In Praise of Robert Mitchum

Hard to credit in a time when movie stars are pampered, preened, PR-potty trained and bland as milk, but leading men were once character actors by definition. Consider the great Robert Mitchum: lantern jawed, broad-shouldered, heavy with muscle but not aerobicised, more like a stevedore than narcissistic gym-rat.

But then, the man had lived. Expelled at 12 for scuffling with the school principal, he rode railway cars, worked as a ditch digger and bareknuckle boxer, was arrested for vagrancy and put on a chain gang at age 14, did stints as a ghost writer for an astrologer and machine operator for Lockheed, all before he set foot on a stage. (Not a bad singer either, as borne out by ‘The Ballad of Thunder Road’ released in 1958.)
The Mitchum of Night of the Hunter differed from the Preacher Harry Powell of Davis Grubb’s novel in physicality rather than spirit. Grubb’s prose describes Powell as a wiry, luminous, almost feral, more like Hank Williams or Jerry Lee Lewis (Hank, it should be noted, was not averse to preachifying to great effect on the Luke the Drifter records, and Jerry Lee was first cousin to Jimmy Swaggart).
But Mitchum’s intimidating physical presence added even more layers of menace to the role. Who wouldn’t want to wield the kind of power that kept the folks at the diner transfixed by the parable of right hand/left hand? Here was a man gone way beyond morals or ethics, a man who wanted what he wanted – money – and made no apologies. A product of Nietzschan will-to-power and fundamentalist fire, and mean as a snake with it.
Would any of us really want to live inside that skin? Maybe not. But absolute freedom from societal mores and courthouse law is a seductive prospect to those among us who, when consumed with the urge to clobber some stuffed-shirt middle-management pipsqueak, are constrained not by better nature but only because we don’t want to reckon with a summons or time in the lock-up.
By contrast, the Mitchum who played Max Cady in that other B-noir classic Cape Fear was a more secular kind of hunter, driven by a code of revenge devoid of any religious trappings. Robert DeNiro must surely have also had Powell in mind when he portrayed Cady in Scorsese’s remake as a wronged backwoods angel of death, bulked up from prison time, tattooed with scripture (“I don’t know whether to look at him or read him,” Mitchum himself quipped in his brief cameo), and even at the moment of his death, spewed bloodcurdling glossolalia that enacted some sort of weird reverse-Darwinian regression to a primal state.
Shades of Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”