by Lee Server
Bob decided to spend the entire summer in Europe, half work and half vacation. He arranged passage on a freighter bound from New York to Genoa—it was a boyhood fantasy, crossing the ocean on a rusty old tramp.
Foreign Intrigue was not the title Sheldon Reynolds had intended for his feature debut. It was not a spin-off from the series, he insisted. But the script, about an American public relations man wandering the boulevards and back alleys of Europe investigating the death of his employer, had enough in common with the TV show to make UA feel they could profit from the association. Otherwise the studio left the producer-director to his own proven devices. It was a ten-week schedule with locations in three countries and a start date in early July.
Filming began on the Riviera, in Nice and Monte Carlo. Mitchum hated the expensive wardrobe that had been prepared for him—”There was a Swedish version of a Made in Paris suit with an Edwardian cut,” he said. “I looked like Johnny off the pickle boat”—and elected to wear his own clothes in the picture. These included a trench coat (a staple garment of the Foreign Intrigue TV hero, making the movie look all the more a continuation) given to him as a going away present by Reva Frederick. Too-tight clothing aside, Mitchum relished the production’s European style—the tiny crew, the minimal technical gear, the ability to move from one setup and one location to the next in a matter of minutes. Reynolds had eliminated all the flab and fuss of big Hollywood filmmaking. There were no story conferences, no production design sketches to be approved, no big sets to be built. The efficient operation Reynolds had put in place for his television show meant they had access to lights, recording equipment, film stock, and personnel wherever they went, allowing them to travel from country to country carrying little more than their personal luggage. They just got up in the morning at one luxurious hotel or another, had a big breakfast, and started shooting something. Mitchum didn’t know if the finished product would look like a movie or a newsreel, but it was certainly pleasant putting the thing together.
The unit moved along the Mediterranean, then up to Paris, Versailles, on to Stockholm and the islands of the Swedish archipelago. The Mitchum boys were shipped over at the end of their school term (Trina left at home with a nurse). Dorothy schlepped them to the obligatory monuments and museums along the route, but more time was devoted to finding them Coca-Colas and properly prepared hamburgers. From Sweden they took a brief trip to Oslo, Norway, and arranged to meet some of Bob’s Norwegian relatives. They were lovely people and in no way fawning—Bob had a feeling they hadn’t gotten a chance to see any of those newfangled talking pictures yet.
He listened to stories of his mother and grandparents. A cousin and some others would stay in touch, writing him letters through the years.
“Mitchum was marvelous to work with,” said Sheldon Reynolds, “extremely knowledgeable, understood the kind of filmmaking we were doing, could adjust and improvise to any situation. An incredibly fast study and with an amazing ear for language. We had a scene where he is supposed to be making a phone call and speaking four or five lines of French. Not one word made sense to him—he learned it phonetically—but he did it instantly, and his accent was excellent. And as an actor, if there was a hole in a scene, in the story line, he could find a way to fill it, to play through it and make it logical, because he understood story and everything that was going on. And he was extremely generous with the other actors. If he was not on camera and a bit player was saying some lines—normally, you had a script girl or the director reading the off-camera lines while the star went somewhere to rest, but Mitchum was always there to feed the cues to everyone. They all enjoyed working with him.
“He was a marvelous man, and we became very good friends. I found that his Hollywood image was a facade. He was very smart and learned, and if you wanted to discuss literature and poetry with him you had to hold your own because he knew what he was talking about. He was always eager for new experiences, not parochial at all. We went to dinner together every night, in Paris and elsewhere, and he was eager to try new things, taste new foods, frogs’ legs, anything.
“He loved wine and he particularly loved cheese, cheese of all kinds he was eager to try. And while we were shooting, his thirty-eighth birthday came up. I told everybody on the set not to say a word, not to say ‘Happy Birthday’ So we went through the whole day shooting and nobody said a thing to acknowledge it. And he was in his dressing room, taking off his makeup and cleaning up, and then I came in and told him I wanted to show him tomorrow’s set. And we went out and everyone was there to yell ‘Happy Birthday,’ and we had the whole place covered with barrels of wine and giant wheels of cheese, about thirty-six different kinds of cheese. And that was the only time I ever saw him get emotional.”
For the rest of his stay in Europe Mitchum would provoke the wrath of hotel keepers and gagging chambermaids, not to mention family members, as he gorged on great slabs of Roquefort and Gorgonzola and Brie and left unwrapped, unrefrigerated portions behind under the beds and in dresser drawers. “I remember, he talked a lot about cheese,” said Harry Schein, the Swedish theater director and husband of Ingrid Thulin. “He was crazy for cheese, that man.”
Ingrid Thulin (billed phonetically as Tulean in the credits), a successful young actress on the Stockholm stage (and with legendary performances for Ingmar Bergman and Luchino Visconti still in the future), was making her film debut as Foreign Intrigues leading lady. “I was so nervous to meet this famous Hollywood star, and he looked so big—he seemed like a giant, such shoulders! And I met him and I saw that he was reading Simone de Beauvoir! And I thought, Well, I have never seen a man reading Simone de Beauvoir, this feminist writer, not even in Paris. And he talked to me about the book and had me read it—and I am really thankful to him for that! So I was so surprised, this ‘tough guy’ was a real intellectual.
“He was very funny. In Paris, the French journalists would come around and someone asked, ‘Can you say something in French?’ And he said, ‘Cognac!’ And one time he was urinating in the street, an alley, and someone yelled to read the sign over his head—it said, in French, Do Not Piss in the Doorway—and he was very angry. ‘What kind of town is this!’ he said. ‘Take that sign down!’ And then another day, we were up at the place where they had the Eternal Flame. And he heard that some Dane had been able to put it out by urinating on it. And he said, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and he made a bet with someone and pissed and he managed to do it!”
Just once, on the Swedish archipelago, were the tables turned, Mitchum getting a chance to be shocked, when the director called a lunch break and—it being a hot day for Sweden, about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Bob—the cast and crew, wardrobe lady, everybody stripped off their clothes and ran naked into the nearby sea. “Well, summer lasts about two days up there,” he said. “Doesn’t pay to invest in a bathing suit.”
“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 R
emy 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 o
f 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.
