Word: mitchum
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...late '40s, hardened by the war, exposed to the fatalism of film noir, American moviegoers learned to be a little indulgent to their stars - if the indiscretion fit the actor's on-screen personality. Robert Mitchum was convicted on a marijuana charge in 1948, and did some time for the crime. But since his appeal was a sleepy, surly sexuality (which he radiated brilliantly, by the way), audiences mostly shrugged, as if the police-blotter notes were just the scenario for some unfilmed Mitchum movie. The actor coasted on that reputation for decades. "The only difference between...
...centered on a vampire and other gothic creatures. It became the cult hit Dark Shadows, which ran on ABC from 1966 to '71. Later he produced and directed two of the best-rated mini-series in history: The Winds of War and its sequel, War and Remembrance--starring Robert Mitchum, above with Curtis--for which he won an Emmy...
...Hollywood dish--latkes, perhaps--and could twist prim dialogue into raunch with her throaty laugh. But the shrillness in a Winters character gave men homicidal urges. She was strangled by Ronald Colman (A Double Life) and drowned by Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun). Robert Mitchum slit her throat (The Night of the Hunter); James Mason drove her to fatal madness (Lolita). She won two Oscars, for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and lent her increasing heft to The Poseidon Adventure. But her ripest later role was as herself: a tell-all memoirist...
...only when Woodward descends into the darkness of a parking garage to consult with Deep Throat that the movie briefly becomes a real noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump...
...about his depth, but in Daniel's dry croak, generalities and absurdities seem to take on meaning. He sounds a bit like Paul Westerberg, but Daniel's irony stems from an excess of feeling, not an absence of it (think of the difference between Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum), and his cadence makes words feel hard earned and universal. Being beaten down by love is an old act, of course, but then so is rock 'n' roll. Gimme Fiction has an amazing way of making both feel new. --By Josh Tyrangiel