ROBERT MITCHUM: 'BABY, I DON'T CARE'. - Hardcover

Lee Server is the author of the critically acclaimed Danger Is My Business; Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground; Over My Dead Body; and other works on cinema history and popular culture.

Robert Mitchum was one of Hollywood's original bad boys. A notorious womanizer, boozer, and brawler who was jailed in the 1950s for possession of marijuana, which only enhanced his appeal as an outlaw and an outsider, Mitchum defined the antihero before the term had been invented. And yet, as Server makes clear in this superb biography, Mitchum was also a consummate craftsman, an actor who always hit his mark (no matter what had happened the night before) and who inspired testimonials from the likes of John Huston and Charles Laughton, who believed that Mitchum could have been the era's greatest Lear. Server tells the fascinating story of Mitchum's early life, riding the rails during the Depression, and he reprises the actor's more than 100 films, providing perceptive analysis of the remarkable number of masterpieces, from the quintessential film noir, Out of the Past, through his groundbreaking and too-little-known western, Pursued , and on to the classic Night of the Hunter , the cult favorite Thunder Road , and the stellar mainstream dramas, including Heaven Knows Mr. Allison and The Sundowners . There's plenty of fascinating insider stuff about what took place on the sets of all these films, but best of all is the way Server captures the Mitchum persona: his "gliding, pantherlike movements, his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence," and, most of all, his "immoral face." Predictably, Mitchum had nothing but scorn for such accolades, claiming he had only two acting styles: "with and without a horse." A wonderful movie-star biography about a rebel who despised movie stars. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved