“I never take any notice of reviews - unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now." –
Robert MitchumRobert left school at the age of 14 and made frequent freight-hopping trips around the country, working as a laborer, coal miner, boxer and aircraft assembler. Run-ins with the police gave him a lifelong antipathy to authority.
1- Mitchum Sings -redtreetimes
Okay,
he was a great actor. But it was some of the other details of his life
that caught my eye. I discovered he was one of the “wild boys of the road”
during the Great Depression, young men and women, often no more than 15 or 16
years old, who were cut loose from their families during those dire times,
told that they were a burden on the family and that they must go out on their
own. It was estimated that during the peak years of the Depression, when
unemployment was over 25%, that there were over 250, 000 of these wild boys
riding the railroad boxcars and hitchhiking around the US seeking work and a
better life. It was a life of violence, depravation and hardship, one
that is a little known footnote to the history of that time.
After
leaving this life as a hobo (the term is supposedly derived from hoe boy when migrant workers followed the
crops by riding the boxcars) Mitchum found himself in the world of movies and
never looked back.
The Ballad of Thunder Road, he
even wrote this.
his eyes and look-a-like --- here
2 -
What
Made Them Great: Robert Mitchum
Classic Westerns, Thrillers and Noirs full where real men like Kirk Douglas and Humphrey Bogart manned about, saying manly phrases like ‘damn it’ and doing manly things such as drinking neat liquor, rescuing dames and sticking to their principles.During this weirdly masculine period in the history of acting, there was one man who was even manlier than the rest, whose being was powered by some kind of super testosterone made unavailable after August 6th 1917. He wasn’t just rougher and tougher than his Hollywood contemporaries; he was rougher and tougher than anyone. His name was Robert Mitchum.
Mitchum
lived through the great depression of the 30’s where like so many, he rode the
railroads and drifted from town to town looking for work. At the age of 14 he
was arrested for vagrancy and spent 90 days in a chain gang doing hard labour…I
don’t know what you were like when you were 14 but personally the idea of
drifting and chain ganging would have seriously got in the way of my girl
chasing and weed smoking career and would have no doubt killed me.
Eventually falling into acting and finding himself in Hollywood, Mitchum found some success playing villains in B-movie westerns films and TV slowly building enough attention to be cast as a lead in the genre that would make him an icon, Film Noir.
It was the 1947 Noir ‘Out of
the Past’ (known sometimes in the UK as ‘Build My Gallows High’) that really
cemented his place in the firmament.
3- Throughout Robert's childhood, he was known as a
prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When he was 12, Ann sent
Robert to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware, where he was promptly
expelled from his middle school for scuffling with a principal. A year later,
in 1930, he moved in with his older sister, waitress and stage actress Julie
(originally Annette) Mitchum, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaran High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including a ditch-digger for the Civilian Conservation Corps and a professional boxer. He experienced numerous adventures during his years as one of the Depression era's "wild boys of the road."
In Savannah, Georgia he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. It was during this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly lost him a leg, that he met the woman he would marry, a teenaged Dorothy Spence. He soon went back on the road, eventually riding the rails to California.
http://www.meredy.com/robertmitchum/biography.html
4- American Legends: The Life of Robert
Mitchum
Mitchum
plays anti-heroes who are victims of circumstance, but even as he is placed in
situations beyond his control, he maintains a cool, if dispassionate
countenance. Mitchum was, in short, neither a hero nor a villain but someone
who seemed to defy the often-simplistic distinctions between protagonist and
antagonist, hero and villain.
Even
so, for someone who put on such a cool façade, Mitchum certainly experienced a
great deal of hardship. From the death of his father, James, to his rough
adolescence—much of which was spent traveling on railcars during the throes of
the Great Depression—Robert Mitchum lived the part of the hard-luck antiheroes
he portrayed onscreen. Up until his adult life, there was little indication
that he would grow up to become anything more than a working-class factory
worker, let alone a world-famous movie star. It is telling that Mitchum remained
within the confines of the gritty noir and western genres; to imagine him
acting in a romantic comedy would be antithetical to the reputation that he
built. Mitchum was, to be sure, one of the premier A-list stars of the 1940s
and 1950s, but he was a leading man in the hypermasculine mold of Humphrey
Bogart rather than the more diverse skill set of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart.
In any event, one of the great mysteries of Robert Mitchum’s career is that for
all the poor luck that his characters experienced, he still was able to affect
a debonair sensibility that made him identifiable–a man to which viewers were
irresistibly attracted, even if his characters did not necessarily warrant such
a response.
This
biography looks at the process that led from Robert Mitchum rising from
impoverished Depression-era youth to leading Hollywood celebrity. Mitchum’s
harsh childhood, including the premature death of his father and his dangerous
life on the road, are discussed, as well as the process that saw him ascend
through the acting industry.
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