Robert Mitchum: "Baby I Don't Care" - Softcover

Server, Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312285434 ISBN 13: 9780312285432

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002

Synopsis

One of the movies' greatest actors and most colorful characters, a real-life tough guy with the prison record to prove it, Robert Mitchum was a movie icon for an almost unprecedented half-century, the cool, sleepy-eyed star of such classics as The Night of the Hunter; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool.

Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

About this title

About the Author

Lee Server is the author of the critically acclaimed Danger Is My Business; Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground; Over My Dead Body; and other works on cinema history and popular culture.

From Booklist

Robert Mitchum was one of Hollywood's original bad boys. A notorious womanizer, boozer, and brawler who was jailed in the 1950s for possession of marijuana, which only enhanced his appeal as an outlaw and an outsider, Mitchum defined the antihero before the term had been invented. And yet, as Server makes clear in this superb biography, Mitchum was also a consummate craftsman, an actor who always hit his mark (no matter what had happened the night before) and who inspired testimonials from the likes of John Huston and Charles Laughton, who believed that Mitchum could have been the era's greatest Lear. Server tells the fascinating story of Mitchum's early life, riding the rails during the Depression, and he reprises the actor's more than 100 films, providing perceptive analysis of the remarkable number of masterpieces, from the quintessential film noir, Out of the Past, through his groundbreaking and too-little-known western, Pursued , and on to the classic Night of the Hunter , the cult favorite Thunder Road , and the stellar mainstream dramas, including Heaven Knows Mr. Allison and The Sundowners . There's plenty of fascinating insider stuff about what took place on the sets of all these films, but best of all is the way Server captures the Mitchum persona: his "gliding, pantherlike movements, his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence," and, most of all, his "immoral face." Predictably, Mitchum had nothing but scorn for such accolades, claiming he had only two acting styles: "with and without a horse." A wonderful movie-star biography about a rebel who despised movie stars. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312285434
• ISBN 13: 9780312285432
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608