[Issue #1, Winter 1997-98]
Mitchum & Stewart
Jeffrey Corcoran
[The following piece on Robert Mitchum and James Stewart was
adapted by Jeffrey Corcoran from his unpublished book, Unconscious Cinema:
Repression and Romance in Postwar American Film.]
Robert Mitchum's narcoleptic acting style was perfected within the shadows
of 1940s and 50s noir crime drama, where his existential resignation in
the face of darkness (annihilation of the self) was an embryonic precursor
to the sadistic ennui (rupture of the id) of Clint Eastwood and Charles
Bronson in the 1960s and 70s. Cultural attitudes toward the urban landscape
shifted over the decades, moving away from an appreciation of Mitchum's
noble self-willed loner. A sizable segment of Vietnam War-era filmgoers
seemed eager to grant Eastwood and Bronson blunt fascistic license to rid
the streets of drug-dealers, pimps, and assorted crazies run rampant in
a decaying inner-city. Such agitprop scenarios played handily into audience
fears (particularly racial hostilities), and Hollywood's cynicism ran deep
enough not to question the moral integrity of these increasingly violent
productions. Mitchum's work, however, comes to us formed of a subtler --
or, if you will, more repressed -- aesthetic. If his early films evoke a
kind of Hollywood innocence, it is in part due to the stylized nature of
film noir, which seems to appeal directly to our unconscious anxieties and
longings, rather than to our overt prejudices. Film noir is at heart a kind
of Rorschach cinema -- the shadows are ink blots in which we all see something
different.
The 40s city was a Freudian labyrinth of desire and instinct (re)pressed
into concrete and steel. The postwar economic boom was real enough, but
so were the postwar nightmares and shattered psyches. Mitchum walked the
city's streets in the guise of a battle-weary survivor who'd long ago witnessed
the worst of mankind's urges unchained, and whose soul was thus insulated
against the petty machinations of criminals too stupid to realize the insignificance
of their dirty deeds. This is a crucial point: the classic Mitchum character
was never altered significantly by his scripted fate; he enters and exits
the picture as the same man, monolithic and complete. The storyline, in
essence, happens around him rather than to him. What some critics have derided
as "one-dimensional" acting was in fact an almost Buddhist impassivity:
the studied calm of the bodhisattva -- transcendent, poised, fully integrated.
The essential Mitchum performances are to be found in a handful of sui generis
B-movies: Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947), The
Big Steal (1949), His Kind of Woman (1951), and The Racket
(1951).[1] Although his two celebrated performances as violent
sociopaths in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear
(1962) are as vivid as anything assayed by Brando or DeNiro, they function
more as displays of acting "chops" than as emblematic Mitchum
roles. Ironically, Mitchum's spirit seems a bit diminished in flashy roles.
"Bad guys" or troubled characters -- such as his portrayal of
an alcoholic in El Dorado (1967) -- are always victims of the storylines
they must serve. Plot and characterization, indeed acting itself, all seem
beneath the authentic Mitchum cool. He is an American original at his best
when his own imperturbable aura is in a sense at odds with the melodrama
surrounding him.
James Stewart, on the other hand, forged a long and healthy career as a
well-directed team player. In smooth performance after smooth performance,
he placed his hard-working loyalties at the service of the designated narrative
and theme. And it is because Stewart served the storyline so assiduously
that he represents a film presence much different from Mitchum's rebellious
implacability. Stewart's screen persona became our most Jungian vessel:
always jumping enthusiastically into the alchemist's fire to be transformed
physically and spiritually into a "better" man, a more forthright
and engaged citizen. As a standard-bearer of the country's self-flagellating
moral mandate, Stewart's roles at any given time unfortunately tended toward
civics lessons. Nowhere is this more forcefully brought home than in his
films for Frank Capra, especially Mister Smith Goes to Washington
(1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).[2] Regardless of
how "beloved" these rather unhinged and over-the-top Stewart performances
have inexplicably grown in the minds of mainstream movie fans, I am hard-pressed
not to agree with Pauline Kael's famous bon mot in regards to Frank Capra:
"No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and
corny humor the way Capra can -- but if anyone else should learn to, kill
him." [3]
The submerged narrative of It's a Wonderful Life is of course the
all-too-familiar story of male midlife disillusionment and frustration.
But rather than allow George Bailey the truth of his psychological breakdown
-- i.e., the quite accurate realization that small town American life really
is a morass of economic and marital despair, mean-spiritedness, and broken
dreams -- Capra chooses instead to unleash Clarence, the pixellated angel
of societal repression and sublimation, who convinces George to shut up,
stop complaining, and get his sorry ass back home to the wife and kids.[4]
It wasn't until the 1950s that the true psychotic nature of Stewart's screen
personality came to the forefront and cracked the veneer of innocence. Only
in Hollywood, where absurdity reigns, could the nearly 50-year-old Stewart
attempt to impersonate a fresh-faced and tireless 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh
in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Stewart's neon blond wig, garish
rouged cheeks, and layers of pancake makeup are as frightening to behold
as Bette Davis decked out as Baby Jane. It's as if we longed to forbid both
Lindbergh and Stewart to grow up. Certainly Lindbergh's controversial WWII
neutrality stance had long ago tarnished the unprecedented glory that trailed
him for years following his 1927 transatlantic flight. Lindbergh once symbolized
and distilled the essence of middle-class virtues: youth, indomintability,
and the inevitable hero's crown born of perseverance; it seemed only fitting
that the anointed Lindbergh had conquered the very heavens themselves. Such
were the Boy Scout qualities that Stewart, too, embodied for a generation
of filmgoers. In a sense he was ordained to play Lindbergh, just as Clark
Gable had been the only acceptable choice for Rhett Butler. However, The
Spirit of St. Louis is surely one of the eeriest representations of
America's unresolved Peter Pan complex.
When Stewart the following year chose to play a character scaled to his
own advancing age, how appropriate that the film was Vertigo (1958),
the apotheosis of both Stewart's and Alfred Hitchcock's long Hollywood careers.
Vertigo is the true endgame of George Bailey's "wonderful life":
sexual hysteria and madness. Stewart's performance is powerfully closed
off from any paths by which audience empathy might comfortably follow. Watching
him desperately trying to insinuate himself into Kim Novak's life during
the film's third act is as disturbing in its own way as Brando's assault
and rape of Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Vertigo
offers few of Hitchcock's patented crowd-pleasing thrills, and its morbid
complexities were misunderstood or missed altogether by audiences and critics
in 1958. (First-time viewers today are frequently disappointed that Vertigo
isn't a higgledy-piggledy hybrid of Rear Window and Psycho).
The film only gradually earned its current "classic" status, still
eliciting critical reservations as late as 1982, when it was re-released
to theaters along with four other then out-of-circulation Hitchcock films.[5
] Painstakingly restored in 1996, Vertigo again played theaters,
this time to critical huzzahs, but it remains a difficult film, and general
audiences have yet to really embrace it. Hardly the ideal "date"
movie, Vertigo might be better classed as a suicide-watch: the film's
chilly and unsettling moral is that desire's true object resides not within
those individuals we purport to love, but rather within the dark soul of
our own obsessions.
-- Jeffrey Corcoran, Ph.D.
___________________
[1] Also worth including here is the atypical but charming A Holiday
Affair (1949), starring Mitchum and Janet Leigh. The film is long overdue
for reappraisal and enshrinement as an annual yuletide video and television
offering.
[2] Stewart's first film for Capra was You Can't Take It With
You (1938), based on the play by Kaufman and Hart. Joseph McBride provides
an insightful revisionist critique of this film in his definitive biography
of the director, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, published
in 1992 by Simon and Schuster.
[3] The quote is from Kael's capsule review of It's a Wonderful
Life in her book 5001 Nights at the Movies.
[4 ] Clarence disingenuously "stumbles" upon a means to
scare the crap out of George Bailey. The game of "You Were Never Born"
is similar to Fritz Perls's notorious Gestalt Therapy "hot seat"
sessions, which employed confrontation and intimidation to supposedly cure
neurosis.
[5] The others were Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954),
The Trouble With Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1956). Critical consensus in 1982 afforded only Rear Window with
the encomium of "classic," while the remaining four were considered
minor or flawed Hitchcock efforts. Stewart appeared in all but The Trouble
With Harry. Since '82, Hitchcock's oeuvre has been subject to innumerable
re-evaluations and re-shufflings as to where individual films ought to be
ranked.
___________________
Jeffrey Corcoran lives in Belleville, Wisconsin, and works as a free-lance
journalist and restaurant critic. From 1980-85, Jeff was an associate professor
of English at Milwaukee's now-defunct Samuel Whittles College.
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