Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (54 page)

“He was such fun,” said Ingrid Thulin. “He would tease me a lot. You know, my English wasn’t at all good. I had only school English for three years. And Bob would correct me and tell me how to make it sound better. And we had a scene, we were walking and it’s very foggy, and I was to say to him, ‘Oh, I really like the fog.’ But he told me I wasn’t pronouncing it right. So he rehearsed me, and when we shot the scene I said it the way he told me: ‘Oh, I really like
to fuck’!”

He enjoyed the four-month jaunt, far from agents, trade papers, producers, and scandal magazines—at least any that he could read. “Whatever you do,” Mitchum said, “the Europeans couldn’t care less. No one bothers you. They leave you alone. They believe in individual liberty.” His last night in Paris he did it up right, closing down a jazz club and bringing the American combo with him to a party he had heard about, where old pal Vic Mature was on hand to greet him—”Bobby,
sweetheart!”
—hopped over from London on the midnight plane in the middle of shooting
Safari
with Janet Leigh, hadn’t even changed out of his great white hunter costume, mamboing around the joint in his pith helmet and khaki jacket with a bottle of Remy in one hand.

.   .   .

Foreign Intrigue:
It was one of those movies that was no doubt more fun to make than to watch. A detective story at heart, the plot followed the hero’s uncovering of a blackmail scheme involving a cabal of World War II quislings, with much footage devoted to Mitchum in his belted trench coat ambling iconically, though often listlessly, across elegant hallways and down dark alleyways. Though lacking in dynamism, the film was an aesthetic pleasure with its Riviera vistas, regal interiors, and sensuous Eastman color photography.
Foreign Intrigue
bombed in America but became a sizable hit in Europe, oddly, where the title and its association with the television series meant nothing.

Earl Felton, the man who had scripted the revised ending to
His Kind of Woman,
had been without the full use of his legs since childhood, a victim of polio and complications, getting around on crutches and leg braces; but he’d never allowed that to keep him from a life of amiable debauchery. He and Mitchum often palled around, closing taverns, getting into mischief. They made quite a duo wandering into a joint together, the big movie star and the man on the crutches, but Mitch never acted as if they were anything but evenly matched as they swapped lies and argued over who was going to get to bed some passing skirt.

Earl knew that Bob saw himself—not inaccurately—as an adventurer, a man who went looking for the fun and danger in the world, regardless of the consequences. “I’ve always liked the taste of the expression
soldier of fortune,”
Mitchum once said. Felton told him he wanted to write a script about a soldier-of-fortune character that would fit him to a T. He fiddled around and one day came through with a treatment about a movie company in Mexico during the 1916 revolution and the American adventurer who was Pancho Villa’s right-hand man. Everyone who read it loved it. Felton got producer Robert Jacks and United Artists interested, Mitchum signed on at once, and Felton’s friend and frequent collaborator Richard Fleischer read the treatment and agreed to direct. Felton and Mitchum took a trip to Mexico and looked at some locations, closed some cantinas, and worked on the material. Mitchum went to Europe. Felton sent him the script he’d written, and Mitchum cabled a response: “What happened to that other story?” Felton cabled back: “The idea which looked so good over Mexican beer hadn’t come out when bathed in black typewriter ink, and this current plot had reared its exciting head instead.” When Fleischer read it, he asked, “What happened to that other story?” There was no more movie company, no more Pancho Villa, no jokes, and no clever Pirandellian self-reflection. It didn’t even read like a finished script, just
a lot of shooting with an American gunrunner doing little more than ducking bullets. Fleischer said he was bowing out, but UA told him he’d be sued if he quit and undermined their investment in the project. Fleischer succumbed but told Earl to pack his typewriter; he was coming along to Mexico to rewrite the thing. Felton would be working on scenes throughout the production, sometimes sitting on the set and turning in pages of script even as the camera was being set up to shoot them.

The project had a title now:
Bandido!
‘In addition to Mitchum it would feature Zachary Scott as a rival gunrunner, German actress Ursula Thiess (who had recently wed Robert Taylor) as Scott’s wife, with Mexican-born Gilbert “Amigo” Roland as a Villaesque bandit leader and, like the trailers used to say, a cast of thousands.

The filming schedule covered over a hundred sites in central and coastal Mexico, from Cuernavaca to Acapulco. Many of the sites chosen were the actual battlegrounds and byways of the revolt of forty years before, the town of Tepotzlan and the Dominican Cathedral built by Cortes, the Palo Balero Falls, Yaltapec, where Zapata was killed. For still more authenticity, the extras in the film, local villagers, would include numerous elders who had been witness to the revolution and participated in bloody events like those depicted on the screen.

Since Mitchum had a share in the film’s potential profits—DRM was co-producing—Fleischer expected he would be on good behavior for this one. And he was, or something close to it. But Fleischer hadn’t counted on Mitchum’s bringing down a couple of surrogate troublemakers to take up the slack. The star arrived with an entourage consisting of Reva, Tim Wallace, and Layne “Shotgun” Britton, makeup man, another refugee from RKO. One night after Mitchum had gone back to his hotel, Wallace got into a brawl at a party. Whether Bob’s stand-in was an instigator or an innocent bystander, Dick Fleischer couldn’t say. “What was clear, once the dust settled, was that a pretty senorita had been at the receiving end of a haymaker and lay unconscious on the floor.” It turned out she was the mistress of a high-ranking Mexican policeman, and the Mexicans were saying that the girl had been kayoed, not by Robert’s look-alike stand-in, but by Mitchum himself; and that Bob was about to be arrested or shot or both. Nobody disbelieved it. The town was full of
pistoleros
and shotgun-toting police. One afternoon several
Bandido!
people saw a cop and a bus driver get into an argument on the street, and the cop shot him without a second thought.

“Jesus Christ,” Mitchum said, “we went through this shit the last time I made a picture here!”

Fleischer was living in a small posada in the mountains (Robert had preferred a hotel amid the downtown tequila joints). That night Mitchum moved his stuff over to the posada and took a seat in the lobby. He said he was certain he was going to be attacked and told Fleischer to sit with him and keep him company. He kept him there practically till morning.

“What you need is a bodyguard,” Fleischer said, blinking back sleep.

“I’ve got a bodyguard. He got me into this mess.”

In the morning the injured mistress vindicated Mitchum but put the finger on Tim. It was arranged for a private plane to touch down at a rural airfield and fly the stand-in to Mexico City and out of the country.

Next it was Shotgun Britton’s turn to stir things up. “People stood, stared, and gaped when he passed by,” Jane Russell wrote of the man. He was a flamboyant, one-of-a-kind, sometimes hard-to-take character who dressed in garish outfits of purple and orange and spoke an indecipherable drawling hipster double-talk. He was also an unreconstructed Texan whose treatment of the local Mexicans was something worse than condescending. Now came reliable word that some of the insulted locals had decided to assassinate him. “Old Shot had grab-assed a young Mexican maid in Cuernavaca,” said Reva Frederick. “The Mexican crew took great exception to this and he had to go. At one point the negative of the picture was taken. They wouldn’t give it back till things were settled.”

The
Bandido!
emergency airlift flew again, and Shotgun was whisked away at dawn.

It was an enormously physical production. Scenes called for huge battles involving hundreds of people, machine guns and cannons firing, horse falls and other stunts, explosions everywhere as armies of
Revolucionistas
and
Regulares
battled in the streets. A first aid station had a line halfway through Tepotzlan with bleeding, bruised, broken-boned extras and stuntmen. The principals got their share of purple hearts, too. Zachary Scott dislocated a leg in a leap. Ursula Thiess suffered serious bruises and a state of shock when the railroad car they were working in took a sudden lurch and sent her flying from one end to the other. Mitchum had the skin shredded off one of his legs when he fell through a rooftop. Richard Fleischer’s dynamic staging and mobile camera craning and tracking throughout—plus Mitchum’s disposition—required the star to do most of his own stunt work. He rode horseback for miles on the roughest terrain, leaped off a moving train, came face-to-face with a shark while swimming underwater in a lagoon, and dodged real bullets from a supposed
sharpshooter when the planted squibs they had expected to use failed to explode. The one occasion when he demanded a double was for an unathletic but spine-splitting ride in a springless 1915 Model-T Ford on a rocky, un-paved road. Tim Wallace would take the ride for him, cursing all the way.

The moviemakers did nothing to make things easy on themselves. For a chase scene they went to a densely overgrown mangrove swamp miles to the east of Acapulco that could be reached only by canoe. It was a nightmare of heat, steam, and muck, large insects and rodents running around, conditions made no more pleasant by the fact that a goodly portion of the American crew had come down with the turistas and were vomiting and shitting even as the camera was turning. One of the few remaining blissfully undiscomfited was Earl Felton, sitting on the shoreline watching the filming, sipping a cold drink. At the end of a take Mitchum came out of the swamp dripping with slime and spitting refuse and looked at the screenwriter with fury.

“What kind of fucking sadist would write a chase scene in a dirty goddamn swamp!” he squalled.

Felton took another refreshing sip of his drink. “Don’t you remember, this was one of your swell ideas,” he said.

Mitchum glared at him. But come to think of it, he remembered the swamp had come from him. “I shut my mouth,” he said later, “and prepared to duck under the murky waters again and see what new garbage or ravenous animal I would meet.”

The picture finished shooting with a week of interiors done at the Churabusco Studios in Mexico City. On the night before they were all to fly back to Los Angeles, Felton and Mitchum got into Bob’s chauffeured car and were on their way to a restaurant in the
zona rosa
when a dark sedan sped in front of them and four large Mexicans jumped out, flashing police badges. They rousted the driver and had him open the trunk, then extracted a heavy brown paper bag that turned out to be filled with marijuana.

The driver said it wasn’t his. Bob said it wasn’t his. Mitchum told Felton, “This is a setup.”

“Oh shit,” Felton said.

Earl spoke a little Spanish and asked the Mexicans to take them back to their hotel where it could perhaps all be straightened out. The cops thought taking them to the prison was a better idea. Felton pleaded. The cops took the evidence, everyone got back into their vehicles, and they drove to the hotel, took Mitchum up to his room, and kept him there under guard.

An assortment of people—Mexicans from the studio and the hotel, members of the crew—were huddled in the lobby. A little later a squadron of burly police officials arrived and went up in the elevator. They conferred with Mitchum. Mitchum talked to John Burch, the film’s production manager, in charge of the per diems and other money matters. Ten thousand dollars was packed into a small suitcase and the police squadron went away.

Fleischer wrote, “Nobody was late for the plane the next morning.”

Bandido!
is a signature Robert Mitchum movie—for all its spectacle, pulp drama, and exotica, one of his most personal works. This was Mitchum as he saw himself, the adventurer’s adventurer, bringing his gaudiest daydreams to life and allowing audiences, if they so desired, to share in the fun. Felton had cut Mitchum’s part to order. The American gunrunner Wilson is a fearless, hard-drinking, wife-stealing contrarian and outsider, crossing the border into war-torn Mexico as everyone else is lined up to escape the other way; an opportunistic idealist, not above making a peso off of both sides of the revolution but ultimately a sentimental fighter for the little guy, taking a stand with the cop-hating peasants. The early scenes in particular are prime Mitchum in all his insouciant glory, hailing a taxi to the battlefield, standing on his hotel balcony in his wrinkled white suit and wide-brimmed hat, a glass of whisky in one hand and a grenade in the other, happily blowing up government troops in the street below.

The direction of the much underrated Richard Fleischer (with the great aid of Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography) perfectly complemented Mitchum’s swaggering style. Fleischer’s muscular mise-en-scène, here seen at its best in raucous action scenes, with a fluid free-roaming camera that turned whole whitewashed towns into the film’s exploding sets, was one of the great justifications for the cinemascope lens and the gigantic new screens of the day. The version seen for decades on television, with faded color and cramped pan-and-scan compositions, is a travesty of the exhilarating original and its extraordinarily vivid wide-screen images.

Mitchum and Earl Felton vowed to do another project together someday, but the writer was just as notorious a procrastinator as the actor, and their assorted plans never came to anything. Earl’s physical problems got worse through the years. His handicap was very demeaning to him and very painful, but he hated to be pitied. He began to withdraw from life. Reva Frederick remembered how Mitchum would go over to see him when he was under the weather, stopping at his favorite restaurants to get him soup and sandwiches.
Felton would come to the Mitchum house from time to time and Robert would go into the kitchen himself and fix something special that Earl liked. But no one had all the time it took to fight the man’s growing despair. One Sunday in 1972, bored and lonely, the caustic and clever Earl Felton took a gun and blew his brains out.