On Robert Mitchum

Only a few times in my life has the villain on the screen ever been so vicious, so vividly, that I wanted to spring from my seat and plunge a knife in him, into the one place where it might really hurt him dead—his throat maybe; I’d probably never be able to get him in the heart or the head. It’s the best kind of compliment I know how to pay Robert Mitchum that on two of these occasions, it was he who played the villain.

The particular movies, if it matters, were Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter, but Mitchum brought that kind of black magic to nearly all his roles, which, to hear him tell it, inevitably came in one of two categories: “With and without a horse.” That was the personal style; that was the sleepy-eyed humor to match the sleepy-eyed gaze. It’s why the best thing ever written about Mitchum, a biography by Lee Server, is called “Baby, I Don’t Care.”

When he was busted for pot up in Laurel Canyon, back when that kind of thing was still called a crime, the wiseguy cop doing the booking asked Mitchum his profession, and the answer that came back was the epitome of laconic cool: “Former actor.” Sixty days later, when he finally got out of county, Mitchum was far from repentant, not quite defiant, but certainly not apologetic or ashamed: “Well, I’m not stupid, and I don’t plan to get into any more trouble. But who can say what I might do tomorrow? If I put out some phony reform story and then fall from grace, I’ll just look like a liar.”

This is the kind of thing the cultural critic Dave Hickey was talking about when he wrote of how Mitchum would never “pardon his failings with some lame excuse.” It’s also the kind of thing I encountered recently when watching an old Mitchum appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. In spite of his age, Mitchum was sitting there in that funky-’70s chic of dark glasses and dangerous lapels. This was very conspicuously the Robert Mitchum of The Big Sleep, not the Robert Mitchum of Tobacco Road. Anyway, he’s sitting there, doing his talk-show thing, the same talk-show thing everybody in the biz does, you know, only they don’t do it with the cool candor and the self-deprecating jadedness. He’s sitting there, and with the best of intentions Dick Cavett asks his guest how he’s managed to remain married—in Hollywood no less—for so many years.

Having already read with fascination Server’s biography, I knew the answer to that question, enough to know that it wasn’t pretty. I also knew that if anyone was willing to give its answer honestly, it would be the man who had just been asked. I started to feel sort of uncomfortable. Mitchum had to think before he answered, but he didn’t have to think long, finally drawing it out slow and thoughtful: “Deviousness.”