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BACK TO : Book Chronicle
ROBERT MITCHUM: Solid, Dad, Crazy
David Lancaster
ROBERT MITCHUM: Solid, Dad, Crazy
Damien Love
B.T. Batsford, 2002. 208pp, hbk.
Reviewer: David Lancaster
Institute of Communications Studies, the University of Leeds.
With its sleek layout and lavish illustrations, this book appears at first glance to be little more than a standard commercial package designed to pull in Robert Mitchum fans. Yet it's much, much more. Damien Love, a freelance culture journalist, obeys all the conventions - gushing introduction, mini-biography, synopses - but he consistently enlivens this tired old formula with a lyrical, slightly obsessed sensibility. The result is adventurous, idiosyncratic, and absorbing.
One of the main reasons for this success is that Love is not just concerned with conventional questions about image and performance. Rather, he sees Mitchum, and stardom itself, in a more complex light, as a fluid pattern of meaning in which an account of the famous 1949 marijuana bust, for example, can easily slide into a general evocation of the Los Angeles of the film noir period, then dissolve into a portrait of Fred MacMurray's death scene in Double Indemnity, before becoming a meditation on the fact that an elderly Jim Thompson made a cameo appearance in the Mitchum remake of Farewell, My Lovely. Another reason is that the writer sees the star, not merely as a screen presence, but as an auteur in his own right, imbuing his films with his particular brand of "delinquent existentialism": "Mitchum took the independent-laconic-lonesome-stranger archetype familiar in American's [sic] cultural tradition from cowboy to cops, and infected it with diseases of uncertainty, fatigue and ambiguity, suggesting the possibility of a different kind of American, a different kind of America." In fact, Love understands that one can't think seriously about Hollywood stardom without thinking about the nature of the country itself.
These pages are full of such wide-ranging and stimulating insights. There is an excellent chapter, for instance, on Thunder Road, a personal project of Mitchum's, which, in Love's view, expresses the essence of the star's doomed, stoical vision. Also, we are offered a fascinating coda about his recording career and his relationship to music, neither of which this writer knew about, let alone thought important. Admittedly, there are drawbacks: at times, the writing is a little over heated, and it can become so obsessed with capturing precise meanings and textures that, at times, it reminds you of James Agee at his syntax-overloading worst. Nevertheless, this is a wayward, erudite, passionate gem, as much a film-inspired poem about America as the portrait of an individual star.
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