A Hollywood fixture from the 1940s to the 1990s, Robert Mitchum's acting, disguised behind a smokescreen of offscreen antics, was only belatedly recognised. Beneath the standard "tough guy" tag existed a chasm: the undercurrent that caused Martin Scorsese to proclaim, "Mitchum is noir," and the critic Lester Bangs to cite Mitchum among the seeds of punk.
A chain-gang convict by the age of 16, Mitchum hoboed to Hollywood, an outsider who built a career playing outsiders. He brought a new style, and a new agenda. Whether playing haunted heroes or monstrous villains, his characters had always a restive darkness and the calm, amused acceptance that they'd never get out of this world alive. Variations on these themes recurred so often he practically defines the "actor as auteur."
Tracing how Mitchum's life was reflected in his films, Damien Love's lively study explores the development of Mitchum's outsider persona, finding a disaffectedness surpassing Bogart's, and a maverick strain to equal Brando's.
Considering over two-dozen key movies - from iconic performances in Out Of The Past and Night Of The Hunter, to less-appreciated films such as Where Danger Lives and Thunder Road - as well as commentary on Mitchum's notorious marijuana bust and sideline work as a singer, Solid, Dad, Crazy charts a career across 53 years: how Robert Mitchum went from working with Lillian Gish and Laurel & Hardy to Robert De Niro and Jim Jarmusch without, as he put it, "changing anything but my underwear."