The Passion of the Chump: The Synoptic Mitchum

above: Mitchum, out there gettin' gutshot for all us sinners


I have a new essay up at Mulholland Books that examines Robert Mitchum's propensity for getting gutshot by beautiful women. I look at this martyr's tale as told by three different, but terrifically talented, directors: Jacques Tourneur, John Farrow, and Otto Preminger.

A taste:

During his long stint in Noirville, Robert Mitchum played everything from upright heroes to the nastiest of villains, but first and foremost he was the definitive sap. More than any other actor, Mitchum created the pivotal figure of the lovesick antihero with tragic taste in women. We find the core aspects of this persona in three films he made at RKO between 1947 and 1953: Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, and Angel Face. These films feature the actor in strikingly similar scenarios which develop and resolve in parallel fashion.

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The Room (2003)

Most bad movies aren't bad in any special way. The business of filmmaking has always been a high dollar risk venture, so most films try to duplicate past successes. This is why your average FAILURE TO LAUNCH* is a bland confection of recycled materials, the cinematic equivalent of fast food--the same old shit on a new bun. In other words, they're bad in a mass produced way.

And then there's THE ROOM, a movie so horrible it achieves a kind of greatness. It is part of the genre of so-bad-it's-good films that reaches back to Claudio Fragasso's TROLL 2 and, further, to the godfather of godawfulness, Ed Wood, director of PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE. Like those films, THE ROOM is the work of an auteur. This would-be chamber drama was produced, written, and directed by Tommy Wiseau and stars Wiseau as Johnny, a San Francisco bank employee with a European accent of indeterminate origin. He's engaged to marry the villainous Lisa, but Lisa is bored by their life together and decides to seduce Johnny's best friend, Mark.

That's pretty much it for the main plot, but the film is chocked full to bursting with tossed-off, immediately abandoned subplots. There's a one-scene-long subplot involving a drug dealer, followed not long after by a one-scene-long subplot about Lisa's faked pregnancy. And then there's the truly weird moments--like one character's casual revelation that she's dying of breast cancer...a matter never mentioned again in the film.

THE ROOM plays like it's been made by people who've never seen a movie before. Someone must have told Wiseau that you point a camera at people while they pretend to have conversations, and that's what happens here. Sorta. The acting in this movie isn't just bad, it's supernaturally horrible. As both a writer and an actor, Wiseau has only a glancing command of English ("Lisa has been teasing me, and we didn't make love in a while" and "Everybody betray me!"). Meanwhile, the main set looks like the background of an infomercial, shots drift in and out of focus for no reason, and scenes play as if they were edited at random.

Best (or worst) of all: scattered throughout the film, like little time bombs, are four sex scenes that should be shown to high school students as advertisements for abstinence.

The movie is, in a word, hilarious. And, see, this is where THE ROOM finds its dimwitted grandeur. Your average Hollywood craptacular is made with proficiency and skill and soul-crushing banality. Wiseau's magnum opus, however, is never bland. There's not a single uninteresting scene in this movie. Every scene is bizarrely, uniquely terrible in some way.

For instance, my favorite subplot involves Denny, the freakish man-child who lives in the same building as Johnny. We're told that Denny is like Johnny's son, but it's unclear a) how old Denny is (he looks to be in his mid-twenties but acts like he's about fourteen), and b) where Denny lives. He sneaks into Johnny's apartment to watch Johnny and Lisa roll around on the bed. This leads to a pillow fight, followed by Denny's departure and the harrowing descent of Johnny and Lisa into one of the film's gorge-raising depictions of human coitus. Later, Denny is threatened by a drug dealer, and still later, he confesses to Johnny that he's in love with Lisa (which, needless to say, is yet another subplot abandoned posthaste).

The thing is, all this adds up to a unified whole. THE ROOM may want to be SEX, LIES and VIDEOTAPE, but its real antecedent is Ed Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, another drama that was morphed into a comedy by the sheer passionate ineptitude of its creator. And to give credit where credit is due, THE ROOM is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, as funny in its way as anything by Woody Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, or the Coen brothers. See it with someone you love, or better yet, see it with a lot of people. The film has become a "cult sensation" and seeing it this past weekend at The Shadowbox Community Microcinema in Roanoke, VA, I was struck by its power on an audience. Yelling at the screen, calling out lines of dialog, applauding after the sex scenes--the crowd loved it with a fervor we usually reserve for great works of pop art.

Watch some clips here.

*my thanks to my buddy Erin Wommack for providing the name of a shitty Matthew McConaughey movie when I needed one.

Pulp Serenade

As near as I can tell, there's no one quite like Cullen Gallagher out there mixing it up on the internet. Gallagher is better known to hardcore noir geeks as the brains behind the blog Pulp Serenade, a treasure trove of old and new crime fiction. On a nearly daily basis, Pulp Serenade churns out reviews of long (looooong) lost pulp novels and spotlights offbeat contemporary authors. Gallagher is a perceptive critic and a dogged archivist/historian. His joy in discovering a new dusty old dime novel is palpable and infectious.

Just last week, he unveiled a new series he's doing on critical perspectives, looking at the original reception of classic crime fiction. His first entry was an overview of writer Day Keene.

Lastly, Gallagher also contributed the fascinating essay "A History of Pulp" to the new anthology Beat To A Pulp: Round One.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The opening scenes of The Night of the Hunter play like something out of a Flannery O’Connor story—a Southern Gothic spin on film noir—but by the end it has turned into something much more. It is a rich, scary, brilliant movie.

Robert Mitchum plays a woman-murdering preacher named Harry Powell who travels the countryside with LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE tattooed on the other. He gets tossed in jail for theft and while he’s there he shares a cell with a condemned murderer named Ben Harper. Not long before he’s executed, Harper talks in his sleep and discloses the existence of some money he left hidden with his young son and daughter, John and Pearl. After Powell is released from prison, he heads off to find the children and the missing money.

He’s lucky to find the kids living with their widowed mother, and luckier still to discover that she’s played by Shelley Winters, that embodiment of needy cluelessness. It doesn’t take him long to convert her into a guilt-ridden religious fanatic and seduce her into marriage. Once he’s moved into the house, he goes to work on the kids to find out where they’ve hidden the money.

John and Pearl are played by Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce. Among the interesting things about The Night of the Hunter is that it is one of the rare noirs about children. Most kids in noirs are props, exploited as symbols of domestic tranquility. In this film, however, the kids are a little weird. Neither Chapin nor Bruce are cute in a conventional sense and neither of them give cute performances. The movie features them as protagonists in a stylized nightmare, and in some ways The Night of the Hunter looks and feels like a child's storybook--albeit a weird one.

Consider the plot from their point of view. Their father is a crook, executed for his crimes. They are outcasts among other children because of this fact. Their mother means well, but she is lonely and sad. Then a man shows up. He marries their mother and moves into the house. But he always wants to be alone with them. Every time their mother is away, he goes up to their bedroom. He interrogates them in different ways. He puts the little girl on his lap, flirts with her almost. He makes the boy stand in the center of the room while he hurls abuse at him. He warns them not to tell their mother. This is our secret, he tells them. She wouldn’t believe you anyway.

In setting up Mitchum as the tormentor of two young children—and having him hide behind his privilege as an adult, and his privilege as both their stepfather and as a man of God— The Night of the Hunter gives us the perhaps the first real portrait of a child molester in American cinema. Even more than Peter Lorre’s turn as the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M, Mitchum’s child-terrorizing preacher is a dark portrait of a very real monster.

The Night of the Hunter situates this monster inside a highly stylized landscape of shadows and Expressionistic sets. It is a completely artificial world where even nature feels unnatural, and where everything is shot to accentuate artificiality rather than obscure it. This movie simply looks unlike any other movie ever made, a combination of Flannery O’Connor and Dr. Caligari. The whole thing is so fake, so scary and eerily beautiful, it feels like a children’s movie directed by a pederast--OZ with an evil Wizard.

As the evil Wizard Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum gives one of his best performances. This movie—along with his equally terrifying work as the rapist Max Cady in Cape Fear—justifies us calling Mitchum one of the screen’s great villains. Impressive, especially considering that he was also one of the screen’s great leading men.

My essay on the film—like most writing about it—has revolved around Mitchum’s crazy preacher, but it is worth noting that the final third of the film involves the children seeking protection with an old lady played by Lillian Gish. Mitchum and Gish square off at the end, HATE and LOVE battling for the lives of two young kids. Years ago, when I first saw this film I didn’t quite understand the function of Gish. The scenes at her idyllic country home seemed to go on too long after the plot had resolved itself. I was wrong. Watching the film many times over the years, I began to see these scenes as the culmination of the film’s vision, their artifice an integral part of the artifice of the film as a whole. Gish’s final speech, in particular, seems like a fairly direct comment on the barely submerged theme of child abuse.

The Night of the Hunter was, famously, the only film directed by the great actor Charles Laughton before his death in 1962. What a shame. Who knows what else he might have done? In a way, though, this sad fact only serves to make Laughton’s film all the more special. I don’t know what compelled him to make this haunting children’s nightmare, but its uniqueness only adds to its mystery.

The Night of the Hunter gets the CC treatment

On November 16th, one of the greatest of all noirs, Charles Laughton's masterpiece The Night of the Hunter gets the Criterion Collection treatment. The package looks to be all that such an important film deserves: a newly restored digital transfer, a discussion with Laughton biographer Simon Callow, and most impressively--two and a half hours of outtakes and behind the scenes footage enticingly titled Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter.

Laughton's film unfolds like a child's nightmare, with Robert Mitchum playing a woman-murdering child-terrorizing preacher named Harry Powell. I'll post an essay on the film in a few days. For now, check out the movie's page at the Criterion Collection.

David Kehr on Film Preservation

Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation just hipped me to an article by David Kehr of the New York Times entitled "The Ballad of Blu-Ray and Scratchy Old Film." It's an incisive look at the odd relationship between movie studios and the priceless film libraries they're letting disintegrate on their shelves. Will Blu-Ray and DVD be the savior of classic films? Not necessarily, according to Kehr.

Read the article here.

Daisy Miller (1974)

Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller is an odd mix of two tones that the director usually hits with skillful precision: comedy and bittersweet loss. Based on Henry James's novella of the same name, the film tells the story of an expatriate named Winterbourne who meets a beguiling young American girl traveling Europe with her flighty mother and surly younger brother. A relationship develops between the uptight Winterbourne and the vivacious Daisy, but Daisy quickly becomes the scandal of the American expatriate community and Winterbourne can't quite reconcile himself to the disapproval of people like the rich widow Mrs. Walker.

Henry James is notoriously hard to adapt to the screen because so much of his work takes place below the placid surface of the (in)action of the plot. Bogdanovich bravely waded into these deep waters with his mind set on staying true to the spirit of James. The result is in many ways his least accessible film. It reminds me in some ways of Welles's The Immortal Story, a film of similar somber control. The difference here is that Bogdanovich, a master of comedy, injects this film with a lot of daylight, in both the metaphorical and literal senses.

Most of the comedy comes from the members of the Miller family. Mrs. Miller (Cloris Leechman) is a motor-mouthed set of nervous twitches, while Daisy's little brother (future singer/songwriter James McMurtry) is a grumpy American xenophobe who's none to happy he's stuck in Italy with his big sister and mother.

And then there's Daisy herself, played by Bogdanovich's 70s muse Cybil Shepherd. A viewer's enjoyment of the film hinges in large part on his or her reaction to Shepherd's quirky charisma. Despite her beauty there was always something imbalanced about Cybil Shepherd, a combination of giddy eccentricity on the one hand and fair-haired banality on the other. That probably sounds worse than I mean it, but consider that both of her iconic film roles (in The Last Picture Show and Scorsese's Taxi Driver) position her as a man's unattainable romantic ideal. It's too much to say that she had a mystery about her, but in most of her film roles there's something untouchable about Cybil Shepherd, something a little playful and more than a little mean. More often than not, when she's playing opposite a man, Shepherd seems like a weird little kid pulling the wings off flies. Here, she plays Daisy as a bubbly innocent--or she tries to--but innocence hangs off her like an oddly tailored outfit.

Which may or may not be the point. Daisy and Winterbourne can't seem to ever say what they're feeling. With Winterbourne this makes sense. As played by Barry Brown, he's a man of tight reserve. With his dark, mournful eyes, Brown has no trouble selling us on Winterbourne's morose self-defeat. (A tragic manic depressive who killed himself just four years after this movie was made, Brown should have been cast as Edgar Allan Poe in a biopic.) But Daisy is tough to figure. There is a scene toward the middle of the film where they dash to make it to a boat, and she turns and looks at him with unbridled joy--a joy she quickly bridles again. It's a terrific moment of acting by Shepherd because it plays off the confusion she usually causes in men: Is she toying with me? Even after the film supplies us with an answer, we're still not sure.

Shepherd is perfect for this role in the sense that you're never entirely sure what she's thinking. Her weakness as an actress, however, has always been that her obliquity doesn't seem to hint at unplumbed depths. She's a shallow actress in the best and worst senses of the word.

Daisy Miller is a fine film in many ways. Its production design is impeccable, and the cinematography by Alberto Spagnoli is often stunning. The supporting cast, particularly Eileen Brennan as the conniving Mrs. Walker, is top rate. Moreover, Bogdanovich shows once again that he is a master of intricate long take (I can't say for sure but I'm willing to bet that this film has fewer cuts than any of his others).

It is a film of surfaces and seems to be the spiritual precursor to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Ivory's Remains of the Day--yet Daisy and her goofy family make odd protagonists for such a tale. This goes back to what I was saying at the outset about the mix of tones.

In its day, the film was a notorious flop, suffering in part from the bad press that Bogdanovich and Shepherd's extramarital affair had generated in the tabloids. It ended Bogdanovich's period of skyrocket success, derailing for a time one of the most important directors of his era. Watched today, however, the film is fascinating. I can't bring myself to call it an unalloyed artistic success--but there is something about it. Like Daisy herself, it stays in the mind.

Here's a piece by Peter Tonguette over at Senses of Cinema, a retrospective of Bogdanovich's career with a lot of attention devoted to Daisy Miller.