The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (288 page)

Mitchell only went to Hollywood in 1935, after an all-round career in the theatre as actor and director. He was immediately drafted into good parts in big films:
Craig’s Wife
(36, Dorothy Arzner);
Theodora Goes Wild
(36, Richard Boleslavsky);
Make Way for Tomorrow
(37, Leo McCarey);
Lost Horizon
(37, Capra);
The Hurricane
(38, Ford);
Trade Winds
(38, Tay Garnett);
The Long Voyage Home
(40, Ford);
Three Cheers for the Irish
(40, Lloyd Bacon);
Our Town
(40, Sam Wood);
Angels Over Broadway
(41, Lee Garmes and Ben Hecht);
Out of the Fog
(41, Anatole Litvak);
Joan of Paris
(42, Robert Stevenson);
Song of the Islands
(42, Walter Lang);
Moontide
(42, Archie Mayo);
This Above All
(42, Litvak);
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Julien Duvivier);
The Immortal Sergeant
(42, John M. Stahl);
The Black Swan
(42, Henry King);
Flesh and Fantasy
(43, Duvivier);
Bataan
(43, Garnett);
The Sullivans
(44, Bacon);
Wilson
(44, King);
Dark Waters
(44, André de Toth);
Buffalo Bill
(44, William Wellman);
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, Stahl);
Captain Eddie
(45, Bacon);
Adventure
(45, Fleming); the forgetful Uncle Billy in
It’s a Wonderful Life
(46, Capra);
The Dark Mirror
(46, Robert Siodmak);
The Romance of Rosy Ridge
(47, Roy Rowland);
High Barbaree
(47, Jack Conway);
Silver River
(48, Raoul Walsh);
Alias Nick Beal
(49, John Farrow);
Journey into Light
(51, Stuart Heisler);
High Noon
(52, Fred Zinnemann);
Destry
(54, George Marshall);
Secret of the Incas
(54, Jerry Hopper);
While the City Sleeps
(56, Fritz Lang);
By Love Possessed
(61, John Sturges); and
A Pocketful of Miracles
(61, Capra).

Robert Mitchum
(1917–97), b. Bridgeport, Connecticut
Dialogue from Jacques Tourneur’s
Out of the Past
(47), a taxi driver to private eye Mitchum:

“You look like you’re in trouble.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t look like it.”

This is the man mocked throughout his career for listlessness, inertia, hooded eyes, and lack of interest. It is a well-worked argument. Words like “beefcake,” “tough,” and “laconic” hang from it, as well as the 1948 jail sentence for possessing marijuana, a variety of publicized scuffles, and his candid unhappiness marooned on the Dingle peninsula with David Lean’s lush and slow
Ryan’s Daughter
.

How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies? Start by referring back to that dialogue: it touches the intriguing ambiguity in Mitchum’s work, the idea of a man thinking and feeling beneath a calm exterior that there is no need to put “acting” on the surface. And for a big man, he is immensely agile, capable of unsmiling humor, menace, stoicism, and above all, of watching other people as though he were waiting to make up his mind. Of course, Mitchum has been in bad films, when he slips into the weariness of someone who has read the script, but hopes it may be rewritten. But, since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.

Mitchum’s father died when he was very young and he left home in his teens. After a variety of jobs, he entered the Long Beach Theater and began working as a writer, actor, and producer. He wrote for radio and then entered movies, first as an extra and then as a heavy in Hopalong Cassidy movies. It was with the end of the war, the appetite for new faces, and the onset of naturalism that Mitchum became a star. At first, he was a guy like all the others, in
The Human Comedy
(43, Clarence Brown); in Laurel and Hardy’s
The Dancing Masters
(43, Malcolm St. Clair);
Corvette-K255
(43, Richard Rosson); Tay Garnett’s
Bataan
(43); Ray Enright’s
Gung Ho;
Le Roy’s
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
(44); and getting special attention in Wellman’s
The Story of G.I. Joe
(45).

But he had already been much more individual in William Castle’s
When Strangers Marry
(44) and he was remarkably good in Minnelli’s
Undercurrent
(46), John Brahm’s
The Locket
(46), and Dmytryk’s
Till the End of Time
(46). He was already acclaimed as a tough guy and was cast in a series of excellent B films at RKO: the already noted
Out of the Past; The Big Steal
(49, Don Siegel);
My Forbidden Past
(50, Robert Stevenson); two excellent John Farrow movies,
Where Danger Lives
(50) and
His Kind of Woman
(51); von Sternberg’s
Macao
(52); with Jack Palance and Linda Darnell in
Second Chance
(53, Rudolph Maté). Usually opposite Jane Russell and Jane Greer in these movies, Mitchum created the character of a fatalistic “underworld” man with a lightness not even Bogart could rival. Thought of as immediate audience fodder when they were made, these films now look much better than the vaunted “realist” thrillers made at Fox.

Mitchum was already broadening his range; no matter how casual he seemed, he figured in so many unconventional and adventurous films: thus in Raoul Walsh’s
Pursued
(47); in
Crossfire
(47)—Dmytryk’s best film;
Desire Me
(47, George Cukor and Jack Conway); Robert Wise’s
Blood on the Moon
(48);
The Red Pony
(49, Lewis Milestone); Tay Garnett’s
One Minute to Zero
(52); John Cromwell’s
The Racket
(51); Preminger’s marvelous
Angel Face
(52); Nicholas Ray’s
The Lusty Men
(52); and Wellman’s
Track of the Cat
(54). His performance in
The Lusty Men
as the veteran rodeo rider is a beautiful study in independence brought to a realization of loneliness without a trace of sentimentality, never far from humor and never separating manliness from intelligence. It was a character that Mitchum refined in Preminger’s
River of No Return
(54);
Not as a Stranger
(55, Stanley Kramer); in Sheldon Reynolds’s enjoyable
Foreign Intrigue
(56); in Richard Fleischer’s
Bandido
(56); in two films for Robert Parrish,
Fire Down Below
(57) and
The Wonderful Country
(59); and in
The Angry Hills
(59, Robert Aldrich).

At about this time, Mitchum began to attract respectable attention—if for the wrong reasons. For Huston’s
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
(57) and Zinneman’s
The Sundowners
(60), for instance, rather than Minnelli’s
Home from the Hill
(60), while his preacher in Charles Laughton’s
The Night of the Hunter
(55) went largely unnoticed. In this unusually stylized film, for the only time in his career Mitchum acted outside himself, and his demented fraud is one of the most compelling studies of evil in American cinema.

In fact, the more praise Mitchum got the less interesting his films became:
The Grass Is
Greener
(60, Stanley Donen);
Cape Fear
(61, J. Lee Thompson);
Rampage
(63, Phil Karlson);
Two for the Seesaw
(62, Robert Wise); and
Mister Moses
(65, Ronald Neame). In 1967 Mitchum made what was, sadly, his only Hawks film,
El Dorado
, and was excellent in it. But he seemed increasingly restless with films like
Ryan’s Daughter
and barely exercised by pleasant but unenterprising Westerns like
Five Card Stud
(68, Henry Hathaway),
Young Billy Young
(69, Burt Kennedy), and
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys
(69, Kennedy). Against this, he was excellent in Losey’s
Secret Ceremony
(68) and seemed to need more demanding parts than
The Wrath of God
(72, Ralph Nelson), in which he played a supposedly fast-shooting defrocked priest, infinitely more coarsegrained than the rabid preacher from
The Night of the Hunter
.

His weary genius rose again as the luckless, small-time informant in
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
(73, Peter Yates), and he went back to violence in
The Yakuza
(75, Sydney Pollack). His Marlowe in
Farewell, My Lovely
(75, Dick Richards) was a loving portrait of aging honor among all the remembered traps of film noir.

He stayed busy, in movies wretchedly beneath his classical status: Admiral Halsey in
Midway
(76, Jack Smight); wasted as Brady in
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan);
The Amsterdam Kill
(77, Robert Clouse); Marlowe again in the unspeakable
The Big Sleep
(78, Michael Winner); with a kangaroo in
Matilda
(78, Daniel Mann).

Just as Mitchum was once indifferent to the great work he was doing, so now he was impervious to the dross that awaits most loyal veterans. He was never more himself or less involved than in the hours and years as “Pug” Henry in
The Winds of War
and
War and Remembrance
, undying studies of mental fatigue in the human face. Elsewhere, Mitchum worked as if he had a fruit machine for an agent:
Breakthrough
(78, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Nightkill
(80, Ted Post);
Agency
(81, George Kaczender);
That Championship Season
(82, Jason Miller);
One Shoe Makes It Murder
(82, William Hale);
A Killer in the Family
(83, Richard T. Heffron);
Maria’s Lovers
(84, Andrei Konchalovsky);
The Ambassador
(84, Thompson); with Deborah Kerr again in
Reunion at Fairborough
(85, Herbert Wise); as William Randolph Hearst in
The Hearst and Davies Affair
(85, David Lowell Rich);
Thompson’s Last Run
(86, Jerrold Freedman);
Promises to Keep
(86, Noel Black), playing with his son, Chris;
Mr. North
(88, Danny Huston) on which he replaced John Huston;
Scrooged
(88, Richard Donner);
Brotherhood of the Rose
(89, Marvin J. Chomsky);
Jake Spanner, Private Eye
(89, Lee H. Katzin);
A Family for Joe
(90, Jeffrey Melman) as a homeless man who adopts some kids—it was a short-lived TV series; and in the remake of
Cape Fear
(91, Martin Scorsese). His voice could be heard on commercials, too—best of all in those for beef—“It’s what’s for dinner!” (the most excited he had sounded in years). He narrated
Tombstone
(93, George Pan Cosmatos) and bowed out with
Dead Man
(96, Jim Jarmusch).

Untouchable.

Tom
(Thomas)
Mix
(1880–1940), b. Mix Run, Pennsylvania
One of the biggest problems in making Westerns is getting the horses to act without fuss or delay. You need decent, amenable animals; you need actors who can ride and who can get the horses back to a start line quickly for a retake; you need men who can handle the horses between setups. They are called wranglers, and there is a tradition of people who got a movie career for no better reason than their skill with horses: Ben Johnson began that way; for years before his glorious performance in
The Grey Fox
, Richard Farnsworth had done stunt riding for pictures like
Red River
and
The Tin Star
. For decades, Yakima Canutt did the most daring stunts. But no one so surely rode into stardom as Tom Mix.

He was the son of a lumberman, a sergeant in the army who never saw action, and a rider of such skill that he went from the Texas Rangers to a Wild West show in 1906. He was hired first by the Selig studio to provide and look after horses. But when the movie crews saw how he could ride he was promoted to stunt work. Then they noticed his dark, lean looks, his way with clothes, and wondered why the guy taking the risks might not be the star.

Mix was making movies—one-or two-reelers—from 1910 onward. In 1917, he went over to Fox and took on a more dandyish look. He directed some of his own pictures, and he very carefully organized his image—along with his horse Tony. His movies were full of fast action and thrills, a clear advance on the grave claims for authenticity made by William S. Hart. Mix was happy to be a showman and he was king of the celluloid range in the 1920s, making five or six films a year.

Sound reduced him, though he returned for a few years in the early thirties. Today, Mix is a curiosity, seldom seen, vaguely performed by Bruce Willis in the film
Sunset
. But he was a knockout in his day, and he was a surviving star on radio and in comic books at least ten years after his death (in a car crash). Kids would not let him go. He stands for that posse of cowboy stars who made thousands of films, nearly all with the same plot, but with a great-looking guy on an adorable horse: William Boyd, Dustin Farnum, Broncho Billy Anderson, Roy Rogers … and Harry Carey, except that Carey went further, to be the vice-president in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
and the cattle dealer in
Red River
, a man who could talk and think without a horse under him.

Kenji Mizoguchi
(1898–1956), b. Tokyo
1922:
Ai Ni Yomigaeru Hi; Furusato; Seishun no Yumeji; Joen no Chimata; Haizan no Uta wa Kanashi; Rupimono; Chi to Rei
. 1923:
Kiri no Minato; Yoru; Haikyo no Naka; Toge no Uta
. 1924:
Kanashiki Hakuchi; Gendai no Jowo; Josei wat Suyoshi; Shichimencho no Yukue; Samidare Soshi; Jin Kyo
. 1925:
Musen Fusen; Kanraku no Onna; Akatsuki no Shi; Kyokubadan no Jowo; Gakuso o Idete; Shiragiku wa Nageku; Daichi wa Hohoemu; Akai Yuhi Ni Terasarete; Furusato no Uta; Ningen; Gaijo no Sukechi; Shirayuri wa Nageku
. 1926:
Nogi Shogun to Kuma San; Doka-o; Kami-ningyo Haru no Sassayaki; Shin Ono Ga Tsumi; Kyoren no Onna Shisho; Kane; Kaikoku Danji; Kin ou Kane
. 1927:
Ko-on; Jihi Shincho
. 1928:
Hito no Issho
. 1929:
Nihonbashi; Tokyo Koshin-Kyoku; Asahi Wa Kagayaku; Tokai Kokyogaku
. 1930:
Furusato; Tojin Okichi
. 1931:
Shikamo Karera wa Yuku
. 1932:
Toki no Ujigami; Manmo Kengoku no Reimei
. 1933:
Takino Shiraito; Gion Matsuri; Kamikaze Ren; Shimpu Ren
. 1934:
Aizo Toge; Orizuru Osen
. 1935:
Maria no Oyuki; Gubijinso
. 1936:
Naniwa Ereji; Gion no Shimai/Sisters of the Gion
. 1937:
Aien-Kyo
. 1938:
Ah Furusato; Roei no Uta
. 1939:
Zangiku Monogatari/The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
. 1940:
Naniwa Onna; Geido Ichidai Otoko
. 1942:
Musashi Miyamoto; Genroku Chushingura/ The Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era
. 1944:
Danjuro Sandei
. 1945:
Hissyo Ka; Meito Bijomaru
. 1946:
Josei no Shori; Utamaro o Meguru Gonin no Onna
. 1947:
Joyu Sumako no Koi
. 1948:
Yoru no Onna Tachi; Waga Koi wa Moenu
. 1950:
Yuki Fujin Ezu
. 1951:
Oyusama; Musashino Fujin/Madame Musashino
. 1952:
Sai kaku Ichidai Onna/The Life of Oharu
. 1953:
Ugetsu Monogatari; Gion Bayashi
. 1954:
Sansho Dayu; Chikamatsu Monogatari; Uwasa no Onna/The Crucified Woman
. 1955:
Yôkihi/Princess Yang Kwei Fei; Shin Heike Monogatari
. 1956:
Akasen Chitai/Street of Shame
. 1957:
Osaka Monogatari
(completed by Kimisiburo Yoshimura after Mizoguchi’s death).