Robert Mitchum — Too Cool for the Method, Too Good for the Material

Biography

From the Chain Gang to Preacher Powell's Tattoos

Born Robert Charles Durman Mitchum on August 6, 1917, in Bridgeport, Connecticut — the son of a railroad worker killed when Mitchum was two, raised through the Depression in various locations, a genuine drifter who was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah at fourteen. He worked in a factory, on a chain gang, as a coal miner and a boxer and a professional astrologer before ending up in California, where he began appearing in westerns.

William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) — Mitchum as Lieutenant Bill Walker, the leader of a combat unit in Italy — earned him his only Academy Award nomination and established the quality that would define the noir career: the ease that reads as danger, the hooded eyes that conceal more than they reveal, the specific physical presence of a man who has done things the audience hasn't and who is not going to explain them.

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) — Mitchum as Harry Powell, the serial-killing preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles — is the defining performance of his career and one of the most frightening things in American cinema. Laughton's only film as director; Mitchum's only genuine departure from the noir persona into something that operates at the level of fairy tale and nightmare simultaneously. The role required him to be evil in a way the genre pictures had never demanded; he delivered an evil so complete and so charming it has never been equalled in the form.

He died on July 1, 1997, in Santa Barbara, California, of lung cancer and emphysema. He spent the last decades of his career collecting royalties, making films he had no particular interest in, and telling interviewers that acting was easy if you learned your lines and showed up. The interviewers invariably found this more interesting than the films.

1917

Born in Bridgeport; father dead at two; arrested for vagrancy at fourteen

1943

Westerns; the B-picture factory; the presence already completely formed

1945

Story of G.I. Joe — Oscar nomination; the quality established; the career begins

1947

Arrested for marijuana; serves 60 days; emerges more famous than before

1947–55

The noir decade: Out of the Past, Build My Gallows High, the hooded eyes

1955

Night of the Hunter — Powell; LOVE HATE; Laughton; the greatest villain

1997

Dies in Santa Barbara; age 79; told everyone acting was easy; they believed him

Filmography

From Powell's Tattoos to Jeff Bailey's Shadows

1955Psychological Horror · Charles Laughton · Shelley Winters

The Night of the Hunter

Charles Laughton's fairy-tale noir — Mitchum as Harry Powell, the serial killer who marries widows for their money and who pursues two children across Depression-era America while singing hymns and preaching. The most frightening performance in American cinema; the LOVE and HATE tattoos; the hymn-singing; the specific quality of a man whose evil is so completely realised it achieves the status of myth rather than mere villainy.

Powell's quality — the evil that presents itself as good, the violence that clothes itself in scripture — is played by Mitchum with the ease that he brought to everything, and the ease in this case is the most frightening element: the preacher who is entirely comfortable with what he is. The sequence where Powell's shadow appears on the barn wall, rising toward the children — Laughton's expressionist staging, Mitchum's controlled performance — is the most purely cinematic image of menace in American film history.

1947Film Noir · Jacques Tourneur · Jane Greer

Out of the Past

Jacques Tourneur's noir — Mitchum as Jeff Bailey, the private detective hired to find a gangster's girl and who falls for her instead, and who spends the rest of the film trying to outrun the consequences of the moment when he stopped being professional. The definitive noir performance; the hooded eyes and the easy manner concealing the specific quality of a man who knows he is going to lose and has decided to lose on his own terms.

Jeff's quality — the fatalism that reads as cool, the acceptance of disaster that looks like grace — is played by Mitchum with the specific ease that made him the genre's essential figure. "Baby, I don't care" — the line is the noir manifesto, delivered without self-pity or drama, by a man who has measured the situation and found it not worth pretending about. The line is improvised; the sentiment is constitutional; the ease is the performance.

1962Psychological Thriller · J. Lee Thompson · Gregory Peck

Cape Fear

J. Lee Thompson's thriller — Mitchum as Max Cady, the ex-convict who returns to terrorise the lawyer he blames for his imprisonment and the lawyer's family. The performance that demonstrated the Powell quality was not specific to fairy tale: the evil of Cape Fear's Cady is contemporary, functional, and specific rather than mythological, and Mitchum plays it with the same ease he brought to everything, which in this context is the most frightening quality imaginable.

Cady's quality — the intelligence applied entirely to revenge, the patience of someone who has spent years planning and is now executing — is played by Mitchum with the dangerousness that the hooded eyes had always implied and that the noir pictures had mostly kept implicit. The dock scene — Cady following the family in the water — is the most sustained piece of physical menace in his career, the ease now fully weaponised against people who can see it coming and cannot stop it.

1945War Drama · William Wellman · Ernie Pyle

The Story of G.I. Joe

William Wellman's war film based on Ernie Pyle's journalism — Mitchum as Lieutenant Bill Walker, the commander of a combat unit in Italy. The Oscar nomination; the performance that established the quality the genre pictures would exploit; and the role in which the ease first read as earned rather than innate — the military leadership of a man who has decided that steadiness under pressure is the only thing he can offer his men and who provides it absolutely.

Oscar Nom

Walker's quality — the officer's calm that is not indifference but the decision to be calm, made once and maintained — is played by Mitchum with the specific authenticity that Ernie Pyle, who was on set during filming, credited as the most accurate representation of combat leadership he had seen in film. The final scene — Walker's death, the soldiers carrying him — was wept over by actual veterans who had watched the production; Wellman said he had never seen a film affect its own crew that way.

Recognition

One Nomination — Film Noir's Essential Presence — Powell's Tattoos

Oscar Nomination — Best Supporting Actor

1946

The Story of G.I. Joe

One nomination in fifty years of working — the Academy's single formal acknowledgment of the most consistently undervalued career in Hollywood history. The nomination confirmed what the quality had always made evident: that the ease was not indifference, that the hooded eyes concealed something genuine, that the genre pictures were better than the genre deserved. He was not nominated again. The oversight is now considered one of Oscar history's most sustained failures.

The Only Nomination

The Marijuana Arrest

1948

60 Days — Enhanced Fame

Arrested for marijuana possession and sentenced to sixty days in a California prison farm in 1948 — which, in the studio era, should have ended his career. Instead, the arrest and the equanimity with which he served the sentence made him more famous, more interesting, and more bankable. RKO's publicists later admitted they could not have engineered better publicity. The studio system's authority over the personal lives of its stars did not extend to Mitchum's specific form of indifference.

The Arrest That Made Him

The Night of the Hunter

1955

The Greatest Film Villain

Harry Powell — the LOVE and HATE tattoos, the hymn-singing, the absolute comfort with his own evil — is consistently ranked among the greatest film villains in cinema history. The performance required Mitchum to do something none of the genre pictures had asked of him: to fully commit to a character whose evil is not contained by cool. He committed completely, and the result has never been equalled in the form.

The Greatest Villain

AFI 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains

2003

Harry Powell — #29

The American Film Institute ranked Harry Powell the twenty-ninth greatest villain in American cinema history — the institutional acknowledgment of what The Night of the Hunter had accomplished in 1955. The ranking placed Powell above most of the explicitly monstrous figures in the genre and confirmed that the specific combination of ease, scripture, and complete moral vacancy that Mitchum had found for the character was something the form had not produced before and has not produced since.

AFI Villain #29

Identity

The Cool — The Danger — Powell's Shadow on the Wall

The Performed Ease

He told interviewers for fifty years that acting was easy if you learned your lines and showed up. The interviewers believed him; the performances contradicted him. The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, Cape Fear — these are not the work of a man who showed up and read the lines; they are the work of a man who had decided to disguise the craft as indifference, and whose craft was consequently underestimated for his entire career.

The Hooded Eyes

The hooded eyes — the physical quality that defined the noir persona — suggested a man who had seen more than he was going to tell you about, and who had made his peace with all of it. The suggestion was accurate: the drifter who had been jailed for vagrancy at fourteen and had spent years in occupations the studio biographies declined to describe had the specific quality the genre required, because he had genuinely earned it.

The Genre's Undervaluation

Film noir was not considered a serious genre in its own time; the critical establishment that has since canonised Out of the Past and Build My Gallows High and The Night of the Hunter arrived after the films were made and after the performances were delivered without the acknowledgment they deserved. The genre's posthumous reputation is largely the revaluation of Mitchum's work, which required the passage of time to be seen clearly.

LOVE and HATE

The LOVE and HATE tattoos on Harry Powell's knuckles — chosen by Laughton, proposed to Mitchum, accepted without the irony the actor usually brought to his material — became the most reproduced image of his career and one of cinema's most enduring symbols. The Preacher's sermon about the hands has been quoted, referenced, and imitated in American culture continuously since 1955; the image is larger than the film that produced it.

Legacy

Powell's Hymn — Jeff Bailey's Fatalism — The Ease That Was Never Easy

Robert Mitchum's legacy is the cool that concealed the craft — the fifty years of insisting acting was easy while doing it better than the people who took it most seriously. One Oscar nomination; the greatest villain in American cinema in The Night of the Hunter; the definitive noir performance in Out of the Past; and the specific quality — the hooded eyes, the ease, the danger just beneath the surface — that made him film noir's essential man.

Harry Powell singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while his shadow falls on the barn wall is the career's defining image. The man who told everyone acting was easy produced the most frightening thing in American cinema — which is either the most elaborate professional joke in the history of the form, or the most honest thing anyone has ever said about the relationship between craft and its concealment.

Oscar Nominations

G.I. Joe, 1946 — the only one

Jail Time Served

Marijuana, 1948 — became more famous

60 days

AFI Villain Ranking

Harry Powell, The Night of the Hunter

#29

Age at Death

Santa Barbara, July 1, 1997

RobertMitchum

From the Chain Gang to Preacher Powell's Tattoos

From Powell's Tattoos to Jeff Bailey's Shadows

One Nomination — Film Noir's Essential Presence — Powell's Tattoos

The Cool — The Danger — Powell's Shadow on the Wall

Powell's Hymn — Jeff Bailey's Fatalism — The Ease That Was Never Easy