ETERNALLY COOL: ROBERT MITCHUM (1917-1997)

He drank too much and smoked too much. He granted too many interviews full of cynical observations about himself and his business. He made too many bad movies and hardly any of the kind that stir critics to rapture or that, taken together, look like a life achievement worthy of official reward.

God, some of us are going to miss Robert Mitchum!

He was the kind of guy who would publicly declare in the midst of an endless shoot with revered, meticulous David Lean that it was “like building the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks.” Or sum up his hardworking, half-century career this way: “You don’t get to do better; you just get to do more.”

Yet he was also the kind of man who would crawl through a field of nettles four times during the shooting of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, until he had a satisfactory take, keeping the blood from multiple scratches hidden from director John Huston. And the kind of actor who in Cape Fear smashed an egg against his bare chest and let it drip unheeded–metaphorical blood this time, from a profoundly wounded psyche–as he proceeded to scare the wits out of Polly Bergen.

“It sure beats working,” he always said of acting, and these incidents convey the same message: do whatever the job requires, but don’t make a big deal of doing something you’re being overpaid for. This was an attitude many great male stars of Hollywood’s classic age mastered. But Mitchum, achieving prominence late in that period (with his war- and bone-weary platoon leader in 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe), took self-deprecation to new levels.

Like the modern jazzmen who were his contemporaries, he helped define cool for postwar America. He had hoboed across the country as a teenager, got into movies taking anonymous horse falls and survived a setup drug bust (he described jail as “just like Palm Springs without the riffraff”). Stardom, he implied, was just another of life’s little absurdities to be sardonically observed and fatalistically played out. As the best of his screen characters did. There’s a marvelously stunned stoicism in his confrontation with the inner furies that haunt him in Pursued. And when he turned to outright psychopathy with his child-stalking evangelist in The Night of the Hunter, he made you lean forward to catch all the nuances of his menace.

That film’s director, Charles Laughton, thought he was “one of the best actors in the world.” Like Huston, Laughton saw beneath Mitchum’s surpassing cool the heat of an often disappointed perfectionist. In his signature role, the private eye in the classic film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum grimly accepts doom as the price of sexual obsession and lights his passage to it with flaring wisecracks. “I don’t want to die,” his inamorata cries. “Neither do I, baby,” Mitchum snaps. “But if I have to, I’m gonna die last.” As inadvertent epitaphs go, it’s pretty good. For one suspects that Bob Mitchum’s spirit will live on in those impious corners of the heart where we treasure our more gallant and stylish transgressors.

–By Richard Schickel