Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (65 page)

The finished film was a polished bore. Hollywood’s Stanley Donen, in his expatriate phase, had directed with such artistocratic preciocity he might have been expecting a knighthood for his labors. Neither of the male stars was well served by the material. Grant’s purring, ironic suavity always worked best when he played quasi-hustlers or schlemiels, not smug noblemen; and Mitchum, enacting a ballsier variation of what screwball comedy aficionadoes would know as the “Ralph Bellamy role,” was constitutionally ill-equipped to do this sort of brittle, one-raised-eyebrow frolic. For Mitchum’s sardonic wit and fatalistic insouciance to resonate he needed a dangerous setting, a life-or-death situation, not a plush London vacation. Sparkling Jean Simmons, with little to do in a ditzy best-friend role, stole the picture from all of them.

.   .   .

Even worse was an all-American comedy,
The Last Time I Saw Archie,
ostensibly based on the army experiences of veteran Hollywood scribe William Bowers and his adventures with an amiable con man of a private named Archie Hall. It was a first attempt at humor for the ordinarily glum producer-director-actor Jack “Just the Facts” Webb, the frog-faced star of television’s
Dragnet,
here playing the wry, long-suffering Bowers to Mitchum’s impudent Archie. Television was the operative word: The whole thing resembled an extended episode of a sitcom, from the cheap gray sets, functional photography, and presence of supporting players like Louis Nye, Don Knotts, and Joe Flynn, to the characters and jokes out of a lesser episode of
Sgt. Bilko.
It lacked only the canned titters and guffaws of a laugh track—and brother, it needed them. No attempt was made to make the supposed World War II setting look anything other than 1960s contemporary, and the cast of jowly, middle-aged actors were all twenty years too old for their parts. The film was relentlessly modest, even by sitcom standards, with little or nothing happening for most of the running time. The script posited Archie as a world-class operator who fascinates and infuriates everyone he meets, but the character Mitchum actually brings to half-life on screen is bland and indescribably lethargic. The real Archie Hall, William Bowers’s army buddy, sued the filmmakers for invasion of privacy, but the dullness of Mitchum’s incarnation made defamation of character a more appropriate charge. Mitchum relished referring to this mediocrity as his favorite film of all time, based on a simple equation: four weeks’ work times a hundred thousand dollars a week.

During the Belmont Farms years, when work took him back to Los Angeles for weeks and months, Mitchum made his headquarters at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the “pink palace” above Sunset Boulevard. The hotel pampered its celebrated guests with customized service, and Mitchum’s personal guest file included a stipulated eye-opener and hangover cure that was destined never to be added to the regular menu—bourbon and orange juice blended with honey and eggs.

As a guest, Mitchum did not always return their graciousness with model behavior. His suite became a rowdy bachelor pad at times. Longtime bellman Jack Keith recalled one four-day-long Mitchum bacchanale as most likely the wildest in the hotel’s history. “It had everything—booze, broads, and guys. It went on in two suites, Mitchum’s and this other fellow’s, which were together. All I can remember is everybody walked around in various stages of undress.”

.   .   .

Gregory Peck and British director J. Lee Thompson were making
The Guns of Navarone
in Europe when the star handed the director a copy of John D. Mac-Donald’s novel
The Executioners.
Peck was going to make it the first feature for his new production company, with Universal picking up the tab. “We were working so well together,” said Thompson, “and he was very happy with
Navarone.
He said, ‘Read this. I’d like us to make this one next.’” John D. MacDonald, one of the last of the writers to come out of the hard-boiled pulp magazines, had written a tough, merciless suspense story, and screenwriter James R. Webb’s adaptation would be even tougher: the story of a lawyer whose life becomes a nightmare when a sadistic ex-con he helped send to prison returns seeking revenge. No simple hooligan, Max Cady cleverly perverts the law to protect himself even as he stalks and terrorizes the attorney and his young family. Hitchcock’s
Psycho
had recently set a new standard for movie suspense, and Peck thought that a film of
The Executioners
could deliver the same kind of terrifying thrills with a much more realistic story.

“I liked the book very much,” said Thompson. “Greg had a script being prepared, we signed the contracts, and I came to make my first picture in Hollywood. Originally there was a certain budget, and it was assumed that Greg would be the only star in this, his own production. We considered some other actors. Rod Steiger was one, and Telly Savalas was another. We actually tested Savalas, and he gave a very good test for the part. But these were character actors, or at least secondary actors compared to Greg. At some point in discussing it together, we began to talk about having the villain played by an actor of equal importance, make it a much stronger matchup from the audience’s point of view, and then Mitchum immediately came to mind. There were some problems—he was not available in the beginning and it meant changing the budget—but once we had seen Mitchum in the role we knew he was superbly right for it, and Greg did what had to be done to get him.”

Mitchum came to a meeting with Thompson and Peck at Peck’s office on the Universal lot. He had no interest in doing it, he said. He had been working too much. He was going back to his farm in Maryland and taking a long rest. Peck and Thompson got him talking about the script, about the character of Max Cady. Yes, Mitchum admitted, he had liked the story, the way it showed how the law really operated, how the cops held all the cards, bent the rules to serve their ends, and how one man gave it back to them. That was something you didn’t see too often. “Who else could do this, Bob?” Peck and Thompson asked. “What about Jack Palance?” That’d be over the top before the opening fade-in, Mitchum said. “The whole thing with Cady, fellas, is that
snakelike charm.
Me,
officer? I never laid a hand on the girl, you
must
be mistaken.”

“We discussed the part thoroughly,” said J. Lee Thompson, “and when we heard Mitchum’s thoughts we were more convinced than ever that he would be terrific for the role. And I think by the end of the meeting he now realized that himself. But he still couldn’t make up his mind and wouldn’t agree to it.”

Mitchum flew back to Maryland. In the morning there was a delivery: a bouquet of flowers, a case of bourbon, and a note—”Please do the film!” A little later in the day he called Los Angeles. “OK. I’ve drunk your bourbon. I’m drunk. I’ll do it.”

They were calling the picture
Cape Fear.

Web’s adaption was set in the Carolinas. Director Thompson traveled around scouting locations mentioned in the book but didn’t like any of them, then found a town in Georgia he thought would be perfect. “Fucking Savannah!” Mitchum said, when he learned where the film would be made. “They railroaded me in that town, man. They may still have a warrant out for me. . . . “

“Oh, he spoke at length about what he thought of Savannah,” J. Lee Thompson recalled. “How much he disliked the people there. He had a definite grudge. And he had it the entire time we filmed. We got down there and he had a great big chip on his shoulder about the whole place, had contempt for everyone there. And he loved that he had come as a big movie star, where everyone was asking for his autograph, and before they had thrown him in jail.”

“We were all put up at the DeSoto Hotel,” said Assistant Director Ray Gosnell. “And word got around that Mitchum had had some problems in Savannah in the past, but I think he settled down and enjoyed himself. It was a very, very friendly place. And the day we arrived there was a convention of southern hairdressers, all these females from beauty salons all over the area, and they were very friendly and made quite a welcoming committee for Mitchum and some of the members of the crew. I don’t think some of them ever got to their own rooms at all that night.”

“You know, Mitchum would give the impression he didn’t take the job seriously,” said Thompson. “He would go out and have a good time all night and come to work and act like he hadn’t learned his lines. You know, sort of saying, ‘What is this thing; where are we?’—looking at the script like it was for the first time. But then he would work perfectly. Highly professional. He just goes in and does it. And he was superb.”

The contrast between the characters of Cady and lawyer Sam Bowden was mirrored somewhat by the personalities of the two stars. Peck was a straight arrow, took the job of acting seriously, was thorough, analytical. Mitchum liked to make a show of being off the cuff, mocked seriousness. As if to emphasize that parallel, Mitchum did some taunting of his more regimented costar. “Peck,” said Ray Gosnell, “always requested there be no distractions off camera. No one standing around in his eye line when he was doing a scene. So if there were grips or people standing around where he could see them, we always needed to clear them all out of the way. Mitchum always thought that was a joke. One time we had cleared the sight-line area for Peck to do the scene and Mitchum arrived to put on wardrobe for a scene and he went right over to where Peck could see him and started stripping, taking off all his clothes. I think it was just a gag; he was trying to see if he could shake him up.”

What might have made the teasing more difficult to take was the realization that Mitchum was stealing the picture. “From the first time Peck gave me the book to read, he said that he would be playing the lawyer, and he said that Cady was probably the better part,” said Thompson. “And when Mitchum signed on, Greg had a feeling he might run away with it. And as we came to shoot the film, his fear was being realized—Mitchum’s characterization was so strong. But this was Peck’s film company and he had hired Mitchum, and I know that Peck was very fond of Mitchum as a person and admired his performance all through the film. He never let it get him upset or felt any jealousy or anything like that, always full of praise for Mitchum. And you know he gave a magnificent performance against a character that was far more colorful.”

Weather conditions and various dissatisfactions brought the
Cape Fear
company back to Los Angeles sooner than expected. Interiors were shot at Universal, the last-act scenes aboard the boat and in the water filmed in the studio lake and on the coast around Ventura. Now they were shooting the film’s most violent and emotionally charged scenes, and the nature of these became reflected in the atmosphere on the sets and particularly in the man playing Max Cady.

Mitchum said to J. Lee Thompson, “You know, I
live
a character. And this character drinks and rapes.”

“That gave me pause, you know. And he did fulfill some of that. And when we had the violent scenes, he did work himself up. When he was playing one of those scenes he looked at you like he was going to kill you. You had to watch him because he really played the part. You had to be careful to control him—
not the acting, but he might go over the top physically. There was a scene with Barrie Chase, where he’s being very rough with her. And I had to stop filming at one or two points to let things cool down. But I was certainly glad to get it all on camera. Barrie Chase was frightened of him; I know that because she told me so. She admired him, as everyone did. But, you know, he made people frightened.”

The climactic battle in the water between Peck and Mitchum took days to film, shooting at night on Universal’s back lot lake. “It was freezing cold,” Ray Gosnell remembered. “We put these warmers in the water, but you know there’s no way of keeping a lake warm. And the actors had to wrestle in there for the better part of a week, at night.”

“Mitchum enjoyed those scenes, I think,” said Thompson. “He liked getting in the water and having that fight with Greg. I’m not too sure about Greg liking it, because he was on the receiving end. He had to be forced underwater, and Mitchum kept him under there for quite a long time. We devised a code so that Peck could come up if it was getting too much for him. But sometimes Mitchum overstepped the line. I mean, he was meant to be drowning Greg, and he really took it to the limit. We had to send a man in to get Greg up. It was a bit of a worry. But Peck took it marvelously; he never complained. I expected there to be some outburst from Peck, but he was a real sport about the whole thing. And it looked marvelous on film.”

Cape Fears
most violent sequence, the last scene to be shot, involved Max Cady’s brutalizing and sexual assault on Bowden’s wife, Peggy, well played by Polly Bergen, whose usual elegance and poise made her violation and reduction to hysteria in these moments all the more frightening. Thompson, Bergen, and Mitchum all sensed the electric possibilities in the scene. Everything had been building to this, Cady’s ultimate, horrible explosion of sadistic fury, meant to bring the audience to a peak of dread and anguish before the climactic release of the final battle and the—not triumph, but bare survival of good over evil. Mitchum roamed the set, bare-chested, sweating, building himself into a rage. There was no joking with the crew, tossing away a cigarette, and “Roll ‘em” this time. “He was like a fireball,” said Thompson. “You felt any moment he would explode, an eruption. We got ready for it, and we talked over the action. But there was no rehearsal. I thought we should just do it. We just talked it over a bit what they should do and added things, invented on the spur of the moment. And I improvised the business with the eggs. To crack the egg on the chest, the symbolism of it. Mitchum liked that very much.”

The camera turned. Mitchum’s fury was released.

“He just. . . lost it,” said Polly Bergen.

“It went much further then we were ever able to use,” said Thompson. “He smeared the eggs over her chest and down over her breasts and so forth.”

Mitchum’s flailing arm hit a cabinet, ripping his hand open. Dripping blood from his fingers, he grabbed Bergen by the shoulders and thrust her against the cabin door. The door was fixed to spring open, but as the actress remembered it the catch had come down and Mitchum simply broke it open, using her back as a battering ram. “His hand was covered in blood, my back was covered in blood,” she said. He slammed her into the other room and continued the assault. The director called, “Cut!” Called it twice more, then people rushed onto the set to break it up. “We just kept going,” said Bergen, “caught up in the scene. They came over and physically stopped us.”