Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (24 page)

As for Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, they attained a certain affability with each other in public, but it was clear that their rivalry went on percolating just below the surface—they would never be friends. Douglas tended to paint Mitchum, with his outlandish stories told and retold, as a consummate bullshit artist, while for Mitchum, Kirk Douglas would forever after be the name he chose to invoke when ridiculing movie star arrogance and pomposity.

Filming would be completed by December, with a brief postproduction period to follow, Jacques Tourneur working closely with editor Samuel Beetley, a rare enough occurrence in an era when directors commonly went on to their next assignment and left the responsibilities of even a first cut to supervisors and technicians. With so much effort expended on perfecting the screenplay, the narrative itself needed few changes at this stage. One adjustment was the snipping of Kathie’s shooting to death of Whit, filmed but cut in favor of having the audience discover Whit’s dead body just as Jeff does. Among other stylistic touches Tourneur imposed on Beetley’s editing was to insist upon never returning to the same camera angles when intercutting scenes, thus keeping the
visuals from becoming stale and maintaining a sense of forward movement in the storytelling—aesthetic subtleties the average filmgoer was likely to perceive only subliminally if at all.

Out of the Past
was not released until almost a year after the production ended. Mitchum would make his next film and see it open before the earlier one reached a single theater. Why the long delay for a film completed with dispatch and with good commercial prospects? According to Daniel Mainwaring, a change in administration at the studio left his movie in the lurch. Producer Warren Duff was fired, and, said Mainwaring, “[Dore] Shary didn’t like
Out of the Past
because it had been bought before he came. He didn’t like anything that was in progress at the studio when he got there. He tried to get rid of all of them. He just threw them out without any publicity.”

Reviews of the film were positive, though far from ecstatic. The appreciations came with an air of condescension toward the confusing plot complications (Mitchum himself would always maintain that some crucial script pages had been “lost in mimeo”) and perceived familiarity of the character archetypes. But Mitchum’s notices were his best since
G.I. Joe.
James Agee at
TIME
had ambivalent feelings about the film and the characterization, though he would compose one of the more amusingly evocative and knowing comments on Mitchum in performance: “. . . his curious languor,” wrote Agee, “suggests Bing Crosby supersaturated on barbiturates.”

Out of the Past
would achieve its classic reputation only belatedly, decades later with the rising critical and popular appreciation for a genre known by name to only a handful of French cinephiles at the time of the movie’s release. What in 1947 seemed to all concerned “just another private eye movie” would become more properly seen as 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; the lyrically cadenced, hard-boiled dialogue; and narration comparable to Chandler at his best, endlessly quotable (Ann:
She can’t be all bad. No one is.
/Jeff:
She comes the closest);
the haunted light patterns supplied by Nick Musuraca, setting a new standard for Hollywood chiaroscuro (”It was so dark on the set,” said Jane Greer, “you didn’t know who else was there half the time”); and Jacques Tourneur’s hypnotic direction, eschewing the sharp edges and bombast of the Germanic nightmare style of noir for the opiated atmosphere of a waking dream. Like many of the greatest examples of film noir,
Out of the Past
was both richly representative of the genre and utterly original, pursuing its own eccentric impulses beneath the generic conventions, a violent, pessimistic mystery thriller that was as well a poetic exegesis of temptation and annihilation.

Even more than a great film, this was a great vehicle for the young actor,
the
great, defining role, the one that took all the ingredients that had shown in bits and pieces in other films and blended them into something coherent and lasting. In
Out of the Past it
all came together, the combination of psyche (cynical romantic, comic pessimist, fatalist) and image (trench-coated pulp knight, honorable tough guy, outsider) that transcended any individual film, that defining mix of art and nature, of personality, physicality, talent, and metaphysics that made the difference between a movie actor—even a great movie actor—and a star.

^*
Hawaiian slang for marijuana cigarettes.

^*
The quiet virtues of
Till the End of Time
were not without their impact. Screenwriter Allen Rivkin recalled for me: “There was a character in there, a prizefighter who lost his legs on Guadalcanal, and he came home and had to cope with it. I got a call one night from a soldier who had also lost both his legs. He just wanted to tell me that he had been planning to commit suicide and then he saw the picture, and on account of that he had changed his mind.”

^*
Pursuers
influence was still being felt twenty years later in the Freudianflashbacksin Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns.

^*
Jazzman for marijuana.

O
N JANUARY I
, 1947, forty-one-year-old Dore Schary became head of production at RKO. A failed playwright and actor from Newark, New Jersey, Schary had come to Hollywood in the early ‘30s and found work as a screenwriter. After negligible credits on films with titles like
Chinatown Squad
and
Girl From Scotland Yard,
he wrote the screen story for
Boys’ Town,
the heart-warmer about the priest and his colony of young delinquents, and won an Academy Award. Louis B. Mayer pegged him as executive material and put him in charge of Metro’s B films. He fell out with LB over interference and creative second-guessing, then took an offer from David O. Selznick—the ultimate meddler, but swearing he’d behave—to head his Vanguard Pictures division, in which capacity Schary produced several films in partnership with RKO, including
Till the End of Time.
He was known in Hollywood as an earnest and conscientious man, an active liberal Democrat, and a filmmaker with the ability to produce intelligent commercial entertainment. Schary had a Sunday schoolteacher’s taste for stories with a message, movies that climaxed with a little civics lesson or humanitarian kicker. The first project he approved for production after taking the RKO post was a controversial screenplay by John Paxton titled
Cradle of Fear.
The story came from a hard-hitting novel by Richard Brooks,
The Brick Foxhole,
about the murder of a homosexual by a viciously bigoted soldier. Schary would boast that three other RKO executives had already rejected the transgressive script.

Paxton developed his adaptation with producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, his creative teammates from
Murder, My Sweet,
the acclaimed film version of Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely.
In
The Brick
Foxhole,
which the three agreed was lacking in focus, Brooks’s villain did not discriminate in his hatred. “He hated everyone and everything,” said Paxton, “officers, fags, Jews; he hated period.” The first third of the novel was excised and the screenplay began with the murder. Early on the three made the decision to change the victim from a homosexual to a Jew. “It was a simple, practical matter,” said Dmytryk. “In those days we had the Code and you simply could not mention or even imply that a character was homosexual. There were people like Franklin Pangborn who played what we called sissies, and if you were a little sophisticated you might suspect something there, but that was as much as you could get away with. So we didn’t even attempt it. The picture would never have been made. And how many people could you get interested, in those days, in something about the death of a homosexual? So we decided to make him a Jew, which made it a much more interesting picture, right then after the war. And anyway, it didn’t make any difference—it was still a picture against prejudice.”

Cradle of Fear,
retitled
Crossfire
during its third week in production, was a hard-boiled murder mystery on the face of it. A man named Joseph Samuels is brutally slain in his apartment after being visited by some drunken soldiers. One of them, Mitchell, gone missing, is implicated in the crime; but Finley, the police detective investigating, begins to suspect his army buddy, the unpleasant and rabidly bigoted Montgomery. With the help of a reluctant Sergeant Keeley and another more naive soldier on leave, the detective lays a trap for the killer. Montgomery, who murdered Samuels merely out of a hatred for Jews, tries to escape and is shot down in the street.

Paxton set the compressed story almost entirely at night, in a series of nondescript, urban warrens. Isolated in the screenplay for the benefit of the production department, the list of settings read like a little poem of noir seediness:

Int. Cheap Rooming House

Ext. Police Station

Int. Hotel Washroom

Ext. Park Bench

Int. Hamburger Joint

Int. Moviehouse Balcony

Int. Bar

Int. Ginny’s Bedroom

Ext. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

It was a good, taut script, and there remained a potentially first-rate, sordid film noir for the making, even if they were forced to eliminate the controversial
aspects of the story. But Dore Schary wanted it as Paxton wrote it, believed in the material, and saw it as the kind of bold, adult project that would put his new regime on the map.

The subject matter played into one of Schary’s personal interests. “For years,” he said, “I had worked in the fetid field of combating anti-Semitism and I knew something about the steamy current of hatred.” During the war he had given lectures on the causes of racial and religious intolerance and had heard first-hand reports about the violent bigotry in the armed services. He believed that a film dramatically revealing of such behavior would serve a very worthy purpose. Few in the executive circle agreed. Peter Rathvon, president of RKO, and even an outsider like Jack Warner, who had heard of the story line, tried to get Schary to drop it. Everybody knew there were people like that, Warner told him—Jew-haters, racists—but that didn’t mean you had to make a fucking picture about the schmucks. Schary considered his instincts correct, though, when Darryl Zanuck, boss at 20th Century-Fox, called him to announce that he had bought the screen rights to a new novel on the same subject,
Gentleman’s Agreement,
and did not appreciate the competition. Schary told him he was sure there was enough anti-Semitism around for two movies at least.

Still, the new production head conceded it was a financially risky proposition. The studio had taken one of its so-called Want to See polls measuring public response to upcoming titles and stories and found that almost no one wanted to see such a picture. Edward Dmytryk made it easier on Schary, proposing what was a B picture schedule and budget: twenty days and $250,000. Dmytryk: “It was no hardship. I was pleased to do it at that pace. On a schedule like that, everyone is at a creative peak and you never get the chance to get paranoid. A long shoot and you begin to worry who has their knives out for you. You get worried, question what you’re doing. You get tired, want to go home, for Chrissake. It’s a terrible strain. But this picture was one of the most pleasant experiences I ever had.”

Crossfire
would have three stars: Robert Young (as Detective Finley, the story’s conscience, in a salt-and-pepper toupee that lent him a distinct resemblance to director Dmytryk), Robert Mitchum as the cynical sergeant, and Robert Ryan as the murderous bigot—”the three Bobs” as they came to be called. Ryan was a favorite of Dmytryk’s. The director laid claim to putting him in his first film,
Golden Gloves,
in 1940. Ryan had worked steadily since then, but in underwhelming leading man parts. In casting him as the despicable Montgomery, Dmytryk would unleash the actor’s powerful capacity for conveying evil and launch him on the most memorable phase of his career, brilliantly playing neurotic antiheroes and ruthless villains. The other featured
role went to Gloria Grahame, Mitchum’s brother’s sister-in-law, borrowed from MGM to play the sweet-and-sour platinum blonde bar girl Ginny.

Production began on February 21. Things had moved so rapidly that Mitchum had to be brought back from a vacation in Miami. He was reluctant to go, but Adrian Scott and Dore Schary pleaded, telling him how great the film was going to be and what a wonderful part they had waiting for him. He didn’t get to read the script until the day before his first scene and then realized it was smaller than he had been led to believe and could easily have been done by another actor on the lot.

“Why did you lie to me?” he asked Scott.

“We needed your name on the marquee,” the producer told him.

The filming was fast and furious. To maximize his chances of making a creditable film with a programmer shooting schedule, the director and his venerable cameraman J. Roy Hunt attempted to reverse the usual production ratio of 80 percent preparation—getting the camera and lights ready—and 20 percent actual shooting. “There were people working then,” said Dmytryk, “like Charlie Lang when he was at Paramount, would take two days to light a single scene. Everything with its own key light, back light. Two days!” Dmytryk used some of the techniques he had learned churning out B horror and action pictures and experimented with new ideas for streamlined production. “How do you light quickly? You light the actors and the background, just throw a dash of light on each and that’s it. Shadows work for you. You don’t have to worry about the things you can’t see on screen.” The director staged a number of scenes in long, uninterrupted takes, dollying in for close shots instead of cutting, and generally restricted himself to the absolute minimum of “coverage” for each scene. There was barely a frame exposed that wasn’t used in the final edit. “I only had 147 setups on that entire picture,” said Dmytryk.