Robert Mitchum

One of the movies' greatest actors and most colorful characters, a real-life tough guy with the prison record to prove it, Robert Mitchum was a movie icon for an almost unprecedented half-century, the cool, sleepy-eyed star of such classics as The Night of the Hunter; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool. Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

Robert Mitchum was--and still is--one of Hollywood's defining stars of Western film. For more than 30 years, the actor played the weary and cynical cowboy, and his rough-and-tough presence on-screen was no different than his one off-screen. With a personality fit for western-noir, Robert Mitchum dominated the genre during the mid-20th century, and returned as the anti-hero again during the 1990s before his death. This book lays down the life of Mitchum and the films that established him as one of Hollywood's strongest and smartest horsemen. Going through early classics like Pursued (1947) and Blood on the Moon (1948) to more recent cult favorites like Tombstone (1993) and Dead Man (1995), Freese shows how Mitchum's nuanced portrayals of the iconic anti-hero of the West earned him his spot in the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

A 1978 biography of film actor Robert Mitchum.

Follows one of cinema's great actors from his early days in Westerns to the end of his life. Along the way, this illustrated biography reflects on how his real life echoed the nefarious characters he played. Readers will especially enjoy the "chronoMitchology" timeline, and a "Mitchabet," the A-to-Z of the actor.

In Apocalyptic Dread, Kirsten Moana Thompson examines how fears and anxieties about the future are reflected in recent American cinema. Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and War of the Worlds, Thompson argues that a longstanding American apocalyptic tradition permeates our popular culture, spreading from science-fiction and disaster films into horror, crime, and melodrama. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of dread—that is, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence about existential choice and the future—Thompson suggests that the apocalyptic dread revealed in these films, and its guiding tropes of violence, retribution, and renewal, also reveal deep-seated anxieties about historical fragmentation and change, anxieties that are in turn displaced onto each film's particular "monster," whether human, demonic, or eschatological.