It's.... Movie Time!
And today's Movie Time Post is dedicated to actor Robert Mitchum who was born on this date (August 6) in 1917 in in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
He road the rails like a friggin' hobo hopping freight cars travelling across the country wherever the railroad would take him.
He took work ditch digging, fruit picking, dishwashing, tree planting
In the summer of 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia and put on a local chain gang.
By Mitchum's account, he escaped and hitchhiked to Delaware.
He was injured in an accident that nearly cost him a leg.
For the next three years, Mitchum fought in 27 professional boxing matches but hung up his gloves after a fight broke his nose and left a scar on his left eye.
By 1937, Mitchum settled in Long Beach, California.
That's when he added "actor" to his resume.
Mitchum joined the Players Guild and made his stage debut in August 1937.
Stage work led to film work as Mitchum became a supporting player in the Hopalong Cassidy western series.
By 1944, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO
Mitchum's first film for RKO was a comedy called Girl Rush (1944). He was groomed for B-Western stardom in two Zane Grey adaptations, Nevada (1944) and West of the Pecos (1945).
Following the filming of those two Westerns, RKO lent Mitchum to independent producer Lester Cowan for a prominent supporting actor role in the critically acclaimed The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), directed by William A. Wellman.
Mitchum ultimately became best known for his work in film noir such as Crossfire I wrote about here.
Mitchum was signed to a new seven-year contract with RKO. This led to Mitchum getting the starring role in 1947's Out of the Past.
Out of the Past stars Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. The film was adapted from a 1946 novel Build My Gallows High.
Life is pretty good for Jeff Bailey in the rural mountain town of Bridgeport, California. He owns a local gas station and is in love with a woman named Ann Miller.
Until Joe Stefanos shows up to tell Jeff that Whit would wants to meet with Jeff in Lake Tahoe.
What's all this then? Who is "Whit"? Why does he insist on Jeff dropping everything to meet with him?
On the drive to Whit's place, Jeff relates the story to Ann.
Three years ago...
Jeff Bailey was Jeff Markham, a private investigator in New York, hired by Whit Sterling, a gambling kingpin, to find Whit's girlfriend, Kathie Moffat, who shot Whit and stole $40,000 from him.
Whit promises Jeff she will not be harmed if he finds her and has her returned to him. (Yeh, right.)
Jeff eventually catches up to Kathie in Acapulco.
She's a looker with a sob story: yeah, she shot White because she hates him but she did not take his money.
Jeff is a sucker, falling hard for Kathie. He proposes they run away together.
Then Whit (along with Stefanos) arrives and confronts Jeff: has he found Kathie yet?
Jeff lies and says Kathie escaped on a south-bound steamer. Whit orders Jeff to keep looking for her.
Then Jeff and Kathie book it to California to lie low there.
Until Jack Fisher shows up. Jack is Jeff's former private eye partner and is working for Whit now. Jack tries to blackmail Jeff and Kathie but Kathie answers that with a bullet, killing Jack Fisher.
Then she runs away from Jeff, leaving behind a bank book showing a $40,000 deposit. Yeah, she did steal Whit's money.
The flashback ends.
Ann drops Jeff off at Whit's estate after Jeff promises to return to Ann after he clears things up with Whit.
Whit is pleasant and cheerful upon seeing Jeff and guess who is living with Whit now? Yeah, it's Kathie.
Whit has one last job for Jeff. Leonard Eels, a crooked San Francisco lawyer, helped Whit dodge $1 million in taxes and is now blackmailing him.
Whit wants Jeff to recover the incriminating records and they're all square once and for all, no hard feelings, right?
Yeah, there are hard feelings all right.
Eels gets murdered and Jeff's the patsy for the frame up and the cops connecting the murder of Jack Fisher to Jeff as well.
Jeff goes on the lam with both the cops and Whit's hired gunsel Joe Stefano on his tail.
People ain't done dying yet.
Will death be the only way out for our hapless Jeff?
Man this is some serious heavy shit going on in this movie.
In 1991, the National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress added Out of the Past to the United States National Film Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” film
Out of the Past is considered one of the greatest of all films noir.
The story may be bit too over cooked for it's own good with a confusing denoument of all the schemes and double crosses going on.
But Robert Mitchum holds the ship steady as a cocky and self-assured consummate private eye in over his head.
What contributed to Mitchum's appeal as an actor in general and specifically in his roles in film noir was his past experience pre-Hollywood as he worked hard and lived fast.
This man had seen some shit and done some shit which infused his performances with a gritty tough realism.
Even becoming an actor did not stop Robert Mitchum and trouble from finding each other.
On September 1, 1948 Mitchum was arrested for possession of marijuana for which he spent 50 days in jail including time on a prison work farm. While RKO could have invoked the morals clause and cancelled his contract, they saw the arrest and jail time as a boost to Mitchum's tough guy image and used publicity from this time to promote his next movies for RKO.
Film critic Roger Ebert called Mitchum his favorite movie star and the soul of film noir: "With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart."
On this occasion of the anniversary of his birth on August 6, 1917, let's salute Robert Mitchum as one of the true great icons of classic American cinema.
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