This Day in Film History (Birth of Robert Mitchum, Postwar King of Cool)

August 6, 1917— Robert Mitchum, whose image of anti-heroic cool made him an emblem of postwar disillusionment even as it masked his very real concern for his work, was born in Bridgeport, Conn. 

Mitchum’s list of noteworthy quotes is long and often hilariously crusty (e.g., “Young actors love me--they think if that big slob can make it, there's a chance for us”), and Lee Server's 2001 biography was titled, all too appropriately, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don't Care.”  The actor’s contempt for filmmaking as a haven for bullies and pretenders was real enough. In these circumstances, it was better that he never give such individuals the satisfaction of thinking he cared about the work. 

Except that, sometimes, it leaked out. While directing Mitchum in El Dorado, an astonished Howard Hawks exclaimed, “You’re a big phony—you’re one of the hardest-working guys I ever saw.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” Mitchum said wryly.

Even industry talent who could not overlook Mitchum’s flip remarks or his penchant for spectacular hellraising still found it hard not to acknowledge what he brought to the screen, such as director Don Siegel, who, in a 1968 interview included in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1997 Who the Devil Made It, recalled their work on The Big Steal (1949), made after the actor’s arrest and conviction for marijuana usage:

“When Mitchum wasn't drunk, which was infrequent, I got along very well with him. He has his own inimitable style. It's impossible to give him a reading and one shouldn't, because his delivery is entirely different. I have a great deal of respect for him—I think it's his privilege and he's very successful doing it. He leads a very strange life. Maybe next week I'll be working with him. I don't look forward to it.”

The fact that Siegel thought he might work with him again said something about the actor’s enduring appeal, not just to audiences but to a variety of directors who employed him in a surprising array of roles. 

Before WWII, Mitchum’s famous sleepy-eyed appearance (“Old Rumple Eyes” was one of his nicknames) might have led him to be typecast simply as a hood. But the horrors of a world lurching out of control led audiences to see him as an Everyman just trying to hold his own, and the actor’s own difficult background (poverty in Bridgeport, arrest as a teenage hobo that led to work on a chain gang, that aforementioned pot bust) gave him an instinctive feel for his characters (often drifters and loners) that compensated for his lack of thespian training. 

In particular, in film noir (Out of the Past) and neo-noir (Farewell, My Lovely), Mitchum seemed such an archetypal representative of a world he never made that many would have been surprised to learn he hadn’t been born in a raincoat, fending off dangerous women. 

In the end, consider his range: romantic lead (Two for the Seesaw), alcoholic sheriff (El Dorado), sensitive middle-aged Irish schoolteacher (Ryan’s Daughter), small-time hood (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and an insolent, terrifying sexual predator out for revenge against the lawyer who helped put him away (Cape Fear). Above all, there is his breakout role as the war-weary but thoughtful Captain Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), which landed him his first and only Oscar nomination. His company commander--weary beyond all measure, but committed equally to achieving his mission and looking out for his men--is a virtual prototype for Tom Hanks' similar role in Saving Private Ryan.

Mitchum passed away in 1997, only one day before his co-star in the 1978 Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep, James Stewart. The two embodied two powerful images of the American male: one, of the devil-may-care variety; the other, of American decency. But maybe they had more in common than might at first appear. In both actors' films, their American male comes under enormous pressure, and audiences believed instinctively that each was reacting according to his nature.

This Day in Film History ('Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' Paranoid Paragon, Released)

February 6, 1956 – A classic of the sci-fi and paranoid film genres, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was released, tapping into multiple free-floating fears of enemies within by following a small town being taken over by creatures sprouted from mysterious vegetation growing unseen in the dark.

The name of this strange growth was “pod.” It was with some trepidation, then, that I heard several years ago that the major new listening device of the last several years was the Apple iPod. What was Steve Jobs trying to do to us? I wondered.

Then I remembered: It was Bill Gates, the geek with the roll-over-‘em instincts of a high-tech Capone, who was more likely to foist on the world an evil alien monstrosity than Steve Jobs, an overgrown adolescent given to exclaiming that things were “insanely great.” I breathed easy.

Not while watching this film, though. Made at close to the height of fears of a takeover of America by the Soviet Union (and less than a decade after Eastern Europe really was taken over by Stalin and his minions), it was also made at the same time Senator Joseph McCarthy was spreading fear and fostering needless conformity through his Communist witch-hunting. People have pointed to both phenomena as the real subject of this thriller.

It was also within a decade of a crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico of what the Air Force reported was a weather balloon and what conspiracy-mongers of a certain bent insisted was a UFO. (I discovered from reading Christopher Buckley’s hilarious satire Little Green Men that Bill Clinton’s old Arkansas buddy, Webster Hubbell, was given two mandates by the new President when he took his post in the Attorney-General’s office: “One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”)

What historian Richard Hofstadter called The Paranoid Style in American Politics found ample seed in the 1950s, then—as well as our own.

The original source material was The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, most famous for the time-travel classic Time and Again. Depending on your politics or your general view of life, Finney was either being truthful or disingenuous when he denied any political intent in his book, claiming it was just meant to be popular entertainment.

No matter. Sometimes an author’s creation is so original that it captures the hopes and fears of other times besides the ones for which he or she writes.

Such was the case with this B-movie—helped in no small measure by crisp direction from Don Siegel.

Over the course of his 49-year career in movies, Siegel probably became best known for his taut, no-nonsense work in sci-fi, war and cop movies, and his influence can still be seen in the quick, economically shot films of his star and protégé, Clint Eastwood.

But I was really pleased to find out that this longtime Hollywood vet started his career as – are you ready?—a film librarian. (I did not learn this from the DVD I watched of his film a few months ago – though that had some nice features, including an interview from about 20 years ago with McCarthy.)

Years later, a CD of Finney’s 1955 novel was narrated by Kristoffer Tabori.

The hero of the film, Dr. Miles Bennell, was played by Kevin McCarthy, the younger brother of the fine novelist-essayist-memoirist Mary McCarthy. His love interest was played by Dana Wynter, a German-British actress who a few years later played the desperately scheming heroine Kate Croy in the Playhouse 90 adaptation of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

(This latter role of Wynter’s was later taken up by Helena Bonham-Carter in a 1997 movie. One of my friends – and he knows who he is! – has classified HB-C as a member of what he calls his “DHBBs” – i.e., Dark-Haired British Beauties. He’s so proud of this acronym that I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to trademark it yet.)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also unique for spawning (you think I could resist that word?) three sequels, including one that I think measures up close well to the original. Although last year’s Nicole Kidman-Daniel Craig film The Invasion was generally faulted for lacking subtlety (even the title, a truncated version of the original, was probably a tipoff of something gone awry), the 1993 Gabrielle Anwar-Meg Tilly flick, Body Snatchers, has its share of adherents. (Not having seen it, I’m not one of them.)

The first version of this now-classic story that I saw, however, was not Siegel’s black-and-white thriller set in the small-town one of Santa Mira, but Philip Kaufman’s color remake, filmed in San Francisco in 1978. Siegel and McCarthy have cameos here—a neat little tip of the hat – but Kaufman has updated it in a way that still has not lost its salience and urgency 30 years later.

Kaufman, spotlighting a celebrity psychotherapist-author played by Leonard Nimoy, captured the emptiness of what Tom Wolfe christened “The Me Decade” – an age that gave rise to EST, Scientology, and all manner of other cults and psychobabble.

This time, the threat to mind and soul comes not from a political ideology that stamps out individuality, but from people’s desire to eradicate all psychic pain through any substance available, no matter what the cost to whatever makes them human – a possibility forecast in the soma of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, and now realized in Prozac and all the other products created by the pharmaceutical industry.

(A broad-ranging examination of the latter has just appeared: Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, by Charles Barber. I met Charlie, a one-time Englewood resident, at a writers’ workshop some years ago, and am looking forward to reading his new book.)

I particularly enjoyed Jeff Goldblum as Donald Sutherland’s hilariously geeky friend. And the ending is a powerhouse – not only, perhaps, a retrospective condemnation of the McCarthy-era practice of “naming names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also a return to the mood, if not the actual events, of Siegel’s original downbeat ending, one that his studio forced him to change.

It was the Kaufman remake that inspired one of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Invasion of the Brain Snatchers,” first aired on April 19, 1980—not only the tail-end of the show’s original golden age, but also the beginning of the Reagan Era in America. In this spoof, diehard liberals suddenly began mouthing the worst clichés of the Reagan candidacy, e.g., “Unleash the oil companies!”

(Well, we did. And where did that get us? Still heavily oil dependent, only now with less oil to go around than before.)

There’s a legend that one of the stars of the 1956 Invasion, Carolyn Jones, was the victim of a practical joke in which some members of the cast or crew left a dummy “pod” on the bed in her trailer.

It sounds like something that the character she would later play on The Addams Family, Morticia, would find mildly intriguing. But supposedly, the actress ran screaming from her trailer in terror.

How like the main characters (including her own) in this great film – and how like audiences in all the years since this classic was sprung on an all-too-ready public.