ROBERT MITCHUM:“BABY, I DON’T CARE”
BY LEE SERVER. ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, 590 PAGES, $32.50.

No question that Robert Mitchum is a star worthy of a biography, and in the first few pages of the clumsily titled Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” you might suspect that Lee Server has drawn a bead on his subject. “The big, muscular physique pegged him for tough guys and outdoor parts, cowboys and soldiers,” Server writes. “But the attitude (wry, ambivalent), the style (indolent, soft-spoken), had none of the usual vitality and aggression of the standard-issue male star. He smoldered, had that opiated, heavy-lidded look, had an almost feminine languor, moved only as much as necessary and then with a measured, sinuous grace. He seemed to withdraw from the camera as others would then try to attack it. But maybe this was some kind of trick because you found yourself watching him much more closely, afraid you would miss something. . . . His acting belonged to no school, no real tradition. He formed his screen characters from a mental storehouse of observational and experiential data and a musical approach to pace and intonation and the spatial relationship of performer to camera.” This is a first-rate piece of performance writing — wide yet precise, with a feeling for both what’s unique about Mitchum’s screen presence and what’s remarkable about him as an actor.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Server shoots his critical bolt in this early paragraph. Subsequent descriptions of Mitchum on screen either echo what he’s already written or else give us unhelpful generalizations like “Mitchum’s great ability as a movie actor — his range, depth, and power — clearly overwhelmed all but a very few other stars on the scene.” I did get excited when I read of the 1947 Pursued, “Its grave yet delirious romanticism was like Wuthering Heights transplanted to a gunslingers’ New Mexico,” and Server’s allusions to James Wong Howe’s lighting experiments sent me out to video stores in search of a copy. (Like many of Mitchum’s pictures, it’s unavailable.) But then, not 20 pages later, I came across this gushing response to the film noir Mitchum did for Jacques Tourneur the same year, Out of the Past: “one of the masterworks of golden age Hollywood, an extraordinary confluence of art and craft in the name of entertainment: the brilliant cast of whispering performers [whispering performers?], the lyrically cadenced hard-boiled dialogue and narration comparable to Chandler at his best.” Hell, I’ve seen Out of the Past: it’s gorgeously shot, but the plot is impenetrable, and I ended up catching it again a year later in the Brattle noir series because I couldn’t remember a single thing about it. (Server’s so fond of Out of the Past that he derived the title of his book from one of Mitchum’s lines in it.)

The book makes an acceptable read for a couple hundred pages. I enjoyed the stories about Mitchum’s hobo days, and about his first ventures before the cameras at United Artists in the Hopalong Cassidy horse operas (known as “Hoppys”). It’s amusing to hear how leftist screenwriter Michael Wilson, in the pre-blacklist days, slipped his cynical views of capitalism into a Hoppy called Border Patrol. I hadn’t realized that William Wellman infiltrated G.I. Joe with more than a hundred active-duty soldiers and had the professional actors in the cast live and drill with them. And director Edward Dmytryk’s description of how he did the tense social-conscience thriller Crossfire on a tight budget while evolving its striking, expressionistic look is very informative. Evidently Mitchum coached the children himself in The Night of the Hunter, the best picture he ever played in, as the director, Charles Laughton, had no patience for them.

These anecdotes are fun; so are the stories about Kirk Douglas trying to steal scenes from Mitchum in Out of the Past, director John Farrow’s sadistic behavior on the set of Where Danger Lives, and damn near everybody’s conduct on the set of Stanley Kramer’s overblown hospital melodrama Not As a Stranger — a collection of personalities that, as Mitchum admitted, “wasn’t a cast so much as a brewery.” The stories about Howard Hughes, who ran RKO into the ground in the late ’40s and early ’50s, are amazing, like all stories about Howard Hughes.

But if you’re looking for some insight into the life of Robert Mitchum, Server’s long-winded tome won’t help you out. That’s a pity, because Mitchum was indeed a fascinating paradox. He was tough and profane yet read widely and had a poetic side that astonished everybody. He affected a careless insouciance yet made more than 100 pictures, maintaining a disciplined steadiness about his craft while getting smashed and stoned on a daily basis. He slept with hundreds of women but stayed married to his first love, Dorothy Spence. And for years he managed to convince almost everybody that he was more of a personality than an actor, despite his work in G.I. Joe, Crossfire, The Night of the Hunter, The Sundowners, Cape Fear, and Going Home.

That last contradiction isn’t surprising when you consider that most of the movies he wound up in were camera fodder. Server doesn’t realize that’s the case: movie after movie, he reports, was a classic, often coming together magically despite the infelicities of the shooting process. He’s a true believer, and true believers don’t make good biographers. You come to the end of Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” without understanding much more about its subject than you did at the beginning.

Issue Date: April 5-12, 2001