by Lee Server
Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, indifferent to the film itself, found cause to take stock of its star, a man she had long admired. Once, at a Manhattan gathering, a snide master of ceremonies had introduced the esteemed critic, praising her suppposed stand against the rising tide of lowbrow pop culturists, the silly sorts of film buffs at places like Britain’s Movie magazine, who tended to worship “the likes of Robert Mitchum” no less. Kael got up and perversely delivered an impromptu glowing encomium to the disdained movie star. Now, in her review, Kael wrote, “Robert Mitchum has that assurance in such huge amounts that he seems almost a lawless actor. He does it all out of himself. He doesn’t use the tricks and stratagems of clever, trained actors. Mitchum is sui generis. . . . His strength seems to come precisely from his avoidance of conventional acting. . . . “
. . .
Aubrey’s handling of Going Home had a direct, negative impact on Mitchum’s welfare. The actor had taken a lower salary in return for a hefty percentage of the gross, and with the picture buried there wasn’t going to be any percentage. The only way to stay even with Aubrey was never to work for him again, Mitchum said, and then went right back to work for him. It was a high-adventure tale set in Mexico called The Wrath of God. The role of Father Oliver Van Home sounded like it had been constructed from bits and pieces of previous Mitchum parts—he was a south-of-the-border mercenary and a homicidal man of the cloth. The story concerned a band of seedy adventurers, led by the renegade, machine-gun-toting priest, hired to assassinate a Latin American despot. Others in the cast included Ken Hutcheson, Victor Buono, Frank Langella as the chief bad guy, and Rita Hayworth as his mother. It was Mitchum, hearing that his former leading lady was having financial and professional problems, who urged director-screenwriter Ralph Nelson (Lilies of the Field, Charlie, Duel at Diablo) to give the part to the the aging Love Goddess.
This would be Mitchum’s sixth time filming on Mexican locations, not counting the backlot-created Mexico of Out of the Past and His Kind ofWoman (or the Mexico via Madrid of Villa Rides). They shot in Taxco, Cuernavaca, Guanajuato, and in the capital city. “Mitchum,” said the film’s producer, William S. Gilmore, Jr., “was the ultimate professional. He did the job, caused no problems. In all my years of making pictures, he was probably as professional as any actor I have ever worked with. He was very well liked by the crew and the rest of the cast. I can’t say enough positive things about him. Mitchum worked hard and he played hard, and the only negative impact he had on the film was that some of the cast members tried to keep up with him, with disasterous results. We had serious problems with several members of the cast. Rita Hayworth was just off the deep end . . . and Victor Buono was a schizo. Mitchum and Frank Langella, John Colicos (only there for a few days), and a couple of others were the stable ones in the cast. Some of the others—it was a zoo. This was my first experience with drug use on a film. I mean I had worked for many years with drunken actors—you get some coffee in them and sober them up and stick them back in there. But this was a whole new ball game.”
Ralph Nelson had an inkling that Hayworth was not operating at full strength when he came to visit her at the small house she was renting, and she sat with him in total darkness the entire time, laughing crazily, telling odd stories about people trying to kill her. It was the time to cut and run, but Nelson thought she was just having a bad day. She wasn’t costing much, it was a nice addition to the cast list—Rita Hayworth, for gosh sake. In Mexico, her behavior proved appalling and pathetic. Her death some years later from Alzheimer’s disease suggests she was already in the grip of mental illness, but she certainly didn’t alleviate any incipient problems by boozing heavily day and night. Hay-worth had screaming fits, refused to set foot on some of the sets, refused to ride in an elevator or be driven at more than twenty miles per hour, verbally attacked a number of women connected with the production, and could not remember her lines—couldn’t remember more than one word at a time and couldn’t read from “idiot cards” either. A disaster. Nelson ended up shooting some of her dialogue from behind her head so that you could not see her lips and dubbing later, shooting her in close-up in a mock set when she was slightly clearer-headed, or simply cutting her out altogether. William Gilmore: “Looking back it seems tragic, but at the time . . . I felt so sorry for Ralph Nelson having to deal with this woman. She could not remember her own name.” Mitchum, like everyone else, was shocked by Hayworth’s extreme deterioration. “He had gotten her the job, but no one held him responsible,” said Gilmore. “He had no more idea than the rest of us that she was so far gone.”
Victor Buono, a Mitchum pal, was a corpulent actor often cast as comically malevolent, epicene villains in this period. “A strange duck,” the film’s producer recalled. “Very strange. Would run around accusing people of opening his mail. I have no idea if he was involved in the drug aspect. But there was a lot of grass, hash cookies, going around. And they were drinking a lot of mescal, rough stuff.”
The film’s near undoing was an unfortunate accident suffered by a young English actor, Ken Hutcheson, playing a rambunctious Irish soldier of fortune. One night about six weeks into the filming, a week before Christmas, Hutcheson was in his hotel room when he cut his arm on some broken glass, flesh slashed wide from elbow to wrist. Dorothy Mitchum, in the suite directly above, heard Hutchenson’s outcry and rushed down the steps to find the gruesome sight, the actor on the floor, his open arm, blood pouring everywhere. She quickly made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, saving his life. He was rushed to the local hospital. “From that moment on,” said producer Gilmore, “we lost control of the film. This actor was in everything. No one knew how long he would be in the hospital. We had about two days’ work we could shoot without him. We could have replaced him and reshot but that meant six weeks of scenes thrown out. But we considered it. . . . We were shut down. It was an insurance claim. The insurance company was now producing the movie—they were responsible for everything above the ten-thousand-dollar deductible.”
The insurer made the decision, based on medical reports and cost estimates, that they would wait for Hutcheson to return to work. The technical crew from Hollywood had to be kept on salary and per diem and spent the next month twiddling their thumbs in Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. “Everybody sat by the pools, sipping margaritas, on full salary,” said Gilmore. “A good deal for the crew. Ultimately Hutcheson’s wound healed enough where he could return, but he couldn’t do anything strenuous, couldn’t really ride a horse effectively, arm had to be kept covered.”
Hayworth, then Hutcheson, then an imposed vacation. Director Nelson came back to work, but his focus and enthusiasm were lost. Now all anyone wanted to do was wrap things up and go home. The finished picture tells the story—early scenes filled with the spirit of adventure, robust, funny, violently exciting, Mitchum, Hutcheson, and Buono a delightful trio of impudent rogues roaming the colorful Mexican locations. Then—confusion, continuity gaps, dislocation. Mitchum in his long, black soutane, toting Bible and tommy gun, stepping over firing squad victims he has just blessed or dangling from a cross in the film’s absurd climax, seemed to be having a good time through it all, relishing his second most outlandish “man of God” characterization. Once again he proved to be a film’s only real pleasure.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle was the first published novel by George V. Higgins, an assistant U.S. district attorney for Massachusetts. It was a story of Boston lowlifes and criminals, told mostly in dialogue through interconnecting vignettes. The dialogue was so idiosyncratic and sustained at such length that some—including Robert Mitchum—believed it was derived from transcripts of actual wiretapped conversations. In any case, the novel conveyed an unusually intimate and detailed view of everyday life in the criminal underworld, qualities that producer-writer Paul Monash and director Peter Yates hoped to repeat in adapting the material to film. Considering how perfectly he became the centerpiece in a large ensemble cast, Mitchum’s participation seemed to be almost an aft
erthought. He was at first offered the small role of the bartender-hit man-police informer (ultimately played by Peter Boyle), a part that fit his request for no more than three weeks’ work, but he wound up taking the title role—Eddie, an aging, small-time crook, three-time loser, a man so desperate to stay out of prison that he begins bartering for his freedom and selling out his associates. No master criminal, Coyle’s treacherous schemes are a flop—the police double-cross him and the mob has him killed.
Monash’s script tried to retain the distinctively cadenced dialogue and nuanced characterizations of the novel, and Yates directed in the fluid, coldly objective style of his breakthrough British film, Robbery. “We decided this would be almost documentary in style,” said the film’s cinematographer, Victor Kemper, “and we tried to stick with that notion, letting the audience feel like they were right there overhearing these gangsters and gunrunners. We shot it all on location around Boston, and there was a different location almost every day. We worked fast, and I don’t think we spent more than a day on any location. And that was tough, packing up, setting up somewhere new every day, but that gave it a certain flavor of reality and spontaneity, grabbing scenes on the go. It kind of reflected the way these shifty characters lived.”
Like Harry Graham in Going Home, Eddie Coyle was a sad-faced loser living in a present haunted by past mistakes, but here the criminal milieu, Coyle’s world of omnipresent corruption, connected the character to the classic era of film noir and to Mitchum’s cinematic past in a way that provided the film with a strong sense of tradition, of ritual. To those who knew and loved Mitchum’s earlier work, Eddie Coyle was a middle-aged relative of outside-the-law protagonists like Jeff Bailey, Dan Milner, and the other noir stumblebums who tried to play both sides against the middle and came up dead or close to it. In an era of glamorous, “cool” antiheroes, Mitchum—who had invented the type—went in the opposite direction for Coyle. There was nothing glamorous about his rumpled, self-pitying, and not too bright Eddie, the actor’s thorough characterization involving not only the assumption of a perfect blue-collar Boston accent but the willing of his body into the form of a plain-faced, craggy, doughy Irish-American. Mitchum said he owed it all to an effective “Eddie Coyle sort of haircut . . . short but not too short.” In fact, he created the character—voice, gesture, body language, attitude—out of his usual mixture of instinct, imagination, and observation. During his first few days in Boston he soaked up the atmosphere, studied the fauna, going on the town with his tough-talking driver and other local fellows, hanging out with the production’s contingent of Teamsters, some of whom, it was rumored, were not unfamiliar with the city’s mob-related activities. Mitchum happily bent an elbow with some fellows he was assured were members in good standing of the notorious Bunker Hill Gang. “I think it’s necessary for people to understand something about the humors of the criminal mentality,” said Mitchum. According to the actor, George V. Higgins himself came to warn Peter Yates that Mitchum was hanging around with some very dangerous men, including a few the DA’s office was in the process of trying to send to jail. “Well, fuck,” said Mitchum, “there’s hardly anyone you can talk to in Boston without—you know. Anyway, it’s a two-way street, because the guys Higgins means are associating with a known criminal in talking to me.”
As he worked and played on assorted Boston locations, the star was given close scrutiny by reporter Grover Lewis, on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine (the cover story no less, “The Last Celluloid Desperado,” with a portrait of the stone-faced star complete with Eddie Coyle haircut). Times had certainly changed since the heyday of Hedda and Photoplay and the other more protective outlets for film studio publicity. Lewis mingled and recorded, in prime New Journalism style, bringing home a spirited portrait of Mitchum in the raw—funny, outrageous, erudite, opinionated, incoherent. After much excited, worshipful, or intimidated commentary by coworkers concerning Mitchum’s legendary propensity for substance abuse, his violence, his allure to the female sex, his grand-scale movie star-ness, the man himself arrives and does nothing to disappoint, telling stories, rapping with reputed hoods, boozing, passing a hash pipe, giving away joints like calling cards, pissing with the door open, cavorting and apparently cohabiting with a pair of voluptuous blonde groupies, a stewardess and a Euro-accented photographer, known in the article as Girl A and Girl B (with replacement Girls C and D spotted just over the horizon). Tim Wallace was around to provide the journalist with supplementary anecdotal data, in typical good taste:
“Listen, you guys, I gotta tell this story on Bob here. He was ballin’ this babe one time, see. He was in the saddle, see, and his nuts was swingin’ back and forth in the air, see. And this babe’s dog jumps up on the bed and takes his nuts in its mouth, see. Big sonofa-bitch . . . So I walk into the room by accident, see, and this dog has hold of Bob’s nuts like a retriever would hold a bird. I couldn’t help it—I started laughin’—”
Mitchum grins. “I told him, don’t laugh.” I very slowly got, uh . . . disengaged. And I smacked that motherin’ dog—whap!—clear across the room. I woulda shot it if I’d had a gun.”
Also on hand, observing it all—the boozing, Girls A-B-C-D—with philosophical tolerance and good cheer was Mitchum’s obviously adoring daughter, Trina, now a beautiful twenty year old and described as an aspiring writer (it had become, after acting, the family profession, this aspiring writing). “When I was growing up, he wasn’t around too much,” she told Lewis. She recalled a childhood without regimentation, with much freedom, her mother, though, a great lady, a steadying influence. “She’s stood by him through everything, and I guess she’s put up with a lot and suffered a lot, but she keeps on going.” Trina remembered years gone by, adventures with her “oddball” father—so others thought him—Sunday morning drives, buying hand puppets at Schwab’s drugstore, being stopped by police for driving on the sidewalk, Dad not even aware he’d gone off the road. “Pretty embarrassing,” said Trina, affectionately.
Though he was in only roughly one-quarter of the movie, Mitchum’s peformance in The Friends of Eddie Coyle easily stole the show and earned the actor an assortment of rave notices. More than one of the reviewers digressed to express their notions of Mitchum as one of the most overlooked and undervalued film stars—but considering the often dismissive reviews he had received through the years, who was it they thought had done all the overlooking? Following in Pauline Kael’s wake, Andrew Sarris, the other great film critic of the era, now weighed in with his own words of praise for an actor he said had muscled his way through the movies “with the professional dedication of a fighter who knows there is nothing outside the ring except an endless gutter.” Recalling a distant memory of seeing the man for the first time in the “very charming” West of the Pecos in some Wild East grindhouse in New York City, Sarris mused that Mitchum’s work had always been oddly subversive, slipping past the conventional critical radar. Sarris confessed that he had not viewed many of the actor’s films, including some of his most interesting work, until long after they were dismissed and forgotten by the respectable tastemakers of the day. “I was always turning to someone or someone was turning to me, and saying wasn’t he good? instead of isn’t he good?” Sarris believed Mitchum’s scandalous past—the pot bust, the jail term—and generally raffish image had had an insidious effect on his critical standing. “No one in places of high cultural authority took Mitchum very seriously.” Nowadays, in the egalitarian environment of television, of endless Million Dollar Movie and Late Show broadcasts (as well as in the more esoteric realms of auteurist and cultist repertory screenings), people were belatedly coming to realize how many unusual and fascinating films—The Night of the Hunter, the still little-known Out of the Past, Angel Face, The Wonderful Country, and so on—Mitchum had made in his long and “subversive” career.
Mitchum followed Eddie Coyle with another unusual gangster film, this one as glamorous, exotic, and romantic as Coyle had been drab and realistic. The Yakuza refe
rred to the organized crime gangs of Japan, their exploits popularly mythologized in hundreds of bloody, highly ritualized motion pictures. Leonard Schrader, an American teacher in Japan, had written stories of the Nipponese mobsters, and his film critic—aspiring screenwriter brother Paul had managed to see a number of Yakuza films in Little Tokyo moviehouses in California. Together they constructed an East-meets-West elegiac and violent story of a tough American detective, Harry Kilmer, once a soldier stationed in postwar Japan, returned to that country to rescue a friend’s daughter from the local mafia. Between battles with the enemy gangs, Kilmer is reunited with his former mistress, Eiko, but this relationship is haunted by a humiliating secret—due to the dire circumstances after the war, Eiko’s husband, Ken, was compelled to pose as her brother during her love affair with the American soldier. In the end, before his return to America, obligated to Ken in many ways, Kilmer unexpectedly fulfills a ritual self-sacrifice—the cutting off and presentation of a fingertip.
The highly unusual screenplay commanded a whopping three-hundred-thousand-dollar payment from Warner Bros., and Lee Marvin was offered the lead. The studio wanted to reteam Marvin with his Dirty Dozen director, Robert Aldrich. But Marvin dropped out after Warner refused to make his suggested script changes. Mitchum signed on, with director approval. He and Aldrich met in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For six hours they talked and drank, remembered the old days, Wild Bill Wellman, G.I. Joe, Greece, Greek girls. They told stories, insulted their peers, the works. “I really considered him my friend, and I admired him,” said Aldrich. “I think he’s a brilliant actor—a strange, convoluted guy.” The day after their marathon bull session, Mitchum sent word that he didn’t want Aldrich to direct The Yakuza. Sydney Pollack, a man not known for his work with tough guy actors or violent subject matter, came on board. Robert Towne, the hired gun who had helped to make Villa Rides all that it became, was put to work on a rewrite of the Schrader script. The company arrived in Japan in January 1974. A small press conference was held. Mitchum looked out at a gathering of Japanese journalists and said to them, “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
