The 'dudedom' that was Bob

Now let me tell the story, I can tell it all

About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol.

His daddy made the whiskey, son, he drove the load

When his engine roared,

They called the highway Thunder Road.

I only mention Thunder Road because it was on TCM last week and I hadn’t seen it since I was in high school. At that time, when I was 16 or so, I thought it was perhaps the finest film since Citizen Kane.

Actually, I thought it was better because, with the perceptions of an adolescent, Kane to me was a bit boring, and boasted no hot cars. You know, there was the sled, but that was about it. Thunder Road not only boasted hot cars, it primarily boasted Robert Mitchum. They broke the mold when they made Bob, and since he has shuffled off this mortal coil (probably swaggered rather than shuffled) there has been none to replace him.

It’s a sad commentary on contemporary culture to realize that nobody in the film biz has even a small percentage of the macho ‘dudeness’ of Bob. It was a demeanor that always suggested “I don’t give a shit,” and that was why his acting chops were superlative, always.

I was once told, when I was in my early 20s, that I looked “sort of” like Mitchum. It was a glorious moment for me, with my tender youthful ego. Mitchum wasn’t Hollywood collar-ad in appearance, like a Rock Hudson, for example. Instead, he was cool looking. Sleepy eyed and slow moving, the seeming lethargy could at once erupt into rage if the role called for it.

He was also a bad boy; busted for pot in the late 1940s back when virtually nobody toked, he drank; he allegedly caroused with assorted women (though always stayed married to the same one), smoked, and carried on as if he didn’t much care what others thought. In truth, he didn’t. Acting, to him, was a job and nothing more, and a dead easy one at that. So he said.

Part of his laconic tough-guy pose was just that. He was (despite a misspent youth that included time on a Georgia chain gang) a bit of a renaissance man. He wrote poetry and songs (including Thunder Road), was a student of dialects, and his Aussie twang in The Sundowners was flawless. Asked by David Lean when he wanted to cast him in Ryan’s Daughter, if he could do an Irish accent, Mitchum merely asked him: “Which one? There are dozens of them.” The scholarly Lean did not know that.

If I had to choose a favorite Mitchum flick, it would be The Night of the Hunter. Mitchum as the psycho fake preacher man (shown above) who is set on murdering two young children who knew he had killed their mom, is terrifying in this classy suspenser.

Later in life his past caught up with him, to a degree. On Johnny Carson one night, near the end of his life, Carson said: “I understand you stopped drinking,” Mitchum, looking a bit dissolute, dragged long on his Marlboro, and said: “Yeah – my wife said it was time I stopped being an asshole in public, so I quit.” That was a genuine Mitchum moment.

So, where are the Mitchums of today? They are rare. Nick Nolte has some Mitchum episodes, and Clint in his Dirty Harry days was worthy of holding Bob’s coat. But neither of them has been able to capture one important aspect of the Mitchum persona: a seeming lack of self-involvement that suggests: "Don't ask too much about me, because I won't tell you."