dual personalities

Tag: Robert Mitchum

August 6, 2015

“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

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January 10, 2014

Great God! this is an awful place.*

by chuckofish

Preoccupied as I am with snow, I got to thinking about a movie pick for Friday that is snow-related.

The first film that came to mind, of course, was one of my favorite musicals, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), directed by the great Stanley Donen and featuring the best-ever dance in the snow.

Then there is the entertaining Cold War thriller Ice Station Zebra (1968) starring a studly all-male cast that includes Rock Hudson, James Brown and Patrick MacGoohan. Who cares if the sets are terrible?

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If you like Robert Mitchum (and I do), you could watch Track of the Cat (1954), a film noir western wherein “complex and dangerous family dynamics play out against the backdrop of the first big snowstorm of winter.”

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Or there’s Scott of the Antarctic (1948)–the true story of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his ill-fated expedition to try to be the first man to discover the South Pole. All the Brits have stiff upper lips (which become frostbitten) in this very sad rendering of a tragic tale.

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Jeremiah Johnson (1972) with Robert Redford has a lot of snow in it and it is a much better movie than Downhill Racer (1969) which also boasts Robert Redford and lots of snow. I vote for Jeremiah Johnson.

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Other movies that come to mind: The Shining (1980), The Grey (2011), The Pink Panther (1964). Can you think of any good movies that take place in a snowy locale? Did Elvis make a ski-bum movie?

*Scott at the South Pole

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