by Lee Server
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.
The movies had entered an international phase in the mid-’50s. Where in the past all roads led to Hollywood, now many of the graduates of the old studio system were wandering the world, making pictures everywhere but on those hermetically sealed LA soundstages. The blacklist victims had been among the first to go, turning up in the European film centers of London and Paris and Rome. Then came the footloose and independent spirits like Orson Welles and John Huston, now more likely to be shooting in Morocco or the Chad than in Culver City. Then off went a contingent of the over-the-hill and the out of work, faded names whose Hollywood resumes were still able to command respect at Cinecitta and Hammer. Even Gary Cooper had arranged to work outside the States for a year, in Mexico and the South Seas, taking advantage of an expatriate’s tax loophole. The American studios themselves endorsed this rising exodus, sending productions to all points from Fiji to Capetown, taking advantage of their blocked funds in foreign countries, taking advantage of cheap labor costs overseas, and hoping to lure TV addicts with ever more spectacularly scenic and exotic visuals.
For Robert Mitchum, imbued with an impulsive restlessness and wanderlust and an unquenchable thirst for adventure, it was a fine time to be a movie star. Now, and for much of the twenty years to come, he would spend a great part of his life wandering in strange and distant lands, a tramp again, though a very well paid and glamorous one to be sure.
His next job was to take him to London and to the islands of the Caribbean. Fire Down, Below (the double-entendre title sounded like one by Howard Hughes) was a British-based production but financed by Columbia Pictures in Hollywood and put together by American expatriates. The London-based producers were Irving Allen and Albert Broccoli; the director, Robert Parrish; and the screenplay by Paris’s favorite Brooklynite, novelist Irwin Shaw. It was the tale of two American roustabouts in tropic waters, owners of a small tramp cargo boat, who get mixed up with an alluring woman on the run. The two partners have an inevitable falling out over the female, reuniting briefly when one must save the life of the other after a disaster aboard an old freighter; but the bad blood remains, and they go their separate ways.
It was a film with three strong lead characters. Mitchum was cast as the more nihilistic partner who steals the girl, the.“nice” roustabout role to be played by Jack Lemmon. The producers tried to get Ava Gardner for the part of the bruised-by-life adventuress but without success. Irwin Shaw suggested Rita Hayworth to his friend Bob Parrish. The director tracked her down at the George V in Paris. She was miserable, in the midst of half-a-dozen personal crises—failed marriages, deadbeat ex-husbands all over the globe, her youthful beauty gone, her endless alliance with Columbia and the despised Harry Cohn coming to a bumpy end. It took some doing to get her to connect, but Parrish talked up the Shaw script and made three months in the Caribbean sound like a wonderful chance to escape from the world and all her problems.
Late in May Mitchum took a flight from New York to Trinidad. The arrival had been heavily publicized and the tiny airport was packed with local press, movie fans, and gawkers. As he walked across the tarmac in 90-degree heat and withering humidity, reporters peppered him with what seemed increasingly ridiculous and trivial questions, and his responses were mostly abrasive. When someone asked what he was carrying with him, Mitchum cracked that he had “two kilos of marijuana” in his bag, and “a quart of Jewish blood, taken by transfusion, in my veins . . . so I can stay even with those guys.”—meaning agents and producers, one of those “Jew jokes” and ethnic references that would come out of Mitchum’s mouth not infrequently through the years. Just Bob being outrageous, friends would say in explanation.
In the limousine riding into town, the local chauffeur told him about Trinidad. “You will love dis island, sir. Not one virgin older den t’irteen!”
As any travel agent could have told them, though apparently the producers of Fire Down Below did not ask, May, June, and July were off-season months in the Caribbean, when there was always a strong possibility of overcast skies and tropical rains. Sure enough, after a couple of weeks’ work, the production was shut down by overcast skies and tropical rains. It rained and rained, while cast and crew sat on hotel verandas and watched it come down. It looked like a scene out of Rita Hayworth’s last picture, Miss Sadie Thompson, the better part of which took place at an island hotel in a downpour. Some wag suggested they do a remake.
While they waited for better weather, the visitors occupied themselves as they might. Jack Lemmon, his first marriage in the process of dissolving, was restless and lonely. Mitchum thought Jack needed calming and claimed to have introduced him to a beautiful, charming island woman Mitchum had recently met. Lemmon took her out and liked her very muc
h. The actors were invited to a dinner at the governor’s mansion, the fancy dress event of the summer, and Lemmon intended to bring the lovely islander. Mitchum decided it was time to tell him that the girl was a very widely known prostitute.
“She screwed the entire U.S. Navy!” said Mitchum.
“That’s their problem,” said Lemmon. “She’s my girl, now.”
Mitchum himself, after his wife had come for a visit and departed, was making a close study of the local flora and fauna. Like that other intrepid seeker of new and unusual thrills, William Burroughs, who about this same period was combing the Amazon in pursuit of the legendary telepathic drug yage, Mitchum spent some of his free time chasing down a rumored backcountry substance reputed to be the one true aphrodisiac. The love potion was derived from the bark of a certain rare tree, and Mitch and an English pal from the crew eventually obtained a sackful of the stuff from some ancient herbalist. They followed his directions, cooking the bark in a pot until a small bit of sap was obtained. Then both of them chickened out—what if the stuff was toxic and we keeled over dead? they asked each other nervously. Or what if it made your dick hard and it never went down again? Deciding like any good scientists that they should experiment first on guinea pigs, Mitchum solicited a pair of paid volunteers for the job. “Two young native kids,” according to Jack Lemmon, “a boy and a girl who looked about fifteen years old.”
Mitchum and his partner sat on the couch in his hotel room and waited for results after the experimental couple ingested the sap, but the boy and girl turned out to be only as horny as any ordinary pair of fifteen-year-olds. Disappointed, Mitchum tossed the rest of the bark off the balcony. Twenty bucks down the drain!
Ears always attuned to appreciate all styles of music, Mitchum was thrilled by the indigenous sounds of calypso and the other sinuous Afro-Carib rhythms by artists like the Mighty Sparrow that he heard in the bars and dance clubs of Port-of-Spain and on the records screeching tinnily from the windows of every island home. He bought drinks for local music legends and jotted down the lyrics of their songs, some of them quite amusingly risque. Ever the quick study and perfect mimic, he was soon hopping up on stage and belting out the raunchiest versions of “Mama, Looka Boo Boo” and “Matilda” with perfect Trinidadian inflection. He shipped home every local record he could find to add to his already massive collection.
The company moved on to the island of Tobago, known as “Robinson Crusoe’s island,” for it was thought to have been the setting of Defoe’s novel. A small freighter was chartered and everyone lived on board for a couple of weeks, the only link with the outside world being a twice daily speedboat run from the tiny town of Scarborough. With nothing else to do, the players might have been expected to concentrate on the work. But a malaise set in—they became spiritually becalmed. Producer Cubby Broccoli came back to the ship after being away overnight and found no activity whatsoever. Parrish took him over to where Mitchum was lying on the deck, passed out and unwakable. The high point of each day was producer Broccoli’s lunchtime arrival with the mail. The isolated, bored group then spent an hour or two sprawled about the vessel reading their forwarded letters, advertisements, and out-of-date copies of Variety and the Times of London. Rita Hayworth’s mail, rerouted from Europe, New York, and Los Angeles, arrived all at once in a huge canvas sack and sat untouched. One day Lemmon and Parrish came upon Hayworth sitting by the railing, tearing up the unread mail piece by piece and tossing it into the sea.
“Rita, what the hell are you doing?” they screamed. “Aren’t you going to open any of it? There may be checks inside!”
Hayworth shrugged, smiling ruefully. “There’s bound to be more trouble than money.”
One day Broccoli arrived with a visitor. It was one of Harry Cohn’s minions, come to keep an eye on Columbia’s investment. Mitchum immediately began calling him “Spy,” as in, “Hello, Spy,” “Out of my way, Spy.” The man was well known to Hayworth from her years at the studio, and she treated him like the plague and fell into an even deeper despondency.
She was another Marilyn, Mitchum thought, another Love Goddess who could never find happiness—and not much love either. “He described her as a rather lost little girl,” said Kathie Parrish, the wife of the director. “She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and everyone took her for something. But Mitch and Jack and my husband loved her, and they were very sweet with her.
“She got married again not long after that and she wanted us all, Mitchum and Lemmon and Bob, to come to meet the man, Jim Hill; and it was an awful evening, terribly stiff. Jim had these terribly square parents from Colorado or someplace. They were very religious and they were nondrinkers. And Mitchum, the moment anything got stuffy, he got dirty. And when he heard that Jim’s mother frowned on drinking, he said to her, ‘What’s the matter, does it make you fart?’ Followed by dead silence. Oh, it was just an awful evening.”
. . .
Irwin Shaw’s original screenplay had been constructed with a framing device. The rusting old freighter is about to blow up, and a man—the Jack Lemmon character—is trapped in the engine room. As the trapped man waits to be rescued, his story is told in flashback. For the finale, the story returns to the burning boat and the Mitchum character’s last-minute rescue of his former pal. The producers cut this structure to make the narrative linear and supposedly did a number of other things of which director Parrish disapproved. Whether or not there was a better film hiding behind the producer’s reedit, what went into release was not much—pretty to watch but empty and disconnected at the center. It was like a grim, sordid version of a “Road picture,” with Mitchum and Lemmon’s Hope and Crosby battling for the hand of Rita Hayworth’s melancholy, frowzy Dottie Lamour.
Mitchum’s agent had signed him to a two-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox. Although he believed his days of being forced to do this or that movie were over, the agreement with Fox turned out to have a couple of overlooked knots in it that effectively removed his power of veto. In London to shoot the interiors for Fire Down Below, he learned that he was about to start filming Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, with John Huston directing. Mitchum said the first thing he knew about it was when Huston’s cinematographer, Oswald Morris, came by to measure him for a marine’s uniform. The assignment was to turn out so splendidly and, on a personal level, so satisfyingly, that Mitchum would later claim that all he needed to know about the picture was that John Huston and Deborah Kerr were involved and he was there. But in fact the actor had a sizable if short-lived snit when he learned that Huston had first tried hard to get Marlon Brando for the role and that Heavens three-month shoot, beginning a few weeks hence, would be done entirely in . . . Tobago. Nearly four months he had been down there, the sand was still coming out of his ears, and now he was getting on an airplane and going right back.
Huston thought the novel—about a U.S. Marine and a nun cast away on a Pacific island during World War II—too salacious, with the characters entertaining illicit thoughts on every page (which may have been just what led producer Eugene Frenke to buy the screen rights in the first place). So Huston got together with veteran screenwriter John Lee Mahin (Red Dust, Treasure Island) in Ensenada, Mexico (the director was an American tax exile) and knocked out what he considered a palatable adaptation of the material. Producer Frenke objected to Huston’s and Mahin’s more celibate script and less lascivious nun—“She’s gotta have an itchy cunt!” he screamed at them—but headman Buddy Adler gave their version the nod. With the adventurous, exotic setting and only the two mismatched characters on screen for nearly the entire picture, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was clearly seen as a variation on Huston’s greatest box office hit, The African Queen, and Fox was hoping lightning would strike twice.
An advance team arrived on Tobago in August, renting all the rooms in four of the eight existing hotels, commandeering nearly every taxi and truck, and building a faux village and church. Returning to the island in September, Robert Mitchum was a little slow getting
back up to speed. The first morning the English crew (Heaven, like Fire Down Below, was a “British quota” picture, utilizing Fox’s blocked pounds sterling) were ready to shoot the opening moments of the film, showing Mitchum floating in to shore on a raft. But Bob was working on a bottle of vodka in his tent and refused to be removed from it. An assistant director was sent to reason with him and came back many minutes later, reeling drunk. At last Huston had to humble himself and make a personal appeal, after which Mitchum—showing no outward sign of having consumed a bottle of hooch by 9 A.M.—accompanied the director down to the beach. Huston could be a son of a bitch, with a mean streak nearly the size of his considerable charm, and he never let a slight go unanswered. Mitchum got on the raft and lay there, bobbing up and down in the water under the fierce tropical sun, waiting to shoot the scene. Sending out one excuse after another, Huston managed to keep Mitchum bobbing and broiling for nearly two hours.
It could have been the start of a very unpleasant three months—Mitchum wasn’t the sort to let a goddamn director get the better of him for long. But as in one of those old Eddie Lowe, Victor McLaglen battling buddy movies, Mitchum and Huston sized each other up nose to nose, decided they were evenly matched, and agreed to be friends.
Huston was the artist as buccaneer, sailing through life in search of adventure and booty, stopping now and then along the way to make some of the world’s greatest motion pictures. “Sure,” said one friend and admirer. “He couldn’t help it! John was a guy who had an appetite for the best of everything. Of course he would make the best movies, too!” Huston, like Mitchum, suffered from wanderlust and a restless nature. Huston, like Mitchum, could drink mere mortals under the table, or certainly tried to at every opportunity. And as an inveterate tale teller, Huston’s accounts of his swashbuckling early years—including a stint in the Mexican cavalry—were, Bob had to admit, even more colorful and preposterous than his own. The director’s range of experience and understanding of life’s darkest secrets impressed Mitchum and gave him confidence in the work they were to do. Whatever the situation, Mitchum said, “you knew John had been there.”
