The celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Mitchum—he was born on August 6, 1917 and died in 1997, just one month short of his eightieth birthday—began in earnest this summer when Il Cinema Ritrovato presented its eleven-film retrospective. Mitchum’s spirit wafted through Locarno in August when the festival presented Out of the Past (1947) as part of its Jacques Tourneur retrospective, a landmark film for both the director and his star. More screenings, series, and tributes have cropped up here and there, but the centenary culminates in the Robert Mitchum Retrospective at this year’s New York Film Festival, twenty-four films made between 1945 (William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe) and 1995 (Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man; image above).
“In all, he racked up more than 130 credits, with his laconic drawl, moral ambiguity and cynical, heavy-lidded passivity seeming to suit every genre,” wrote David Parkinson for the BFI in August. “But Mitchum knew his limits. ‘People can’t make up their minds whether I’m the greatest actor in the world—or the worst. Matter of fact, neither can I.’” Parkinson then writes up a list of ten “essential films,” and all but one of them, John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), are screening in the NYFF retrospective. You can supplement the festival’s program notes, then, with Parkinson’s comments on The Story of G.I. Joe, Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1953), Wellman’s Track of the Cat (1954), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962), Howard Hawks’s El Dorado (1966), Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and Dick Richards’s Farewell, My Lovely (1975).
“Like many of Hollywood’s ‘naturals,’ Mitchum was so comfortable in his own skin that his acting was often invisible,” notes Tony Pipolo in his overview of the retrospective for Artforum. “Directors thought he was doing nothing until they saw the rushes. . . . Key to Mitchum’s mystique was that his impressive physique—a chesty bulk that moved with animal grace, somewhere between sleek panther and imposing stag—framed an enigmatic core. Yet directors said he was anything but detached, that they could actually see him thinking, so attuned to everyone else’s lines that he never missed a beat.” Pipolo moves on to, among other films, Raoul Walsh’s “Freudian western” Pursued (1947), Robert Parrish’s The Wonderful Country (1959) in which Mitchum is “positively mellow,” and The Lusty Men (1952), “one of Nicholas Ray’s most beautiful and underrated films.”
In the Notebook, Greg Cwik walks us through the life, onscreen and off. As a young man, Mitchum “smolders, with that boozy, baritone voice, seductive and soporific, a cigarette perched between wispy lips below which is a chin cleft like a geological fault. He’s slithery with innuendo. There’s an effortless allure to it all, a mix of malaise and braggadocio, a cocksure machismo and a hint of fragility. He’s ever-cool, a paradox, ‘radiating heat without warmth,’ as Richard Brody said. A poet, a prodigious lover and drinker, a bad boy; his penchant for marijuana landed him in jail, and in the photographs from his two-month stay he looks like a natural fit.” When he made The Friends of Eddie Coyle, he was only fifty-five, “the same age as Tom Cruise in 2017 and just a year older than Brad Pitt, but he looks as weathered as a cathedral.”
For Film Journal International, Daniel Eagan talks with Dan Sullivan, who co-programmed the retrospective with NYFF director Kent Jones: “For me, Mitchum is like the most confident, the most knowledgeable guy in film noir. He's a man of experience, one who's not surprised by any situation he finds himself in. But he’s not a superhero, he's subject to the same host of chaotic variables that we all are.”
VIDEO
Mitchum “was known as an avid reader and a bit of a renaissance man,” wrote Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times back in August. “He wrote poetry, songs, recorded two albums and once reportedly penned the libretto for an event Orson Welles directed at the Hollywood Bowl. An intimidating man of contradictions, he could be surly and charming, aloof and loquacious, humble and arrogant, pugnacious and gentle, testing the mettle of reporters from gossip columnist Hedda Hopper to the Los Angeles Times’ own Charles Champlin.” Crust collects a string of memorable quotes from interviews the paper conducted with him over several decades.
And, as noted relatively recently, an episode of the Film Comment Podcast features Imogen Sara Smith, Kent Jones, contributor Steven Mears, and digital producer Violet Lucca discussing highlights from the retrospective (55’15”).
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