Robert Mitchum Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We're four weeks into 2009's summer movie season. X-Men Origins: Wolverine got things off to a soggy start and was eclipsed by Star Trek as a popular favorite. Not many were impressed by Angels & Demons (though it did big business overseas), leading into this long weekend with Terminator Salvation and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian doing battle (and a little Dance Flick on the side).

So what are your general impressions so far? I was disappointed by Wolverine and loved Star Trek. My ambitious weekend viewing plans began with a viewing of Terminator Salvation, which satisfied the 12-year-old boy in me, but left the adult me sorely hungry for more substantial entertainment. So I watched two DVDs that came out last Tuesday. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941) stars Walter Pidgeon as a British big game hunter whose "sporting stalk" of Hitler ends up with the hunter becoming the hunted. Lang is an elegant, efficient storyteller; Man Hunt is intelligent and thoughtful. Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) features Robert Mitchum (pictured) as the weary, wary "Eddie Fingers," a loyal, long-term, low-level Boston hood. Really, though, the story revolves around his "friends" -- criminal colleagues and law enforcement officers, people who don't really care about Eddie. Even with bank robberies and intense stake-outs and stand-offs, the real impact comes from the characters and what happens to them.

What did you watch over the Memorial Day weekend? Feel free to elaborate in the comments section.

Born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, Sept 26, 1921 in Helensburgh, Scotland, Kerr was a ballet dancer, who had her first significant screen roles under the genius of the British cinema, Michael Powell. She was filmed and cut out of Contraband (1940), but then turned up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven) and then most memorably as the lonely and tempest-tossed nun in Black Narcissus (1947). Kerr's air of what Kingsley Amis termed "dignance" was essential to her 46-year long career, epitomized in respectable stuff like Separate Tables. In America, Kerr's hidden torridness was brought out when she played the adulterous Karen in From Here to Eternity, in which she explores a Hawaiian black sand beach with Burt Lancaster. The film earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress of 1953.

It was a comeback after a long stretch at MGM starring in costume dramas and epics. Later, she danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I, had a very sub-rosa affair with a student vaguely accused of unmanliness in Tea and Sympathy (1956): "When you speak of this, and you will speak of this, please--be kind". She held her own in the minor Cary Grant comedy The Grass is Greener, in which Grant and Robert Mitchum are rivals for her affections. In the 1960s, as the studio system frayed and fell apart she had more drastic roles: the proper woman melting in the Mexican heat and humid tropical prose of Tennessee Williams in Night of the Iguana, and a brief topless scene with Lancaster again in The Gypsy Moths (1969), and eventually had a turn as a Bond girl--of sorts--in Casino Royale (1967). Appearing with long-time co-star David Niven, Kerr turned on one of the richest stage-Scots accents ever. In the early 1980s she appeared in several small scale TV productions; because of Parkinson's disease she had not acted since 1986. But she appeared -- as David Thomson reminds us -- on the 1994 Oscars, to get the honorary award to make up for six bridesmaid appearances on the Oscars. Strange, none of the nominations was for perhaps her hardest work in The Innocents (1960). Kerr died Oct 16 at her home in Suffolk. She was 86.

Warner Bros. is developing a new adaptation of David Morrell's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose, which was previously made into a TV miniseries back in 1989. The book tells the story of twin brothers two orphans adopted by the CIA who are raised as perfect assassins and then are themselves hunted by the CIA. I don't remember the NBC version -- if I heard the title back then I probably mistook it for The Name of the Rose -- but I'm now pretty interested. It stars a young David Morse and an old Robert Mitchum, and Morrell is the author of the novel-turned-Rambo-franchise First Blood. Unfortunately, it is only available on VHS, and though I could order it online, I'd rather rent it -- something that isn't an easy option in my neck of the woods anymore. Maybe as the new movie gets closer to arriving in theaters, someone will realize it's a good idea to get the old one onto DVD.

The new project seems to be a hopeful substitute for Universal's similar Bourne movies once that franchise (likely) ends with this summer's The Bourne Ultimatum. It may even try too hard and be an obvious copycat, but if Warners gets a decent duo to play the twins and a quality action director, it shouldn't matter if we feel we've seen it all before. Action thrillers about spies who find out they're being targeted are a very, very old concept, and they never really get tired. Basil Iwanyk, who is producing Brotherhood, is even planning a remake of Spies Like Us, which is in many ways a comedic take on the Bourne/Brotherhood/etc. premise. Once again, it's another unnecessary remake, and it won't have anything as funny as the original's "Doctor, Doctor" scene, but I love any movie involving spies (real or fictional), so I'll probably guiltily see it. That reminds me, when the heck are we going to get the long promised Spy vs. Spy movie?

Film Forum's inexplicable decision to include the strange and wonderful film Thunder Road in their six-weeklong festival of film noir did not diminish the fun of seeing it on the big screen for the first time. Directed by Frank Capra protege Arthur Ripley and scripted by star Robert Mitchum, the film would be a rough fit for almost any film festival, since it seems to occupy a genre all its own. Set in the foothills of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains in the 1950s, it paints a picture of a joyously unreconstructed South where all higher authority is corrupt and any kind of loyalty other than blood loyalty is dubious. Elder statesmen of the local moonshine trade hold Godfather-like summits in tin-roof shacks, where they discuss how to deal with rival moonshine syndicates trying to poach their customers. This is a film where the biggest applause moment comes when an ATF agent is blown up in a car that was rigged with explosives and meant to wipe out Robert Mitchum's anti-hero character, Doolin. The coda before the film's end credits, in which the U.S. government is thanked for its cooperation in the making of the film, is perhaps stretching the tongue-in-cheekiness too far, but you get the idea: Screw you, yankees!