Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (44 page)

Preminger himself came up with the idea for the automotive murders. “That was taken from my personal experience,” he recalled. He’d pulled up past the lines at an intersection, reversed, forgot to shift back, hit the gas. “You see, I’m not a very good driver.”

Herbert Marshall, Mona Freeman, Barbara O’Neil, Leon Ames, and Jim Backus were added to the cast. Fast-moving cinematographer Harry Stradling was borrowed from Samuel Goldwyn. The Lewis estate in Beverly Hills was rented for the role of the Tremayne estate. Filming began on June 16.

The feud between the RKO mogul and Jean Simmons had grown ever more virulent. Inflamed by Hughes’s fetishist dictates concerning her hairstyle, Simmons had abruptly taken a pair of shears and hacked off her rich dark locks till what remained was a variation on the hairdo worn by Stooge Moe Howard. Wigs had to be quickly prepared to disguise the damage.

Speculation as to just what sort of treatment Hughes had instructed Preminger to give Miss Simmons was fueled by the director’s gratuitously brutal behavior toward the actress. “He absolutely, totally destroyed me,” Simmons would remember. Shooting a scene at the studio, they reached a moment early in the script that required Mitchum to slap Simmons on the face. Mitchum effectively faked the blow, barely grazing the actress’s cheek. Preminger, standing just behind him, screamed, “No, no!” The camera was tight on her face, too close for such fakery, said the director. “Slap her for real!” Mitchum tried again. Preminger didn’t care for it. “Again!” Simmons braced herself, her cheek already flaring. The camera rolled; Mitchum slapped her. “No good! Do it again!”

Jean Simmons’s eyes began to water from the impact. Mitchum thought she was crying. “Oh Christ,” he muttered.

“Vunce more!” Preminger barked.

Mitchum slapped her again.

“Vunce more!”

Mitchum spun around. “Once more?” he said and either slapped Preminger across the face, with just the force the director had been asking for, or very nearly did the same.

Preminger scurried away. He demanded that Mitchum be replaced. He was told to go back and finish the picture before Jean Simmons decided to cut her nose off. Thinking this was not how they would have treated Hitler, Preminger readjusted his pride and returned to the set.

“Well, do you think we can be friends?” the director asked the actor.

“Otto,” Mitchum said with fiendish affability, “we’re all here for you.”

Like Preminger’s other noir features
{Laura, Fallen Angel, Where the Sidewalk Ends), Angel Face
was cynical, perverse, and glamorously sleazy. However much or little the director had to do with it, the lead actors were extraordinarily good: Mitchum’s amoral, disengaged Frank Jessup was the most spookily apathetic of the star’s fatalistic noir losers, while Jean Simmons’s simmering, Siamese-catlike performance as Diane Tremayne was among the greatest of her career, though she would probably gag at the thought of it. Perfectly reflecting the circumstances of its production, the entire film quivered with an air of frustration and resentment—there is nary a shred of sympathy evoked for anything on screen, living or dead. The glacial final image—following Mitchum’s and Simmons’s berserk death scene—of a taxicab pulling up and idling before the ghostly mansion, is a moment of haunting emptiness like nothing else in the American cinema.
^*

Barely a decade old, film noir, the genre that didn’t know its own name, had already reached a decadent phase. Like the Western, noir had become ritualistic, scavenging its own cliches. Seen with a harsh eye,
Angel Face
appeared rewoven, put together from remnants of assorted earlier black melodramas. The aberrant female, the male patsy, the whiffs of incest and sexual obsession, the ironic deaths—all familiar motifs by now, though they had been shocking and fresh just a few years before. The film’s trial sequence was a wholesale purloin from James M. Cain’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
with Leon Ames virtually recreating his role from the MGM version of the tale. Other elements were more than vaguely reminiscent of
Sunset Boulevard
and
Where Danger Lives.

The golden-age cycle of film noir that had begun in the early ‘40s with
The Maltese Falcon
and
Double Indemnity
was drawing to a close. Shadowy black-and-white crime dramas, filmed on artificial backlot streets and soundstages, would be fewer and farther between, replaced by genre works considered more up-to-date, more appropriate to wide screen and color. Femmes fatales and trench-coated crime solvers would now, for the most part, be relegated to the B movie ranks and to the ignominy of television. For Mitchum, anyway, whose close identification with film noir was almost unmatched by any other actor,
Angel Face
was the finish, if not the capstone, to an extraordinary ten years in cinema’s shadowland. His last moment on screen was a fitting nihilistic exit for noir’s great corruptible chump/hero: seated on the passenger side of an open-topped sports car beside his final fatal woman, pouring a glass of champagne as the vehicle screams into reverse and shoots them through space and to their just desserts.

The African adventure story, yet another generic staple of big-studio-era filmmaking, had experienced a recent rise in prestige after the critical acclaim and popular success of
King Solomon’s Alines,
starring Stewart Granger, and
The African Queen
with Bogart and Hepburn, both films shot in color and on dangerous “Dark Continent” locations. Otto Lang, an Austro-Serbo-Croat alpine sportsman and Darryl F. Zanuck’s skiing instructor at Sun Valley, Idaho, had followed Zanuck back to Hollywood and became a movie producer at 20th Century-Fox—quite a good one at that, his credits including
Call Northside 777
and
Five Fingers.
Lang was eager to make a film of a book he had read,
White Witch Doctor
by Louise Stinetorf, a fictionalized memoir of the relationship between a saintly old missionary woman and her young novice working with the tribes of Central Africa. Zanuck agreed to purchase the film rights. Lang was delighted, sure that the touching and unusual story would make a memorable motion picture. With enthusiasm he arrived at the first preproduction conference with DFZ, where Zanuck told him the following: “We do not want a picture based on the ‘exploits of a woman missionary’ struggling for courage in the African jungle. We want a picture about two interesting people, a woman missionary and a white hunter, a story full of physical excitement, physical violence, and
sex.
We do not want a picture about a woman struggling with . . . locusts and other depressing things.”

And thus did Lang’s moving drama of the hardships of two selfless, celibate Christian ladies become a lusty tale of adventure, a vehicle for sexy Susan Hay-ward and Bwana Bob Mitchum.

Lang, Roy Baker (an up-and-coming young English director who had just
completed
Don’t Bother to Knock
at Fox), and a small camera crew took off for the Belgian Congo on a search for suitable locations. Venturing deep within the Congolese jungle, the team faced great hardships, constant heat, rot, insects, and disease. Baker, a “pale-skinned . . . ultrasensitive Englishman” (per Otto Lang), collapsed with fever and had to be shipped home. Lang forged on, returning to Hollywood with lots of exposed film and the realization that no stars could be taken to the pestilent hellhole he had just visited, so
White Witch Doctor
would have to be made on the lot or at Griffith Park. Loaned to Fox in reciprocation for RKO’s use of Susan Hayward, Mitchum was teamed with his
Lusty Men
costar for a second and final time. Hard-nosed director Henry Hathaway was assigned to the Technicolor production, guiding the performers around all the potted foliage, process screens, and pot-bellied extras in leopard-skin loincloths. Otto Lang’s spectacular location footage would be interspersed with the glaringly phony soundstage exteriors. The film’s exciting action highlights included Susan Hayward’s molesting of a rubber tarantula and Robert Mitchum’s epic brawl with a man in a gorilla suit.

Otto Lang: “The character of this white hunter was a man with a shady reputation, and a sultry guy, and we thought Mitchum would be perfect for the part. I know he had up and down periods where he was under the influence, but he had periods where he was completely sober and normal and no one was better than he was. We had nothing but the best experience. He was on time, always ready to go. Do whatever had to be coped with. He and Susan Hayward got along, but there was no particular charisma between them, or any attraction. She was going through a difficult divorce at the time and was not really approachable as a person. In other words, she kept her distance. And Henry Hathaway was a very strong director. Very forceful. And the stars respected that, Mitchum respected that. No one made any difficulties.”

Notwithstanding Henry Hathaway’s ugly tendency to direct screaming tirades at his crew, it was an easygoing shoot, and Mitchum—not unaware that the picture was as foolish as anything he’d ever done—settled into a big Fox trailer and tried to enjoy his first job in four years away from RKO’s cramped quarters. Between scenes, Mitchum would converse with the production’s technical adviser, Dr. Conway Wharton, a medical researcher who had spent twenty years in Africa. “He wanted me to trace the ethnological history of the little-known Bakuba tribe in the Congo Basin,” Dr. Wharton recalled. For several sequences involving jungle drumming, a percussionist named Eddie Lynn was brought in to establish some authentic-sounding rhythms; and Lynn was working out on the skins one day when Mitchum came over and joined him in a hot, polyrhythmic jam session. “Man alive,” said Lynn, “he was real solid!”

One afternoon, killing time on the set while waiting for the gorilla suit to come back from the steam cleaner, Mitch put his feet up, tipped back his pith helmet, and favored the press with a philosophical discourse on a favored topic. “I believe,” Mitchum pronounced, with the conviction of Lincoln freeing the slaves, “the average woman should never wear a girdle! I believe a well-proportioned woman is an object of great beauty. I feel that the lines that nature gave us are the ones we should show. . . . I always have had an intense dislike for anything that detracts from the feminine qualities of a woman, and I look upon a girdle as such a device. I don’t see why you should not be able to recognize a person from the back as well as the front.”

The weird, hard-to-believe saga of RKO under Howard Hughes was moving ever closer to its inevitable, annihilating conclusion. In September 1952, Hughes unexpectedly sold his controlling interest in the studio to a quintet of businessmen, a syndicate headed by Ralph Stolkin of Chicago. Within weeks of the syndicate taking charge, a New York newspaper exposed the members’ various ties to racketeering and organized crime. The revelations shocked Hollywood’s scandal-fearing poobahs and infuriated the already shaken RKO stockholders. The confusion brought activity at the Gower Street property to a standstill. For several months in 1952-53, as studio chroniclers Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin described it, “RKO had no president, no chairman, no production head, and was controlled by men who couldn’t run it and wouldn’t allow others to take charge.” The new owners tried to dump their shares, but no one wanted to go near such an albatross. Finally, to the rescue came . . . Howard Hughes, who in February agreed to take control of the studio once again, keeping the syndicate’s $1.25 million down payment for his pains. Hughes was ready to go on as before, but this was not going to be easy now, with so many suddenly alerted to RKO’s strange state of affairs. With the company drowning in red ink and ridicule, stockholders began looking into Hughes’s management style, incredible squandering of company funds, and sleazy self-indulgence—the vanity productions, the endlessly shelved features, his virtual white-slave racket, filling the payroll with imported starlets, most never even to glimpse a working movie camera. Hughes was pelted with lawsuits, many of them containing lurid accusations regarding his private life. People joked that RKO now employed more lawyers than actors. Thumbing his nose, Hughes announced the studio’s first new production in seven months, a “spectacular” adventure called
Second Chance,
to be filmed in color and in the exciting new “3-D” photographic process, and starring Robert Mitchum.

•  •  •

Dorothy had once said that her husband was a bachelor at heart, but that didn’t mean she liked it. With a new baby in addition to two adolescent boys to be minded, she found Bob’s honorary bachelorhood increasingly hard to stomach. Early in March 1953, Hollywood gossips reported that the actor had been kicked out of his home and was living in a rented apartment in Beverly Hills. A series of indiscretions or one lease-breaking outrage—the exact cause of the rift was never revealed, but Dorothy’s anger was sufficient to make her change the locks and the phone number at 1639 Mandeville.

Mitchum explained it to the press like this: “I guess I was pretty irresponsible and brought too many people into the house and Dorothy felt I was a complete nuisance.” He hoped the “trial separation” would be brief. He was “very much in love” with his wife, he said. “I want to live with Dorothy and my three kids. I am going to do everything in my power to win her back. Sunday is our thirteenth wedding anniversary, and I’m going to ask her to have a date with me.”

On Sunday a sheepish Mitchum showed up at the Mandeville doorstep, bearing gifts—a Spanish lace mantilla and a silk skirt and blouse from Italy. He took her to Ciro’s. Bob said he was sorry and wanted to come home. He would be going to Mexico soon for two weeks to shoot the new picture and wanted her to come with him. Kind of a little honeymoon. No kids. Just the two of them—and a Hollywood film crew.

Bob played it hangdog back at the doorstep at the end of the evening. “Can I take you out again?”

“You may call,” she told him.

Second Chance
was about an American palooka fighting tank town matches somewhere south of the border, and how he becomes involved with a dame on the run from a gangland enforcer. To get permission to shoot in Mexico, RKO had to send the script to Mexico City for approval. The propaganda minister sent it back with a letter telling RKO it had been an honor to read the truly fine tale of the American palooka and demanding that the script be changed to eliminate a number of scenes and references insulting to all Mexican people and their Spanish-speaking neighbors. These offending passages included the hero’s depreciative classification of Latin American women as “tamales,” another line stating that “there is no hot water South of Laredo,” and a dialogue sequence about the battle of the sexes, all of which were found offensive, ineluding
the line “Latin American men beat their women once a week regularly and if they did not the women would miss the beatings.” Although they regretted compromising the integrity of a piece of fine art like the
Second Chance
screenplay, RKO agreed to the changes and deletions, and the filming permit was granted.