“Build my gallows high, baby.”*

by chuckofish

Today is Robert Mitchum’s birthday.

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Even as a child, I knew he was sexy. I mean really.

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And he was a little scary too.

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Finally he was paired with John Wayne. Perfect.

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Indeed, he made some really good movies and some not so great ones. He played two of my favorite characters in fiction: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (twice) and A.B. Guthrie’s Dick Summers in The Way West (1967)–none of them very good movies. But Robert Mitchum was one of those actors who  made even a terrible movie (like The Way West) worth watching.

So let’s toast Robert Mitchum tonight and watch one of his good movies: His Kind of Woman (1951), Out of the Past (1947), The Enemy Below (1957), or one of my all-time faves El Dorado (1966).

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Bonus Point: Who knows what movie it is in which Robert Mitchum utters the immortal line: “Go on, tell me some more about that time when you were Queen of the Veiled Prophet’s Ball”?

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*The title quote is Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past