Weird Scenes Week 82 - Ridin' the Rails with Rob: the unflappable cool of Robert Mitchum

Starring in at least 12 films that are or have been associated with the Film Noir genre (a retroactive designation courtesy of France’s Cahiers du Cinema crowd covering American B pictures with cynical, compromised heroes, vicious femme fatales and a gialloesque immersion in a dark underworld where all is not as it seems and everyone is guilty and menacing), Robert Mitchum brought a less comical, far less telegraphed Dean Martin style insouciance to his work.  

Tall and manly enough to stand his own in a fight, yet sleepy eyed and laid back enough to be led along by the nose to his doom by the many vamps and tramps he’d encounter, much of his onscreen persona appears to have been presaged by his own life.

The son of a working class dock worker and railroad man, he wound up living under a resented military stepfather to the point where he wound up riding the rails and bumming his way around the country in his early teens, supposedly winding up (and escaping!) Sullivans Travels style on a southern jailhouse chain gang for his efforts.

An early advocate of the wacky weed, he wound up in prison for a second time over pot possession right in the middle of his noir career, threw a studio manager into a lake (literally) and more, in a career which at times found him working alongside two of the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes girls (Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell) and eventually starring in two much overhyped films late in the genre, Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear.  He’d then return to prominence over a decade later with three notable films in the 70’s neo noir revival before closing out on then much hyped television miniseries The Winds of War...and that stupid Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged (oy, what a way to go!)

Join us tonight as we speak of another cinematic epitome of tough guy cool, the one and only Robert MItchum, right here on Weird Scenes!

Week 82: Ridin' the Rails with Rob - the unflappable cool of Robert Mitchum

 

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