On the second day of our journey through Christmas Past, Hollywood-style, what is a bewildered and very youthful Robert Mitchum doing interviewing Santa like a beat reporter in December of 1949? Penance, for one thing.
The pride of RKO, who was apparently the fantasy alter ego of that studio's increasingly squirrelly boss, Howard Hughes, had not had a very good year. At this point, in part to publicize his appearance in a Christmas themed Holiday Affair (1949-Don Hartman), the actor, who had a growing family to feed, found his contract--which had formerly been owned in part by David O. Selznick, to be solely owned by Mr. Hughes. The seemingly imperturbable Mitchum may have struck a nonchalant pose more than once in public during his career, but perhaps he could see some advantages to getting some better press. After his 1948 arrest for his presence in what was described as "a marijuana shack" in Hollywood, the actor might have seen that being colorful could have a downside. Like going into incarceration in a county facility for sixty days of a suspended two year probation sentence in the Winter of '49. That hard won coolness that he became so well known for helped the actor ride this scandal out, resume his career and continue to support his family. He later claimed that no matter what he did, "There just isn't any pleasing some people. The trick is to stop trying." He may not have appeared to have been breaking a sweat as he churned out product for RKO, but he did put his head down and keep working.
It would be some years after the excellent notices he'd received for his early career peak in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945-Lewis Milestone) were ever repeated. While he would even receive an Oscar nomination as Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of an ordinary dogface, Mitchum understood that later films were rarely in the same league as that breakthrough. For every Out of the Past (1947-Jacques Tourneur) there seemed to be a half dozen White Witch Doctor (1953-Henry Hathaway) movies on his C.V. "I often regret my good reviews," he said, "because there is no point in doing something I know to be inferior and then I find I have come off the best in the film. Wouldn't you find that worrying?" Actually, his ability to ingratiate himself with audiences despite some scripts may have been one reason for his longevity. As he later commented wryly, "We kept the same suit for six years - and the same dialog. We just changed the title of the picture and the leading lady."
Eventually, brilliant work in such movies as Night of the Hunter (1955-Charles Laughton) and The Sundowners (1960-Fred Zinnemann) would earn him far more respect, except perhaps in his own eyes. As he said once about his own profession, "People make too much of acting. You are not helping anyone like being a doctor or even a musician. In the final analysis, you have exalted no one but yourself."
The little movie Robert Mitchum was publicizing in these photos was not a success, but in recent years it has been rediscovered as an appealing, low key charmer about a free soul (Mitchum, naturally), a war widow (Janet Leigh, blending pertness, wariness and fresh-faced sexuality) and a straight arrow fiancé (Wendell Corey, profiled here, gives one of his few relaxed characterizations in this film). Their problems may not be earth shaking but some humanity shone through the Hollywood gloss rather nicely. Despite a lifetime of posing as someone who didn't care, at the end of the day, playing a nice guy on screen wasn't such a stretch for the bad boy after all, was it?
Please click here for previous entries in The Christmas Album series on this blog.
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