Mitchum, Mexico and the Good Neighbours Era

By Liam White

Robert Mitchum was one of the most charismatic stars of the ‘classic Hollywood’ era. His screen persona was the essence of cool: tough but vulnerable, accepting of his fate with languid charm and easy humour. His films have often been seen through the lens of film noir, but they had something else in common too: the characters he played in Out of the Past, The Big Steal, His Kind of Woman, Second Chance, Where Danger Lives, and Angel Face seemed irrevocably drawn to Mexico.

Mitchum’s sequence of films south of the border coincided with the advent of the ‘golden age’ of Mexico’s own film industry, a new cinematic wave that drew on serious artistic influences from the muralists to Sergei Eisenstein, and that was led by director Emilio Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa whose 1943 film María Candelaria, starring former Hollywood siren Dolores del Río, had won a prize at Cannes.

Under the Roosevelt administration’s ‘Good Neighbour’ policy - a wartime effort to court friendly Latin American countries - Hollywood’s portrayal of Mexico changed: out went the all-purpose exoticism, where ‘south of the border’ was a metaphor for the loosening of moral and sexual standards, and in came a more nuanced approach.

In this authoritative study, Liam White encourages us to take a fresh look at how Mitchum’s films broke with Hollywood convention in the way they depicted Mexico; how Mexico’s own film industry boomed, becoming the first example of ‘world cinema’ to have an impact on the post-War world; and how its success attracted significant US talent - from John Steinbeck to John Ford - to work on bi-national projects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaplin Books
• Release date: Feb 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909183452

Book preview

2006.

Chapter 1: Small World, Big Signs

Out of the Past and the Problem of Film Noir

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) is one of the great films from a period of great films. However, unlike the era’s monuments of world cinema - Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), La Régle de Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939), The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurusawa, 1954) or Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955) - it has never featured in critics’ all-time top-ten lists. Out of the Past instead resides in a different space. It is the ‘definitive film noir’, the archetype of the dark, complex crime thrillers that emerged from Hollywood between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, so closely associated is the film with noir, that few regard it any other way.

It begins with Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) running a gas station in Bridgeport, a small northern Californian town, when he is recognised and approached by old acquaintance, Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine). Stephanos tells him another man from his past, Whit Sterling, is looking for him. Jeff agrees to meet Whit in Tahoe, and drives there accompanied by Ann (Virginia Huston), a local girl who has fallen for him. On the long journey, Jeff tells Ann of his shady past, how his real name is not Bailey but Markham, how he used to be a partner in a private detective business, and how he was employed by Whit to find runaway girlfriend Kathie Moffat. Thus begins a flashback sequence, with Jeff’s monologue from the car journey forming a voiceover narration, where Jeff follows Kathie’s trail to Mexico, tracks her down in Acapulco and falls in love with her.

Whit (Kirk Douglas) tells Jeff that Kathie (Jane Greer) attempted to murder him and of stole $40,000 of his money, but Jeff, besotted with Kathie, believes her pleas of innocence and decides not to turn her over to his paymaster. When Whit and Stephanos arrive in Mexico to check on Jeff’s progress, Jeff and Kathie are forced to flee. They begin life on the run together, finding a secluded cabin hideout back in the United States, only to be tracked down by Jeff’s embittered former partner, Fisher (Steve Brodie). A fight ensues at the cabin and Kathie shoots the interloper. She flees as Jeff lies unconscious, leaving a bank-book proving her guilt over the theft. Jeff, broken-hearted, believing Kathie has played him for a sucker, opts for the quiet life, which is where we came in.

It’s all there: everything the phrase ‘film noir’ leads us to expect, and we’re only halfway through the film. A man on the run from a shady past; a private investigator employed by a shadowy but powerful man; the femme fatale, alluring but ultimately bad; the protagonist doomed by his desire for her and his resignation to his fate; moody, expressionist black-and-white photography; the flashback; the voiceover. It’s one of those films ... you know the kind ... you’ve seen a hundred like that...

Back in the present, Jeff arrives at Tahoe for his meeting with Whit, to find Kathie also there. Whit now wants Jeff to track down some tax records in San Francisco, and Jeff agrees to take the job even though he figures he is being set up by Kathie and Whit to take the rap for the murder of Fisher. He escapes, hiding out in the wilds near Bridgeport, only to be tracked down again by Stephanos. Jeff kills Stephanos, and calls Whit, trying to convince Whit of Kathie’s guilt. He travels to see Whit again, only to find him murdered by Kathie. Kathie urges Jeff to flee with him, but Jeff has called the police, who have a roadblock waiting for their car. Kathie, realising Jeff has set her up, shoots him, before she herself is shot dead by the police.

This movie ticks all the boxes. Whether it be the black-and-white cool, trenchcoats, hats, cigarette smoke and dangerous women of the popular imagination or the more academic concepts of ‘victim hero’, ‘existential ennui’, ‘transgressive females’ and ‘restoring patriarchal order’, Out of the Past seems to include all the essential characteristics of film noir. But it is this very ‘typicality’ that stops Out of the Past making it onto the all-time great lists, stops it joining the other great films of the era in the pantheon.[1] It turns out this ‘typicality’ is entirely contrived because, unlike the western, or war movies, noir as style, as a genre, as a set of film-making rules, never really existed. To see this film really for what it is, we need to understand that the box it’s been put in is obscuring the view.

Certainly director Jacques Tourneur, despite his French origins, would not have had the phrase ‘film noir’ in mind when he began work on the film. The term didn’t enter the lexicon of film analysis until the late 50s, by which time the vast majority of the films it has come to define were already made.

It was a French critic, Nino Frank, who first coined the term, and two others, based in the southern city of Toulouse, who developed the analysis. Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton published A Panorama of American Film Noir in 1955, identifying a common mood and style among a sequence of Hollywood movies they were exposed to in quick succession following the War years. They describe how in mid-1946 they saw The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Murder, My Sweet[2], Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window, followed soon after by This Gun for Hire, The Killers, The Lady in the Lake, Gilda and The Big Sleep.[3] One can only envy the sheer pleasure it must have been to be a film critic suddenly confronted by such a wave of new material, having been shut off from US cinema for half a decade under Vichy and the Nazi occupation. Clearly something drastic had happened: even now, almost 70 years on, it’s striking how the most lauded of pre-War Hollywood thrillers - say Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), or John Ford’s The Informer from 1935 - look old-fashioned, while any of those mentioned above appear modern and comparatively fresh. Borde and Chaumeton clearly saw in one season what perhaps US critics had missed happening in increments, namely that contemporary crime stories had changed and taken on a more profound, darker, psychological aspect.

Borde and Chaumeton talk of the unhealthy eroticism of these films, their cruelty and strangeness, their ambivalence and amorality. They don’t pay much attention to formal stylistic qualities, such as the cinematography or schools of acting, preferring to focus on mood and atmosphere. Oneiric is a word that crops up repeatedly in their book - an uncanny, nightmarish quality, a distorted reflection of reality. This remains probably the best way of categorising these films, because if you look closely at these and other movies that fall under the noir umbrella, they don’t really have much else in common.

Take John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), almost universally regarded as the first film noir. This is a rather conventional, set-bound detective story, with little memorable photography. It’s memorable rather for its cast, the enormous, effete Gutman, played by Sidney Greenstreet, and his oily, foreign sidekick Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre. And of course it introduces Humphrey Bogart, one of the era’s definitive personas, as Sam Spade, the original tough, quick-witted, resourceful private detective, as handy with a sharp one-liner as he is with a government issue .45. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) is also a landmark in the noir canon, the first ‘classic noir’ according to many studies. It’s told in flashback with a voiceover by the dying Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a man whose lust for an amoral woman has led him to murder her husband. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) puts the flashback, voiceover narrative together with the private detective, this time with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. It helped launch a visual style with some striking cinematography by Harry J Wild, such as the flashing neon sign outside Marlowe’s office, and the hulking figure of Moose Malloy reflected in the glass above the seated Marlowe. It also includes a scene straight out of pre-War German expressionism, as Marlowe undergoes drug-induced hallucinations.

One could be forgiven for seeing a trend emerging here. But no sooner does one find the elements in place for a clear category called noir than they dissipate. Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) also involve detectives, voiceover narration and flashback sequences. Both feature men obsessed with an alluring female, but only in The Killers is she the dangerous, duplicitous femme fatale of noir stereotype. Here, the focus is on the hapless victim of her charms. In Laura, the woman is herself the purported victim, notable by her absence during the majority of the film, her painted image becoming the object of male fixation. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) has Bogart this time as Marlowe, but here he is not the steely, cold lone detective of The Maltese Falcon. Now the emphasis is on his on-screen chemistry with Lauren Bacall, playing a seductive, but in no way fatale, femme. Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), meanwhile, has a plot involving international espionage, but Gilda is not a cold, calculating manipulator - rather she’s a woman who just can’t help it. Frank Tuttle’s 1942 film This Gun for Hire is based on a Graham Greene story and is more akin in many ways to a Hitchcock espionage caper, while Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) is notably, weirdly, shot entirely from the point of view of private detective Philip Marlowe.

Hold any of these films up against another and you can find similarities. Hold them all up together and the only thing they all have in common is the period when they were made and a certain mood. There are consistent pre-occupations: sex, both repressed and overt, is ever-present, and violence is almost always threatened. There is a consistent sense of things being disordered, of a situation that must be put right, and that the protagonist at the centre of this situation is there by accident of fate rather than design. A crime is usually involved. But there is no formula for putting these elements together.

None of these films were made according to a set of rules: these conditions were applied a long time afterwards. However, for good or bad, ‘film noir’ is a convenient label, but something of a catch-all. To expect anything specific from a film labelled ‘noir’ is simply not possible.[4] To be fair, many books and studies on film noir grapple with the inherent problems of categorising so many diverse films. However, the proliferation of concise introductions (Rough Guides and the like), film guides, plus the many, many internet sites and forums devoted to film noir, merely emphasises the mistaken view that film noir is some kind of genre or fixed style.

‘Film noir’ not only misleads us about what these films contain and what they look like, it also limits how we talk about where these films come from. Almost without exception, the many guides to film noir provide more or less the same historical overview. They tell us of the huge impact of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, with its radical narrative structure and innovative photography. Kane is the first major Hollywood film to use flashbacks and a ‘broken’ sequence to tell its story, while cinematographer Gregg Toland pioneered deep focus, capturing scenes with action from foreground to background, using low angles with deep shadows and stark contrast. Coupled with this is the influence of German expressionism, brought to Hollywood by European émigrés who directed many of the great crime films of the era. Here, photography and sets heighten the experience of the narrative, distorting the real world for artistic impact.

Fritz Lang, director of expressionist classics like Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) was one of the first to make an impact on Hollywood. He would go on to make Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948) among other now-canonical ‘noir’ works. He was joined in Hollywood by other European ‘architects of noir’: Siodmak, Preminger, Wilder and Edgar G Ulmer (Detour, 1945). All were experienced as directors or screenwriters in the German-speaking film industry. Fleeing the Nazi’s, they brought to Hollywood the key noir ingredients of pessimism and paranoia, finding ready raw material in popular US hardboiled fiction by the likes of James M Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. They exploited the studios’ requirements for low-budget thrills to develop their cynical world view. In this, they were joined by a few native mavericks like John Huston and Anthony Mann, and leftist rebels like Edward Dmytryk and Jules Dassin. They found more inspiration as war and its aftermath shook up the US social order, traumatising young men while empowering women in the workforce.

Acapulco Nightlife: Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer on the town in Out of the Past

Once again, Out of the Past ticks all the boxes - a hard-boiled source novel, Build My Gallows High; a European émigré in the director’s chair; shadows visibly engulfing a man at sea in a world where the odds are stacked against him; and a woman who will cynically exploit his weakness. But again this is all too superficial. Out of the Past is never so straightforward. In fact this ‘definitive’ film noir is utterly atypical in its genesis, and it can be argued that its themes and style have more in common its director’s earlier low-budget chillers.

Jacques Tourneur may have been European, but that’s about all he has in common with Lang, Preminger, Wilder and Ulmer. Tourneur was born in France in 1904, but had lived in the United States from the age of 10 when his film-director father Maurice relocated to New Jersey. Father and son returned to work in Europe in 1928, Jacques working as script editor and assistant director to his father on productions in France and Germany. Jacques would clearly have been exposed to German expressionism, though his father’s work was at the more commercial end of the spectrum, including an early Marlene Dietrich vehicle, Grischa the Cook (aka The Ship of Lost Men, 1929). While Maurice stayed in Europe, Jacques returned to the US in the mid-30s, taking up an offer of work as second unit director on A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935). He went on to direct mostly shorts until he joined Val Lewton’s B-movie horror production unit at RKO in the early 40s.

It’s difficult to find much biographical information on Tourneur: he was not a big personality like a John Huston or Billy Wilder. He appears to have been a fairly reserved man and the most anyone seems to say about him is that he liked a drink when he wasn’t working. His political affiliation is not really known, although he is reported to have claimed to be on Hollywood’s ‘grey list’ for his liberal attitude toward race.[5] He made Days of Glory in 1944 - a slow, poetic wartime propaganda film about heroic Soviet partisans on the Eastern Front - the kind of film that later raised hackles among the more right-wing US politicians and critics.

The three films Tourneur made with Lewton are classics of their kind. Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man (both 1943) are exquisitely crafted films with a direct bearing on how we should see Out of the Past. To call them horror films is to use the term in its loosest possible sense. There are virtually no special effects, no great shocks, no monsters. Anyone tuning into I Walked with a Zombie and expecting an encounter with the undead would be gravely disappointed. What Lewton and Tourneur had was almost complete artistic freedom. Lewton, a Crimean-born child immigrant to the United States, would be given only a title, a budget and a running time by the studio, with he and his team filling in the rest. Gothic sets, gruesome make-up and camera trickery were out of the question, given tight financial and time constraints. Instead, Lewton and his director focused on atmosphere.

Cat People, now recognised as one of the most original films of its era, is often said to owe its strange, oppressive atmosphere to what Lewton and Tourneur chose not to show - namely a monster. But this is only half the story. Tourneur subtly builds a sense of an impending, inevitable catastrophe, with each beautifully shot, underplayed scene. The story is that of Irina, a young Serbian woman living in New York, who is convinced that if she becomes passionately aroused she will turn into a predatory panther. Irina, played by French actress Simone Simon, is courted and married by a young, American engineer Oliver, the embodiment of scientific rationality.

Scene after scene emphasises a sense of looming tragedy and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca must take enormous credit for the look of the film. It is clear he was sensitive to Tourneur’s requirements for mood and atmosphere and it is a surprise that they didn’t collaborate again until Out of the Past. His previous notable work had come on RKO’s low budget Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940), often cited as a ‘proto noir’, but better described as a quirky attempt at German expressionism, starring that iconic presence of pre-War European cinema, Peter Lorre. For that film, Musuraca illustrated a paranoid nightmare trial sequence in a style that wouldn’t look out of place in a Murnau or Lang film from a decade earlier, but also created a genuinely alienating nocturnal cityscape. Cat People, however, is more subtly expressionistic. One key scene shows an office at night - the lighting is low key, the filing cabinets look like skyscrapers, there is a sense of something lurking unseen, spying on Oliver’s co-worker Alice, and the disconcerting feeling dawns that it could be us, the audience. Later, Alice takes a dip in the pool in the basement of her apartment, again it is night-time. What little light there is, reflects from the rippling surface of the pool onto the ceiling, providing an uncanny sense that light is struggling against - and being absorbed by - the shadows. What all this suggests is that these filmmakers know how the story is going to end and they aren’t trying to hide it. Rather, they prefer to build the pervasive sense of doom, the dread of an inevitable end.

Equally impressive is I Walked with a Zombie. This time Tourneur’s director of photography was J Roy Hunt, who would go on to shoot Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947) with Robert Mitchum (another film unfairly limited by its categorisation as noir). Once again the horror is downplayed, in favour of a pervasive sense of mystery and doom. Once again a woman is afflicted with an apparently hysterical reaction to sexual arousal, a disorder that could be psychological, or could be supernatural. This time it’s the wife of a Caribbean plantation owner. She is in a catatonic state. A young Canadian nurse is contracted to look after her, and the nurse, on arriving on the tropical island, discovers a world both beguiling and perplexing. The conflict concerning the wife’s disorder (reason versus superstition again) is echoed throughout the film: her prim, upright husband is contrasted with his easy-going, heavy-drinking brother, their world of bourgeois mores with the upside-down celebrations of their servants (mourning birth, celebrating death), the clumsy male world with that of the sympathetic, caring women. The tropical foliage, beautifully captured in black and white by Hunt, is contrasted with the fastidious order of the plantation house interiors - its Venetian blinds creating vivid straight lines. The mood feels oppressive, heavy with looming tragedy in much the same way as Cat People: the effect is compelling, uncanny and dreamlike, but not terrifying. More than expressionism, the artistic tradition on which Tourneur appears to be drawing here is surrealism, an exploration of the unconscious truths hidden by beneath the surface of western civilisation.

While there is no supernatural aspect to Out of the Past, it shares with these earlier films the sense of looming, inescapable fate. Writers and academics may ascribe this mood in Out of the Past to some kind of post-War paranoia, but in truth the atmosphere of doom and dread is something inherited from these low-budget B-movies. For Tourneur, a sense of existential angst and deep psychological unease appears to be a fundamental poetic truth of the human condition, and is consistently visible from the beginning of his directorial career. Jeff Bailey’s journey toward his end is merely a more refined expression of it, more troubling and compelling for its lack of supernatural elements.

If not quite so captivating or atmospheric as Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie, the third of Tourneur’s collaborations with Lewton, The Leopard Man, adds a couple more ingredients into the mix that brought forth Out of the Past. This time it is a detective story with no hint of the supernatural - only an escaped big cat and a sequence of grisly deaths. And it is set in the southwestern US, in a town as much Mexican as it is American.

The story, based on the Cornell Woolrich novel Black Alibi, tells of a nightclub performer Kiki (Jean Brooks), urged by her manager/boyfriend Jerry (Dennis O’Keefe) to add a leashed black leopard to her act in an effort to upstage local flamenco dancer Clo-Clo (Margo). The leopard escapes during the act and later a local Mexican girl is killed while running an errand for her mother. Panic ensues in the town. Another young Mexican girl is killed, this time from a wealthy family - attacked while waiting in a graveyard for a secret tryst with a boyfriend. Next, Clo-Clo is killed in the street, shortly after a promising meeting with a rich older man at the nightclub. Jerry and Kiki seek the advice of local museum curator Dr Galbraith (James Bell), who seems to know rather too much about the habits of large cats and the psychology of human