Friday's Old Fashioned: The Wonderful Country (1959)

If Robert Mitchum’s Mexican-American accent in “The Wonderful Country” (1959) comes and goes, well, that’s less any kind of flaw than emblematically appropriate considering his character, gunslinger Martin Brady, was born in America and then fled to Mexico when he was but 14 after avenging his father’s killer. That left him stranded south of the border, re-christened as Martín Bredi, a man with two identities and none it all, left to hire himself out as a pistolero to the dastardly Castro Brothers. And though ensuing events find his identity at stake, Brady is content going with the flow, allowing the situation to dictate his movements, which might be a weird quality in a main character though a nonetheless perfect one for Robert Mitchum, where the actor’s peerless ability to make passiveness so charismatic is on full display. When his character is finally made to take a stand it is not about some grand overarching statement in the name or this or that as a gunslinger wearied out with having to always be so quick on the draw. The idea that one man can make a difference isn’t explicitly laughed at, but you suspect that Brady would roll his eyes at it over a cold one.

No, while the ever-incendiary border politics dot “The Wonderful Country” throughout, Brady’s journey is far less political than personal, beginning when he crosses the Rio Grande to run some guns and finds himself hung up in the little border town of Puerto with a broken leg. If most people with his past might be in a hurry to get out, Brady plays it pretty cool, magnified, of course, by Mitchum himself, who makes being propped up with a giant cast look like a card player kicking his feet up at the poker table. And the movie allows Brady to revel in the people around him, like Dr. Stovall, a scene-stealing turn from Charles McGraw who plays the part, his character stealing glugs of whiskey intended for his patient, like the doctor in “Hot Shots!” who issues himself 15cc of morphine, as well as youthful Ludwig (Max Slaten), a German immigrant and nephew of the gun runner, Sterner (John Banner), with whom Brady is dealing. Sterner warns Ludwig away from Brady, a warning he does not always heed, and Ludwig’s chance at a new life in America both mirrors and becomes tied up in Brady’s same attempts.

Eventually Brady gets a shave and a new suit, looking like a new man, and is presented dueling opportunities to truly become a new man, first by the US Army and then by the Texas Rangers. Army Major Colton (Gary Merrill) seeks Brady’s services as something of a spy to report on the movements of the Castro Brothers to help the US government eradicate the threat of violent Apaches preventing their expansion of a railroad. If American/Mexican political relations are presented as murkily true to life, the Indians are, expectedly, simple savages, glimpsed for only one action sequence in which they play the archetypal Indians of Cowboys vs. Indians. Still, that Brady does not simply give them up points not necessarily to some strict personal code but an understanding that things are not so simple.

This gray area is exemplified in Captain Rucker (Albert Dekker) who knows Brady’s past and promises him the U.S. will turn a blind eye if he’s willing to help his native country, which Dekker alternately plays for forgiving kindness and harsh leverage, never quite letting Brady know what he really thinks, maybe because he thinks both things at once. Mitchum was always such a great actor when his characters were backed into a corner, and so Brady’s relationship with Rucker, where he is left more or less at the Captain’s mercy, is the best one in the movie even if the movie seeks to render Colton’s wife Ellen (Julie London) his primary partner.

That her marriage is loveless is believably sketched in the way Colton asks her to dance – “it’s the first dance, Ellen,” he says with the air of a tired man reporting for guard duty – but the screenplay, for all its indulgence, seems to be missing a connecting scene between Brady and Ellen as antagonists and Brady and Ellen as burgeoning romantic partners. It just never comes all the way together and essentially undermines what might have been a superb ending, one that comes around after Brady has been forced back into Mexico and made to cut his nefarious ties before crossing the Rio Grande once again, under a billowy sky, to re-unite with Ellen, movingly obfuscating the difference between expat and immigrant.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Macao (1952)

Telling Robert Mitchum that he's alone and sad and tired and must regret something in his past seems a bit redundant. It seems a bit like Miss Moneypenny observing that 007 enjoys martinis and a roll in the hay. He’s Robert Mitchum! That’s why you cast him! Because he comes to set with the cigarette clutching his lower lip for dear life and loneliness and sadness and sleep deprivation and regrets clinging to his being like condensation to his bourbon glass. So Jane Russell telling him in “Macao” that he's alone and sad and tired and must regret something in his past takes redundancy to a whole new level. Hell, ol’ cantankerous pants himself, Bosley Crowther of the wayback New York Times, says as much in the first paragraph of his original 1952 review: “All the other ingredients, including Miss Russell's famed physique, are pretty much the same as have been tumbled into previous cheesecakes with Jane and Bob.” But……what if we go to the five and dime diner and specifically ask for the Jane and Bob Cheesecake? What if the redundancy is precisely what lends the film its charm?

“Macao” was the last Hollywood film of Josef von Sternberg, the great Austrian-American director who made Marlene Dietrich his muse, and perhaps von Sternberg emulated a thirty-year man at the office mentally checking out by launching a pre-emptive in-office vacation ahead of retirement. Visually it’s just a trifle, taking its actors and putting them in the frame and standing back and letting us imbibe. Here again we quote Crowther: “’Macao’ is a flimflam and no more—a flimflam designed for but one purpose and that is to mesh the two stars.”

Its purpose is to mesh the two stars, no argument, but I object to the term “flimflam.” I object because Merriam-Webster tells us that flimflam is “deceptive nonsense” and while “Macao” might be nonsense, it is not deceptive. It is, in fact, forthright about its nonsense. Take the establishing sequence aboard a steamship bound for Hong Kong. Julie Benson (Jane Russell) - a nightclub singer if for no other reason than it gives Jane Russell a couple crooning scenes and without them the film would probably be sixty minutes - is in a cabin with a guy who mistreats her. Luckily Nick Cochran (Mitchum) happens by. Seeing the goings-on, he interjects, knocks out the abusing non-gentleman, exchanges a few bon mots with Julie, and then kisses her. Just like that. No warning. No real build-up. Plants one right on her sultry lips without asking. This might sound presumptuous on his part, sure, but is really just maximum screenplay efficiency. If these two are gonna be lovers why waste time trying to throw us off that scent? Thus, it ain’t flimflam. It's frank. And that’s the whole film.

Technically there are “surprises” but they’re the sort where you nod and think, “Well, of course.” The story itself revolves around an American gangster, Vince Halloran (Brad Dexter), laying low in Macao frightened of being drawn into international waters. He suspects this is precisely what Nick Cochran (Mitchum) has come here to do, an NYC detective posing as a down-on-his-luck. Show of hands if you actually thought Nick Cochran was an NYC detective when he’s fingered for being one? No one? Well, of course not. So the Bad Guy gets mixed up with Julie and Julie gets mixed up with Cochran and Cochran gets mixed up with Trumble (William Bendix), a traveling salesman whose mug sure does look less like a traveling salesman than an NYC detective's (whoops! spoiler alert!), and Margie (Gloria Grahame) is content to just stand off to the side and sigh.

So the villain’s yada-yada, the final fisticuffs are blah, and the plot charts a course as worn as an old trading route in the South China Sea. So what? All that crap doesn’t matter. Here, all that crap’s just the tin holding in the cheesecake. The cheesecake is Mitchum's performance, the embodiment of a man in a hammock. The cheesecake is Jane Russell being, you know, Jane Russell. The cheesecake is Gloria Grahame acting all glamorously discontent. The cheesecake is lines like: “You remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine. The Sphinx.” Maybe it's not a White Chocolate Raspberry Chocolate Chip cheesecake from Reuschelle's. Maybe it's just frozen New York Style cheesecake from Trader Joe's. It's still good.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Angel Face (1952)

Diane Tremayne certainly has the face of an angel. Perhaps it’s my Iowa bias showing but in Otto Preminger’s seriously hard-boiled 1952 noir, Jean Simmons often evokes Donna Reed at her most gregarious, if Donna Reed had been born in Lower Holloway. That face, however, belies a sinister interior. The only message this angel seeks to spread is narcissistic mayhem. Still, what hope does Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) have? He’s an ambulance driver called to Diane’s house because her stepmother, Catherine (Barbara O’Neil), has suffered gas inhalation. She suspects Diane may have be the culprit, a suspicion which should immediately provide Frank pause. Alas, when he meets Diane tickling the ivories of the family grand piano, the femme fatale’s song, as it so often does, proves irresistible.

Quickly, slyly and beguilingly Diane insinuates herself into Frank’s orbit. They go to dinner and then dancing, and the next day she asks Frank’s gal, Mary, to lunch to tell the truth and purposely drive a stake right through the heart of their relationship. She pledges to have her stepmother help fund Frank’s dream of opening his own mechanic shop, but when Catherine relents, Diane portrays it as an evil attempt to keep them apart. Diane convinces her father to hire Frank as chauffeur, and soon enough Frank is living on the Tremayne grounds, making it all the easier for her to saunter into his room and work her wiles.

The rest of the story, involving death and an ensuing arrest and trial that put the pseudo-lovebirds on the spot, are rife with melodrama, yet Preminger minimizes it with a no-frills approach, an atmosphere of slowly accumulating dread and shots underpinning its psychology. When Diane delivers a monologue regarding both her real mother and stepmother, Preminger films it as a single take, but has Simmons start in the background and then walk into the foreground and then into the background and then into the foreground, which is where it concludes. As in, Frank tries to brush her off and she forces her way right back in.

Early on Frank refers to himself as not wanting to be an “innocent bystander”, an apt comment because isn’t that how a movie audience often feels? Like innocent bystanders? The events on the screen are a place apart, seen, maybe even felt, but disconnected from the reality we inhabit. But with “Angel Face” I never felt innocent or as if I were merely standing by. I felt involved. More than that, I felt tempted, seduced and ensnared by Diane Tremayne. (Or, was it Jean Simmons?) But I did not feel betrayed. One shot finds Diane slipping into Frank’s trench coat and sleeping through the night, all wrapped up in her own psychosis, yet I confess to becoming wrapped up it in too.

Mitchum excelled in this genre specifically because his laconic cool melded so acutely with its fatalistic air. “How big a chump can you be?” he asked rhetorically in “Out of the Past” voiceover. “I was finding out.” Which is to say, he knew his string was being pulled as it was happening. He always drove himself off the cliff, never the other way around. But for once, in “Angel Face”, Mitchum finds himself getting driven off the cliff. An early moment is telling. Diane becomes hysterical and in keeping with the times, Frank slaps her. Diane slaps right him back. He thinks he’s in control. He’s not. Neither was I.

Friday's Old Fashioned: His Kind Of Woman (1951)

“His Kind Of Woman” was an RKO production of the inimitable Howard Hughes, and it shows. The rambling plot revolves around a gangster stuck in Mexico yearning to change his appearance and sneak back into America. It is apropos. Three times over the course of its two hours “His Kind Of A Woman” reverses its tracks and becomes something else. Hughes’ dissatisfaction with original director John Farrow led him to bring Richard Fleischer in for re-shoots and for Hughes himself to re-write the ending of the film with Fleischer. Who knows what Farrow’s original intentions were, but if Hughes only re-scripted the end, not the rest, the evidence would suggest he yearned to break free from the noir genre and into something much more communal, something for everyone to enjoy. And I enjoyed it. Did I ever.

It opens, seemingly, as another in a long line of dark-hearted Robert Mitchum vehicles, him starring as Dan Milner, a down-on-his-luck gambler offered $50,000 to fly down to Mexico, cool his heels and await instructions without having the slightest inkling of just what these instructions will be. On his way to remote Morro’s Lodge deep in the heart of Baja, he encounters a comely nightclub singer Lenore Brent (Jane Russell), bound for the same place. The pins are lined up – The Loner, The Femme Fatale – for fate to twists its screws. Then again, Robert Mitchum – Robert Mitchum!!! – doesn’t drink, and so perhaps this should clue us into the fact that “His Kind Of Woman” is not what it appears.

Once at Morro’s, with nothing for Milner to do but wait and see, the film sort of morphs into a laid-back version of a screwball romance, Milner courting Lenore even if it turns out Lenore is courting a famed Douglas Fairbanks-esque movie star, generous if deluded Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). As it happens, Lenore is not really Lenore, but Liz, merely posing as Lenore in an effort to woo Mark who is estranged from his wife (who will show up, as she must, to re-woo her husband) to have at his fortune. This might make most men run, but not Milner. Heck, what’s he got to do, ‘cept for snoop around and try to figure out who’s paying him to be there and why. So he flirts with Lenore and does a little reconnaissance on the side. And Lenore turns out to be not quite so devious – a gold-digger with a heart of gold.

The scheme emerges. A gangster, Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr), deported from the US, is hiding out aboard a boat anchored off the Mexican coast. His thugs abscond with Milner and drag him to the open sea where Ferraro, whose height and build matches Milner’s, plans upon reconstructive surgery to assume Milner’s identity and return scot-free to the States.

And this is where the film pulls its boldest tonal shift, leaving noir and screwball back at the resort and transforming not merely into an action-adventure but damn near a parody as Mark Cardigan – alerted to Milner’s predicament by Lenore – becomes Kirk Lazarus and Tugg Speedman in “Tropic Thunder” fifty-seven years before “Tropic Thunder.” He takes up his hunting rifle, dons a cape, stands valiantly in the bow of a boat, issues orders, quotes Shakespeare, leads his charges into battle, literally embodying one of the many heroes he portrays on the silver screen. Meanwhile, Milner is strapped down like a shirtless Frankenstein and threatened with a memory-erasing serum. It’s quite nuts and freaking awesome.

It’s a third act meant to appeal to a broader base, a broader base that may have already jumped ship, and that particular appeal may, in fact, frustrate the narrower base more interested in its establishing noir aspects. In other words, it’s a Howard Hughes-served goulash, and whether or not saying it hangs together is factually provable seems beyond the point. Strange as this may sound, it reminded me of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry”, in so much as that film concludes and then cuts to Kiarostami and crew on location making the movie. His intent is to remind us that it’s “just a movie”, but the reminder only arrives upon movie’s end.

“His Kind Of Woman” is a movie all along, and this swashbuckling conclusion only works to enhance that sensation. It makes itself up as it goes along and, thus, at a certain point Vincent Price decides to appropriate the film for himself. And rather than prevent this appropriation, Hughes encourages it. I’m glad he did.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Thunder Road (1958)

Robert Mitchum’s face – the smile in particular, that smile of cocky yet indifferent bemusement, never getting overly worked up since he treats threats as fun ‘n’ games – lets us know that somehow he knows every detail of what is about to happen, fatalism written in the smoke that curls from his constant cigarettes. More than anything, he is the rugged, lackadaisical evocation of a Man That’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do.

You never expect him to survive in “Thunder Road”, not from the moment he first appears as Lucas Doolin running moonshine on the country roads of Kentucky from Harlan down to Memphis, avoiding not only the requisite Feds but the requisite rural moonshine conglomerate out to either convert him to their side or put him outta business. But that you never expect him to survive is not so much a sign of story weakness (“you can see it coming from a mile away” as they say) as the sense that such a life is simply a curtain of criminality slowly being drawn all around you.

Naturally Mitchum is hardly bothered by this prospect. The film’s critical monologue involves him explaining how his past bootlegging life was, as one that pre-dated his involvement in WWII, a different idea, moonshine distilled of a much purer (metaphorical) variety. It is an existence he has essentially given up on re-creating, knowing its time has passed and, thus, HIS time has passed. Life moves pretty fast, and when you’re a bootlegger turned soldier turned bootlegger you don’t have much time to stop and look around. Pretty soon you’ve missed it. Thus, he keeps making those illegal runs to Memphis, counting on the inevitable to catch up with him. Which it does, of course, just in time to coincide with the film’s conclusion, echoing an earlier shot that practically comes casked in foreshadowing.

This is a Mitchum project through and through. He concocted the story (James Atlee Phillips and Walter Wise received screenwriting credit), co-wrote the theme song and even co-directed much of the film if you choose to believe the post-picture legends. (That, or Arthur Ripley directed it.) “Thunder Road” props up his own legend as much as it carries him to his demise. He is provided a love interest in the form of a nightclub singer named Francie (real-life singer Keely Smith) who is woefully underwritten, a character without an interior, existing to shine a spotlight on Lucas and say wonderful things about him and how much she loves him and why she can’t bear to see him put his life on the line for a little grain alcohol. He loves her, sure, or says he does, because he knows he’s supposed to, but even in her elegant company he’s a lone wolf.

He receives not only a Reflective Character in Francie but a Rebellious Apprentice in the form of Robin, his younger brother, the ace mechanic who keeps Lucas’s automobile in tip-top shape. Robin dreams of running moonshine. Lucas aims not to let that happen by any means necessary. Robin is played by James Mitchum, son of Robert, which is a kind gesture by father, but I must report the facts and the facts are that while younger Mitchum is serviceable in most moments he cannot quite rise to the occasion for the pivotal scene when he calls out his big brother. And his kinda, sorta romance with Roxanna (Sandra Knight), meant as the movie’s gut-punch capstone, fizzles as a result.

Not that any of these problems are truly problematic. As stated, repeatedly, “Thunder Road” is a Mitchum film. You could have the young Eva Maria Saint begging Mitchum to set aside whiskey running and Kyle Reese trying to pull him off the ledge. Mitchum’d just smile that smile and smoke that cigarette and keep on truckin’.

Planet Earth Poet Laureate Bruce Springsteen, who famously ripped off the title of this film for a classic tune, once said: “I realized that after I put all those people in all those cars I was going to have to figure out someplace for them to go.” But in “Thunder Road” the movie the protagonist is never unaware of where he’s going.

Right off the cliff.