by Lee Server
The film’s real coup was its casting of Takakura Ken (most likely the Schraders’ hope from the get-go) as Mitchum’s comrade and the secret husband of Eiko. Ken was a legendary film actor in Japan, the Bogart or perhaps the Mitchum of his country’s gangster cinema. His tragic heroic aura, a distinctively dour charisma, was a perfect complement to Mitchum’s own wonderfully sad, soulful performance. “Mitchum and Ken got along just great. I think they really respected each other,” said Michael Moore, the film’s assistant director. “Ken was a prince to work with, and he was a big help throughout the filming, whenever there were difficulties with locations or with local conflicts. A true gentleman, Ken Takakura. A wonderful man.”
They filmed on locations in Tokyo and Kyoto, interiors in a Tokyo studio. The key American crew had to adjust to the surprisingly simple, almost primitive conditions of the Japanese soundstage. “It was a little strange at first,” said Michael Moore. “No overhead structures for the lights or for the electricians to work off of. Everything was hung up with ropes and bamboo poles. But we had a local crew with us and they showed us how it all worked.” They traveled to Kyoto on the bullet train. Pollack wanted to shoot on the actual moving train instead of faking it, so they took over a whole car and filmed Mitchum as the scenery streamed behind him.
In public, any time he wandered from the sets or took a walk, Mitchum would recall, he was surrounded by chirping, giggling schoolgirls, bowing and huddling. Everywhere he’d hear them chanting, “Please, Kirk Douglas-san, your autograph!” We also met some of the less demure Japanese. As with The Friends of Eddie Coyle’s Boston hard cases, The Yakuza put Mitchum in contact with real-life local gangsters. They were acquaintances of someone or other with the production, sleekly groomed, sharkskin-suited fellows in wraparound shades. One man showed Mitchum his automatic pistol—it was ten years in prison if you were caught holding it. “If anyone gets in your way while you’re in Japan,” a thug calmly told him, “just let us know. We’ll cut him down.”
He had his fun on the locations. “He became very fond of Japanese sake,” said Moore. He had his bad days. The studio publicist slipped a reporter into a dinner party in Kyoto one night and the actor erupted at the intrusion, the attempt to work him in his private time. The publicist said to relax; it was all part of being a star. Mitchum told him he didn’t want to be a star anymore. “I want out. I really want out. Perhaps the only way they will believe me is if I pack my bags and get out of here tomorrow. . . . Greta Garbo did it. . . .” Mitchum began shouting and pounding his fists in the direction of the now disinvited reporter, who fled the restaurant. Mitchum said people didn’t believe he didn’t give a damn anymore. He said, “Cross my heart and hope to die, no, I don’t give a damn!”
“He didn’t raise hell many times on that show,” said Michael Moore, “but when he did it was a good one. The furniture came out the windows of the hotel. The management had to be well paid off. Then when we were coming home, we were all at the airport together and Mitchum showed up with a framed picture he had bought, some Japanese scene. I swear you needed a van to move the thing, but he dragged it to the plane. He was loaded, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, dragged the thing onto the plane, Japan Airlines. I guess they were afraid to take it away from him. So they found someplace on board for it and we flew home.”
“I found him to be like a very, very powerful and lazy horse,” said Sydney Pollack of Robert Mitchum. “He wants to walk as slow as possible and wants to get away with doing as little as possible. You used to really have to push him. He won’t offer the full emotional nature of a performance, at least he didn’t for me, until you went after him a little bit.” Still, Mitchum’s performance was a grand one, a glorious tough/tender characterization, and he looked more purely movie star glamorous—the leonine presence, face of decaying beauty, broad shoulders caped in a camel’s hair overcoat—than he had for years. The film suffered from the director’s fondness for mushy, soft-focus visuals, but overall The Yakuza was a very entertaining and wonderfully exotic film.
If Bob had been reading his Los Angeles Times in late January 1974, he would have encountered news of an old friend, not heard from in ages. In a seedy stretch of Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, a nineteen-year-old transient named Roger B. Lebel had been stabbed to death. The suspected killer was an unstable drifter from Connecticut, a Bible salesman. Police investigating the murder found that Lebel’s only known acquaintance in the neighborhood was a female minister in a small church on nearby Western Avenue, The Spiritual Mission, Inc., Laymen’s Evangelist (SMILE). Her name was Lila Leeds. Now forty-eight years old, fuller of face, hair no longer blonde, she lived in a tiny court apartment on Melrose. Back in 1949, she had left California, banished from the state by the same judge who had sentenced her to sixty days behind bars. She had roamed around in the Midwest, working in nightclubs, getting married more than once, getting into trouble, going to jail. She’d gotten hooked on heroin. Once she’d been caught with the stuff on her while visiting her current husband in prison. Fifteen years an addict. In 1966, she had drifted back to Los Angeles, sick, penniless. One day she heard church bells ringing. It seemed like all the church bells in LA were ringing at once. She began to study religion, volunteered to help in the local missions. She did healings. For a time she sang and gave testimony of her deliverance at the Johnny Barton Miracle Crusade (”Come for your Miracle. . . . Come early, doors open at 1:00”), hosted by a man with the hair and sideburns of an Elvis Presley imitator. After so long a time as a bad girl, she believed she had finally been blessed, chosen to do good works for the Lord. At the SMILE center in Hollywood she tried to offer help to drug addicts and others with problems. So many young kids came out there, said Lila Leeds, wanting to get into the movies and finding nothing but trouble.
. . .
In the spring, returned from Japan, Mitchum gets a call, a voice out of the past. It’s Otto Preminger, in France, preparing an “international thriller” called Rosebud about a group of yachting debutantes kidnapped by Arab terrorists. Preminger needs a name actor for the sort-of lead, the role of the two-fisted government agent in pursuit of the terrorists. The part means two months’ work on the Cote d’Azur and Corsica in summer. A tempting offer. They call each other friend now. Otto is like Henry Hathaway, a charming gentleman when he’s not directing. Mitchum tries not to remember what Preminger is like when he is directing. He accepts the part.
In June Mitchum arrives in Juan les Pins. He is coaxed into attending a press conference. He is in fine form. Here, a sampling of his responses to reporters (questions immaterial):
“You want to suck what?”
“As long as it has tits. . . . “
“Fuck you! I’m not here to sell your papers.”
The company moves to Corsica. Bastia. Mitchum and his wife move into a deluxe hotel overlooking a palmy seashore. Up to now the filming has been a series of disappointments and minor disasters. The script doesn’t play. Production values must be reduced or sacrificed altogether. Some of the actors do not, after all, speak coherent English. It’s a mess. Some on the production believe—pray—that Mitchum’s skill and charisma will turn things around.
They don’t. After two weeks on location, Mitchum has worked only three days. Bored, he shifts between smooth professionalism and strange, erratic behavior. Preminger has his own problems, has never been a hand-holder, and is oblivious to the star’s growing restlessness. Shooting at an old mill, Mitchum wanders over to meet some local farmers, who present him with a mason jar of eau-de-vie, a mightily potent fruit mash. He is pleased with the gift and samples it readily. A writer, Theodore Gershuny, is chronicling the making of Rosebud for a book and records the actor’s antics as they try to film the scene. Mitchum and a group of raiders are lined up before the camera, studying a map. One of the actors cannot pronounce his line of dialogue. Mitchum is blithely mocking. The actor continues to screw up his line. “I should take out my dick and show him the map,” says Mitchu
m. “Take out what?” Preminger says. “I should piss on his arm! Hahaha—” “Bob, we are rolling!” “I’d take out your dick, if I could find it. . . .” “Bob, please, there are ladies present!”
In the evening, in town, Mitchum is drinking tall glasses of pastis with droplets of water. He sits at a cafe and ruminates sullenly to a reporter, William Hall: “I’m trapped. It’s an economic expedient, nothing more. I’ve no pride in my films. I don’t like being a movie star. I don’t like being owned. . . .” Later, the mood lightens, he scats to an appreciative audience. How he taught Gina Lollobrigida a new diet, “isometric farting.” Tells about the time he was at Eleanor Roosevelt’s joint and was trying on one of her nightgowns when Noel Coward comes in and starts kissing him on the hand and then FDR’s old lady walks in on them. Someone asks where he’s stashed his own wife. Mitchum says, “She’s here somewhere. I’m expecting her to show up at some embarrassing moment—like when I’m in bed with a cop. . . . “
He can’t sleep. Actor Cliff Gorman, in the hotel room below, hears Mitchum moving about all night. Preminger has scheduled two scenes to be shot at dawn: Mitchum, Cliff Gorman, and others scaling a wall, and a fight scene between Mitchum and French-Arab actor Amidou. A production assistant comes for him at 4 A.M. It is still pitch-dark when Mitchum arrives at the set. He enters the big catering tent where some members of the company are having coffee or breakfast. He shouts that he should not have been called so early and that a half hour had been wasted going to the wrong location. After getting no satisfactory response from the film’s associate producer, Mitchum goes over to the big wooden pole in the center of the catering tent and in his best Samson imitation attempts to pull it down. The members of the crew go on drinking their coffee, thinking that if they ignore him, there is a chance the tent will not come down on their heads. Mitchum storms out, growling that he would make them pay for this, that Preminger would have to do fifty takes for every shot in the picture.
Outside, Mitchum spots Preminger supervising the preparation of the tracks for the camera.
Mitchum screams, with mocking accent, “Vy haff you gotten me out here at this fucking hour of ze night, Otto?”
“Bob, you have been drinking with the Corsicans,” says Preminger.
“Yeah, that’s what they got here. Ship in some Jews and I’ll drink with them.”
“You were drinking yesterday when we tried to film. It cannot go on like this.”
“Just what are you trying to tell me, Otto?”
“. . . cannot go on . . .”
“You’re giving me my walking papers? Okay, let’s shake hands and I’ll be on my way, pal.”
“I don’t want to shake hands,” Preminger says. “There is nothing to shake hands about.”
“Right,” Mitchum says. “That’s it then. Bon voyage, buddy.”
Mitchum turns around and heads back to his car and driver. On the ride back to the hotel he leans his head against the young female chauffeur, closes his eyes, and begins to snore.
At the hotel, Mitchum announces that he’s been fired. He wakes Dorothy and tells her to start packing. The producer’s camp claims that Mitchum wasn’t fired, he quit. With insurers to think about, it would be costly to take the blame. Preminger is furious, convincing himself that Mitchum has been the source of his problems all along, even the ones before he hired him. Later in the morning there is a tense scene in the production office as Mitchum demands his first-class tickets home. A telephone is thrown around. Preminger has someone call the police.
“Fuck Preminger and the boat he sailed in on,” says Mitchum. “The Exodus!”
Gershuny reports a conversation that evening between Mitchum and Israeli actor Josef Shiloah. Mitchum grabs Shiloah’s hand. He says, “Kill me, brother. Kill me!” Mitchum is very sorry about what has happened. “If you are sorry,” the Israeli says, “you must call Preminger because he is older.” Mitchum says, “You Jew bastard, you stick with him.” Shiloah says no, it is the right thing to do. Mitchum calls Preminger, but Preminger doesn’t take the call. Shiloah says, “And I know is not a great star leaving. No! This is man with pain. He hurt to leave.”
Mitchum and his wife board a flight to Madrid that night. No one from the Rosebud company sees them off.
Within days Preminger hires Peter O’Toole, who has not worked much for several years. Victor Buono calls Bob with the news. “That,” says Mitchum, “is like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller.”
Nearly sixty years old and fired for inappropriate behavior, drunk and disorderly, that was the way people were telling it. Nearly ready for Social Security and still Hollywood’s reigning bad boy. Mitchum, back home, shrugged it off. Preminger was having one of his fits and the actor called his bluff, that was all. Then came Jackpot. He was entirely innocent this time. The picture, with Richard Burton costarring, was supposed to start rolling in Europe later that year. Mitchum said he wasn’t leaving home till the check cleared his American bank. He called their bluff, too. The check never cleared, and while Burton—too drunk to know if he’d been paid or not—sat in his hotel room waiting to be carried to the set, the producers abandoned the production. But all some people in the business heard was that Mitchum was connected with another big mess. One careless mention in the press even suggested that he had been replaced on the picture, fired because of a poor performance. “He just wasn’t coming across,” said Women’s Wear Daily. Did they mean across the Atlantic? Anyway, Mitchum was under a cloud. It was a funny time to start working on the last great film of his career.
Elliott Kastner had dreamed of making a movie from one of Raymond Chandler’s private eye novels long before he ever started producing pictures. Raymond Chandler: the great bard of hard-boiled literature, whose tales of crime and detection in Southern California were both violent, convoluted mystery stories and poetic ruminations on the human condition, told in the voice of Chandler’s ruefully wisecracking, philosophical, tough guy hero, knight errant of LA’s mean streets, Philip Marlowe. Early on, the various screen rights had been unaffordable or slipped through his hands and went to other people. Kastner had settled for a Chandler pretender, Ross MacDonald, buying The Moving Target and making Harper, with Paul Newman as a smirking excuse for detective Lew Archer. By 1973, with many hits to his credit, the producer could make his dream come true. There was one major Chandler book un-filmed, The Long Goodbye. Kastner wanted to do it right. He hired Leigh Brackett for the script—she had done The Big Sleep for Bogart back in the ‘40s. And to play Philip Marlowe, Kastner wanted Robert Mitchum. United Artists said no. They wanted to go with somebody more happening and imposed that ace contemporary star Elliott Gould. Direction was entrusted to another now personage, Robert Altman, who proceeded to make a smug kind of antiChandler movie, with a stoned-looking, hippie-student-protester Philip Marlowe. It was a disaster, barely making it into a few theaters. But Kastner kept the faith. Two years later he was ready to make another Chandler, having purchased the rights to Farewell, My Lovely from the current owners. This time he got the man he wanted for the role of Raymond Chandler’s urban knight.
To direct, Kastner and his team of producers hired Dick Richards, a former photographer for Look and Life magazines, a maker of television commercials, and now a feature film director with two pictures under his belt, The Culpepper Cattle Company, a Western, and Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, a seriocomic road picture, both of them unusual and often striking works. It was a time of many new, young directors in Hollywood, and Richards was by no means the least interesting. His first inspired decision was to make Farewell, My Lovely a period piece. Kastner had never considered anything but a contemporary setting for the production, like The Long Goodbye, like Marlowe with James Garner as the detective, like every other Chandler adaptation. The continuing value of the Marlowe stories was supposed to be all in the plot, the characters, the wisecracking dialogue. It took a certain sensibility in 1975 to begin to see works like the novels of Raymond Chandler or the ‘40s fil
m noir as talismanic items from a mythic pop cultural past. Kastner agreed to Richards’s choice, not out of any great interest in the poetic possibilities of an evocation of archaic forms and character types but in acknowledgment of the success of recent “historical” movies, the recreations of the ‘30s and ‘40s in such popular films as The Godfather, Chinatown, Bertolucci’s voluptuous The Conformist set in Fascist Italy. For Dick Richards, though, the idea of returning this Philip Marlowe movie to the time of the novel’s original writing and the heyday of the private eye movie was more than an attempt to ape Chinatowns success or to parade some quaint old automobiles and retro-chic pinstriped suits and fedoras across the screen. Richards’s film would be as much elegy as detective story. From the opening shot of a weary (fedoraed and pinstriped) Robert Mitchum bathed in the soft glow of red neon, and the opening line—”This past spring was the first that I’d felt tired and realized I was growing old”—Farewell, My Lovely was to be a consciously mythopoetic work, tribute to the shadow-haunted melodramas of the past and to a man who was among the last surviving links to that lost golden age, a movie star who had indeed grown old and done it on camera before our very eyes.
