Word: mitchum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hollywood dish--latkes, perhaps--and could twist prim dialogue into raunch with her throaty laugh. But the shrillness in a Winters character gave men homicidal urges. She was strangled by Ronald Colman (A Double Life) and drowned by Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun). Robert Mitchum slit her throat (The Night of the Hunter); James Mason drove her to fatal madness (Lolita). She won two Oscars, for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and lent her increasing heft to The Poseidon Adventure. But her ripest later role was as herself: a tell-all memoirist...
...only when Woodward descends into the darkness of a parking garage to consult with Deep Throat that the movie briefly becomes a real noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump...
...about his depth, but in Daniel's dry croak, generalities and absurdities seem to take on meaning. He sounds a bit like Paul Westerberg, but Daniel's irony stems from an excess of feeling, not an absence of it (think of the difference between Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum), and his cadence makes words feel hard earned and universal. Being beaten down by love is an old act, of course, but then so is rock 'n' roll. Gimme Fiction has an amazing way of making both feel new. --By Josh Tyrangiel
Good example: Cape Fear, with Peck as the head of a family menaced by all-time cunning sicko Robert Mitchum. At the climax, Peck trains a gun on the villain. Shoot 'im, Greg! But no. This time the good guy is not going to kill the bad guy; the rotter will be tried, convicted and imprisoned. A less confident actor might have let this verdict sound like weakness, but Peck sells the notion that life in jail is as unpleasant as a bullet...
...cancer; in Los Angeles. Greer, who was briefly married to singer Rudy Vallee, was discovered by Howard Hughes. ("He was obsessed with me," she later said.) When Greer married her second husband, Hughes reduced her film work for his studio. Greer starred as a femme fatale opposite Robert Mitchum in the 1947 film Out of the Past--and, nearly four decades later, in the remake, Against All Odds...