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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Individual actors & performers
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Robert Mitchum - Baby, I Don't Care (Paperback, Main)
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Robert Mitchum - Baby, I Don't Care (Paperback, Main)
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List price R492
Loot Price R448
Discovery Miles 4 480
You Save R44 (9%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 17 working days
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In the 30 or so years since I started reading and even writing a
few of them, Hollywood biographies have gone sharply downhill. Now
that the subjects themselves (or, worse, their agents and managers)
demand involvement, all you usually end up with are fan magazines
in hard covers, recyclings of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, or the
inane as-told-to ramblings of some rubbishy movie star who has been
told by acolytes that they have a literary gift above and beyond
the accurate spelling of their (often false) names. All the more
reason to praise Lee Server's massively magnificent account of
Robert Mitchum. True, the actor had the grace to die before the
book was complete, thereby placing him beyond reach of libel
lawyers; true too, there had never been anything definitive on
Mitchum; and true, finally, he was almost the last of the old
giants. When he died 24 hours before James Stewart on the last day
of June 1997, there really was the feeling that Hollywood, the old
Hollywood, had done forward. Was Mitchum a great actor? Almost
certainly not. Was he a great film star? Undoubtedly. He was also
his own creation, built of decades of drink and drugs and alcohol.
Unlike the pygmies who tried to follow in his footsteps down the
mean streets of a thousand Philip Marlowe rip-offs, Mitchum was the
property of no director, no studio, no writer. Always there, tall
in the saddle except when the alcohol caused him to fall off,
usually most afternoons; always a better actor than critics allow,
because it takes talent to play other people but genies to play
yourself in a hundred movies. Mitchum didn't just do something he
stood there, and in public as in private, there was a magnificent
carelessness about the man. He never really meant to be an actor,
but when he found himself acting, he always did it to the best of
the abilities of his scripts : in a great movie he was great, and
in a bad one he was at least usually watchable. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, he had no real stage past, no desire for an Oscar
or a fortune in real estate: he wanted to be left alone, to get on
with the girls and the guns that were always what he knew best. He
was a crapshooter with no time for the crap, and he understood deep
down what the cinema was all about. It was all about getting laid
and getting paid, but just sometimes you suddenly did a look, a
shot, a retake that made you a genius. This is a great book about a
great star in the days when they came at you not off some tiny
television but off a screen the size of a California carpark.
(Sheridan Morley's John G,the authorised biography of Sir John
Gielgud, has sold out two hardback editions and will be available
in paperback and as an audiobook this winter. He is currently
writing his memoirs, Asking for Trouble.) (Kirkus UK)
A bona fide tough guy with soulful eyes and a laconic style, Robert
Mitchum was one of Hollywood's best-loved actors, star of such
moody film noir favourites as Out of the Past, Night of the Hunter
and Cape Fear, as well as enduring classics like Angel Face and
Crossfire. But, as Lee Server now reveals, Mitchum was one of the
few Hollywood icons whose real-life exploits were yet more
compelling than his on-screen persona. A hobo in the Depression, he
fell into movie acting after stints as a boxer, a beach bum and a
songwriter. Despite early Hollywood successes, he was famously
busted on a narcotics rap. But even prison couldn't tame Mitchum's
taste for living on the wild side, and he remained an unrepentant
misbehaver until the end of his days. In this biography of Robert
Mitchum, Lee Server offers the definitive life story of a man who
redefined cinematic cool.
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