by Lee Server
On Thursday morning Mitchum, along with a studio accountant and an assistant to Warren Duff, took off from the Los Angeles airport aboard a tiny four-seater airplane bound for Bridgeport. Three hours later they came in sight of the tiny airstrip south of town and began to descend. At the moment the wheels touched down, Mitchum, in the front seat beside the pilot, heard him emit a whispered but nonetheless disquieting oath:
“Fuck!”
The plane rushed along the tiny strip without slowing, heading straight for the trees beyond the runway. “At the last second,” as Mitchum recalled it, “he jammed down and threw the throttle forward and took a right oblique.”
The aircraft smashed through a fence, hopped a ditch, and knocked over an outhouse before it came to a complete stop.
The two men in the back were unconscious. The pilot said, “No brakes.”
• • •
Cast and crew were having lunch when word arrived of the crash. There were no details at first, who was hurt and how badly. Some people drove over to the airstrip, others went off to phone the hospital. Paul Valentine and a few others were still in the restaurant when Mitchum arrived. He had crawled out of the crumpled plane, dusted himself off, and hitched a ride into town.
“He walked in on us,” Valentine remembered. “Everybody looked up. And the first words out of his mouth were ‘Anybody here got any gage?’” *
The company remained in the mountains for three weeks. With the tourist season over and winter coming early in the Sierras, life was bleak in Bridgeport. On the twenty-sixth of October it snowed while they were at the lake, sending them back to base early, and on the twenty-ninth they lost a whole day to a freezing windstorm. The Hollywood people had little to do when they weren’t shooting. At the end of the day, many found their way to a roadhouse tavern a few miles outside of town. RKO sent up a projector and some spare prints, so in the evening people would gather around and watch Tom Conway as The Falcon and call out bored, inside jokes. “We all got a little stir-crazy very fast,” said Paul Valentine. A studio publicist rounded up some of the local members of the Shoshone Indian tribe and convinced their genial Chief Owanahea to initiate Mitchum into the tribe. The chief and the actor posed for photos in feathered headdresses, giving each other the secret handshake. Some nights Mitchum would lie on his bed and write poetry, in the morning circulating the results to a select readership. One of those favored, Dickie Moore, was greatly impressed by Bob’s gift for language, though the subject matter was sometimes less than worthy. “One pithy sonnet,” Moore recalled, “in flawless rhyme and meter, was about a farting horse.”
Virginia Huston, sweetly romantic as Ann, the “nice” love interest in the movie, was said to have developed a bit of a crush on the film’s star. “It was her first film,” Paul Valentine recalled, “and he was a big star, and she just followed him around like his pet poodle. But he brushed her off. He had other fish to fry.”
One night a few people were sitting in Virginia Huston’s cabin shooting the breeze. All of a sudden Mitchum, back from the bar, loaded, bare-chested, in a rage, stormed through the doorway, cursing in all directions.
He turned to the wooden door and put his fist through it. He moved over to the wall and put his fist through it. “I scooted out of there at that point,” said Valentine. “The man was shouting, he didn’t have a shirt on, he looked like he was ready to kill somebody. You didn’t want to mess with him. Everybody got out as fast as they could.”
Valentine ran into Huston later that night.
“Are you all right? What was up with that guy?”
“Oh, it was so exciting,” she said. “And you know what he called me? Little chickenshit!
“She was thrilled.”
In a memo regarding expenses incurred on location, it was noted that payment had been made “for damages caused by Robert Mitchum to Slick’s Cabins, Bridgeport, cost $135.00.”
On November 7 cast and crew were back in Los Angeles and resumed filming on the RKO lot. Jane Greer, preparing for her first scenes, met with Tourneur to discuss the performance. She found the rotund director a calmly mild-mannered fellow, sweet and charming.
“Zzjjane, do you know what ahm-pahs-eeve mean?” he asked the actress.
“Impassive? Yes.”
“No ‘big eyes.’ No expressive. In the beginning you act like a nice girl. But then, after you kill the man you meet in the little house, you become a bad girl. Yes? First half, good girl. Second half, bad girl.”
“I get you,” she said. That was his direction, Greer recalled. “But I did throw in a few big eyes anyway. I couldn’t help myself.”
Tourneur also discussed with her his plan for the character’s wardrobe, something typical of his films’ subtle, insidious visual design. “At first you wear light colors. After you kill the man, darker colors. In the end, black.”
Greer: “And it would have worked had they not screwed up the production schedule and made us do some later scenes early and the clothes weren’t all ready, so you wore whatever fit. Things went ahead so quickly on a picture like that that you didn’t have the luxury to wait for anything.”
Her first scene with Bob Mitchum was their clinch on the beach at Acapulco. The two had run into each other around the studio and at parties, but they were essentially strangers.
“Nobody thinks about that sort of thing, whether it’s awkward or not to start two people off with a love scene. You’re supposed to say hello and get started. But on top of that, I’m looking at Bob and I see he has something on his mouth and it looked funny. Finally I got courage enough to say, ‘Excuse me, Bob, but they’ve done something with your makeup; I think they messed it up. Your lips, that brown lip liner, or whatever it is, is smeared.”
Mitchum said, “What are you talking about?” He yelled for the makeup man.
“They bring a mirror,” said Greer, “he takes a look into the mirror, and he says, ‘Oh, honey, that’s just chawin’ tabbaky!”
Bob wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and resumed kissing position.
Greer thought, “Well, this movie is going to be different!”
She found Mitchum’s carefree style amusing and infectious. “He would arrive for work in the morning and say, ‘What are the lyrics?’ That’s what he called his lines, his dialogue. He hadn’t gotten around to looking at the script yet, he’d say. ‘Somebody give me the lyrics.’ And I thought that was the secret to doing the lines like he did them. You don’t learn them in advance. ‘I’ll go in each morning and I’ll learn them in makeup.’ Oh, dear, was I wrong. I was stumbling over my first line. And he knew the script backward and forward. It was part of his act . . . ‘What are my lyrics?’”
Director and star proved to be ideally matched. In Mitchum, Tourneur had found the most expressive embodiment of his own cinematic aesthetic of eloquent, subversive reticence and oneiric sensuality. Tourneur loved Mitchum’s physical grace, the gliding, pantherlike movements, and his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence thrilled the director whose films were among the quietest in the history of talking pictures. He savored Mitchum’s ability to listen in a scene. “There are a large number of players who don’t know how to listen,” said Tourneur. “While one of their partners speaks to them, they simply think, I don’t have anything to do during this; let’s try not to let the scene get stolen from me. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five-minute speech. You’ll never lose sight of him and you’ll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn’t do anything. That’s how one judges good actors.”
As Mitchum’s opposite, the sort who tried “not to let the scene get stolen,” Tourneur might possibly have been thinking of Kirk Douglas. With his explosive starring roles—Champion, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story—still a few years off, Douglas was becoming typed for intelligent, urbane characters, supporting parts. As Whit Sterling, certainly among the most well-spoken and civilized of ruthless racketeers, Douglas gave a brilliantly cont
rolled and charismatic performance, but he could not have been thrilled by another second-fiddle part—especially second fiddle to Mitchum, who had already taken from him the lead in Pursued. The two got along well enough off the set, but the rivalry would flare as soon as the camera began to turn. Since Tourneur was not about to accept any obvious histrionics in his diminuendo world, Douglas was left to try and out-underact Mitchum, an exercise in futility, he discovered. He tried adding distracting bits of business during Mitchum’s lines and came up with a coin trick, running it quickly between the tops of his fingers. Bob started staring at the fingers until Kirk started staring at the fingers and dropped the coin on the rug. He put the coin away. In another scene, Douglas brought a gold watch fob out of his coat pocket and twirled it around like a propeller. This time everybody stared.
“It was a hoot to watch them going at it,” said Jane Greer. “They were two such different types. Kirk was something of a method actor. And Bob was Bob. You weren’t going to catch him acting. But they both tried to get the advantage. At one point they were actually trying to upstage each other by who could sit the lowest. The one sitting the lowest had the best camera angle, I guess—I don’t know what they were thinking. Bob sat on the couch, so Kirk sat on the table, then one sat on the footstool, and by the end I think they were both on the floor.”
Tourneur, no martinet, liked to give his performers a lot of freedom and waited out the one-upmanship antics with a weary grace. “Quoi qu’il arrive, restez calme,” he liked to say.
Actors were actors. One night he was screening the rushes of a scene with Mitchum and Douglas talking to each other on either side of the frame and was startled to see how Paul Valentine—placed in the background and without a line of dialogue—had craftily picked up a magazine and was flipping the pages with an altogether distracting intensity, hijacking the scene.
“Oh, Paul,” he said to the actor, “now I have to keep an eye on you, too?”
Tourneur was happy to have two such sympathetic producers as Warren Duff and Robert Sparks, who allowed him to work with little interference though they were often present on the stages and available when any problems arose. Sparks, the executive producer, was, in Daniel Mainwaring’s words, “a very nice guy, dignified and sweet.” His position of authority, however, was sufficient cause for Mitchum’s disdain. One day in his dressing room the star was being interviewed by columnist Sheilah Graham. They were interrupted by an acquaintance of Mitchum’s, a slow-witted old lavatory attendant who needed to borrow five dollars. Mitchum gave him some money and then told him to get the hell out, he was busy.
“Oh my, who was that?” Sheilah asked.
“A very sad story,” said Mitchum. “That’s our producer, Robert Sparks, a terrible alcoholic.”
He provided Graham with enough “sad” details to make for a juicy item in her column. Luckily a publicist introduced her to the real Robert Sparks before she left the studio.
For the most part it was a convivial set, a family-like atmosphere, according to more than one veteran of the production. Mitchum and his leading lady, Jane Greer, established a friendship during the filming that would remain warm for a half a century. Paul Valentine and Mitchum became pals, too, though their relationship would not outlast the filming. Valentine and his wife, blonde bombshell Lili St. Cyr, were invited to the house on Oak Glen Drive. “It wasn’t much of a place. Nothing fancy in the least. Mitchum would sit in a cheap chair in the living room with his drink and his cigarettes, talking, while his two boys would jump all over him. They liked to run and throw themselves onto him, land on his shoulders or his leg, and he was so strong that he didn’t even flinch. They would charge him, leap up, then hang onto him like little birds. He’d hold them up, play with them, toss them off, they’d come running back and jump onto him again, and he’d go on talking and sipping his drink, like he didn’t even notice them flying through the air.”
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.
chapter five
The Snakes Are Loose
ON 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.
