Robert Mitchum: The Last Celluloid Desperado
After 20 years of playing a comic strip character called Superstud, Mitchum at last is being recognized as the gifted actor he has always been. He is a master of stillness. Other actors act. Mitchum is. He has true delicacy and expressiveness, but his forte is his indelible identity. Simply by being there, Mitchum can make almost any other actor look like a hole in the screen.
— Director David Lean, to a reporter
On a clear, bone-cold morning in early November — the same day the nation is opting for four more years — the news flashes across Boston’s church-encircled Commons with the speed of a virus ravaging an old-folks’ home. Among the cast and crew assembled in the park to film George Higgins’ street-savvy study of New England hoodlum folkways, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the surprise announcement causes near pandemonium. The gaffers and grips, the electricians and sound men, all the technicians begin to mill about briskly on the thick-sodded grass adjacent to the ice-rimed children’s wading pool. Even the park’s casual strollers, walking their diarrheic poodles and mastiffs, begin to form small, excited queues, because word has it that Robert Mitchum . . . fabled wild boy of the road, myth-dripping bete noir of more than a hundred movies . . . is arising . . . and coming to the location site . . . before noon.
Peter Yates, the director, swaddled to his stringy gray helicopter hairdo in a bulky, fur-collared parka, flashes the V sign. “It’s a tribute to Bob’s professionalism, rayly,” the Scottish-born director drawls out of the corner of his mouth in a clipped mid-Atlantic brogue. “Bob’s only tahsk will be to feed lines to Richard Jordan off-camera, you see, which could be done by anyone here. But contrary to common myth, Bob takes filmmaking very seriously. And I’ve been absolutely astounded by his performance so far. This will be the finest role of his career, I assure you.”
“It’ll be his Zorba, ” the unit publicist chimes in nervously. The unit publicist — let us call him Portnoy in deference to his concordance of real and imagined complaints — is a thick-bodied, prematurely balding gnome who is not without interest. For one thing, he is mortally terrified of Mitchum. The week before, during a filming sequence at the Boston Garden, Big Bad Bob had hurled a styrofoam cup of beer at Portnoy’s photographer. The photographer had been too zealous in his work, that was all — “He got in too close and made Mitchum’s shit hot.” This morning, hopping from foot to foot to keep warm, Portnoy looks visibly relieved when Yates hospitably offers to introduce the visiting writer to Mitchum.
A blue-jowled Irish cop is controlling the queues of spectators massing along the park’s main path. “Can youse step back dere, lady? Dey’re fixin’ to take some movie heah.” A snaggletoothed little man in a twill hat asks the cop when Mitchum is supposed to arrive. The cop shrugs. “Zowie!” the little guy yodels, shadowboxing in the air. “I wouldn’t want ol’ Mitchum to belt me one, you know what I mean? That guy, he’s as tough as John Wayne — tougher, maybe.”
Over at the Beacon Street boundary of the Commons, a sleek black limo driven by a bullet headed Teamster named Harry docks at the curb, and Mitchum alights, wearing pitch-black shades and a dark topcoat. There’s a hush as he walks leisurely down the grassy glade toward the camera setup, moving in the loose, powerful stride that’s known in the trade as the Mitchum Ramble. On the way, squaring his door-wide shoulders, he surveys the park’s gnarled trees, the coveys of pigeons wheeling overhead, the State House dome glowing gold in the distance, the crowd of hushed onlookers in their orange-lined styrofoam parkas. Mitchum is a massive hulk of a man, with a jowly face battered as a used VW bus. Silently, he shakes hands with Yates. “Where we at, dad?” he asks.
As Yates smiles and begins to explain the setup, Mitchum glances around at the individual members of the crew, nodding, counting heads. Portnoy flashes him a sickly smile. Mitchum looks at Portnoy and doesn’t see him. Does not see him. Mitchum, it turns out, looks at a lot of people that way.
Mitchum studies the spectators, paying particular notice to several fetching college-age girls showing tantalizing expanses of panty-hosed shank and thigh between boot tops and coat hems. “Hot damn, dad, it’s great to get up durin’ the day,” he deadpans to Yates in a bass rumble. “I get to see some ladies with clothes on for a change.”
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