as another John Wayne figure; maybe he turned into that, I don’t know, but I found that to be very far from the truth at that time. I liked him. I’m sorry we didn’t get to work together.”

It is surprising that Mitchum—a man with such associates and known to make mention of his days as a longshoreman (one of the more politically suspect forms of labor at the time) and of his authorship of a play,
Fellow Traveler,
not unsympathetic to Communist strike leader Harry Bridges—did not himself become a target for any of the self-apppointed investigators and Red-chasers, who cast their nets wide and recognized no statute of limitations on radicalism. “The play . . . remains unknown,” he told writer Jerry Roberts. “The HUAC never had any interest in me.” And that was that.