Category: Robert Mitchum
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Crime tourists, Part II: Americans clash with the underworld in foreign lands
DeForest Kelley, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Ryan, (unidentified), Robert Stack, ‘House of Bamboo’ (1955). By Paul Parcellin We’ve already talked about films with Americans overseas acting badly. It seems that whenever a region is beset by war, a pack of jackals descends on the still twitching carcass of civilization to devour whatever meat is left on…
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Crime tourists, Part I: Yanks behaving badly in foreign lands
Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949). By Paul Parcellin Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters…
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‘Out of the Past’: 13 Signs that Jane Greer is About to Destroy You
Jane Greer, ‘Out of the Past’ (1947). Dressed in mink and deadly. Warnings abound, but the only thing Mitchum can sputter is ‘Baby, I don’t care’ Contains spoilers By Paul Parcellin ‘Out of the Past’ (1947) You can’t say that Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) had no way of knowing what he was in for. A…
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One Revealing Moment: Something that Happens in “The Night of the Hunter” Made Me Rethink My First Impression of the Film and See It in an Entirely New Light
Robert Mitchum, “The Night of the Hunter” (1955). By Paul Parcellin I first saw “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) around 20 or so years ago and walked away impressed but not particularly in love with the movie, and having said that I know what many of you are thinking: Heresy! I have no real…
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Gumshoe Confidential: Would-Be White Knights, Reluctant Heroes and Rotten Apples, Otherwise Known as Private Detectives, Walked the Mean Streets of a Noir Hellscape
Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). By Paul Parcellin Private eyes, those lone rangers who traverse bleak urban landscapes, are romanticized in books, radio dramas and movies as upholders of right and wrong. They do the dirty work that the cops can’t or won’t touch. Often hired by those…
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How a Real-Life Prison Sentence Added Another Dimension to Mitchum’s Performance as a Woozy Doctor on the Run in a Nightmarish Flight From Justice
Robert Mitchum, “Where Danger Lives” (1950). By Paul Parcellin This article contains spoilers A lot of red flags should go up when Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) meets Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue). But she’s a real dish and this is noir, so naturally he ignores the many warning signposts screaming at him that he’s about…
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‘Eddie Coyle’ Introduced Us to ‘Boston Noir’
Robert Mitchum in ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ (1973). How Boston labor union muscle terrorized Hollywood film crews No one was quite ready for the grittiness of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” when it arrived in theaters in 1973. It didn’t look like most films that Hollywood turned out — it had a certain rawness…