Read Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert for Free Online

Naked Spur. And in lighthearted comedies (Philadelphia Story), and superb adventure films (Flight of the Phoenix), and romantic biographies (The Glenn Miller Story) and in countless other fine movies. But those are what movie fans would remember. It's a Wonderful Life is remembered by everyone.
    Robert Mitchum never made a picture like that. Perhaps he couldn't have. He embodied a completely different kind of character on the screen: harder, wiser, darker. No matter what your age was, Mitchum always seemed older than you were, just as Stewart always seemed boyish. Stewart smoked in roles, and you felt it was because the character smoked. Mitchum smoked, and it was because he needed to. And when he drank in a movie, the way he picked up the glass let you know he wasn't keeping count.
    Robert Mitchum was my favorite movie star because he represented, for me, the impenetrable mystery of the movies. He knew the inside story. With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart.
    Mitchum was the soul of film noir. And film noir is one of the three uniquely American movie genres (the others are Westerns and musicals). The way he wore a fedora, the way he let a cigarette dangle from his lip, the way he handled himself in a fight, was manly, tough, and cynical. The model for that kind of character was Bogart, but Mitchum refined it, and made it modern.
    When he was in a fight in a movie, you felt like you were watching a fight. Not a skillful exercise in choreography, constructed out of pseudokarate and special effects and stunt men. But a fight, in which one guy's fist hits another guy's gut, and it hurts, and is surprising and definitive, and is over in a flash.
    Mitchum made probably the best of all film noirs, Out of the Past, and a lot of others. He made that distinctive American art film Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton, which combined a nightmarish story with the most delicate of visual whimsy (remember the animals along the river bank as the children float to safety?). To look at the span of his work, from The Sundowners to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, from Farewell, My Lovely to The Lusty Men to The Yakuza to Pursued, is to see a professional at home in many genres, periods, and accents. You can never catch him cheating, coasting, or looking phony.

    When a great star or director dies, critics all over the world haul down David Thomson's big Biographical Dictionary of Film, because it does the best job in the fewest words of capturing the essence of its hundreds of subjects. Some of them may have been surprised by what he wrote about Mitchum:
    "How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies? There is an intriguing ambiguity in Mitchum's work, the idea of a man thinking and feeling beneath a calm exterior so that there is no need to put `acting' on the surface. And for a big man, he is immensely agile, capable of unsmiling humor, menace, stoicism, and above all, of watching other people as if he were waiting to make up his mind."
    And then Thomson added: "Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods."
    I was lucky enough to meet both James Stewart and Robert Mitchum several times. Stewart was one of the nicest movie actors I ever met. He was patient, humorous, modest, smart. There was an edge to him-no one could fly twenty-two combat missions over Germany and be merely a nice guy-but he liked people and liked himself, and you felt good around him.
    Mitchum was another story. He was known as the hardest interview in the business. I thought he was the best. I learned early how to talk to him. It was a rain-swept night in 1968, in a little cottage on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, where he drank whisky and listened to Jim Reeves records and told stories. He was making Ryan's Daughter and was