#writers #bydgoszcz #noir: Robert Mitchum, Colin Wilson, Robert Gawlowski.
(Photo: Robert Mitchum by Kate Gabrielle and a letter thatI received from the author and philosopher Colin Wilson in 1990.)
Some walk like they own the place /Whilst others creep in fear/ Try if you can to walk like a man /You’ve got to walk like a panther tonight’
Or so said, Jarvis Cocker, and, indeed, he really could have been talking about the great uncaged beast that was Robert Charles Durman Mitchum.
Big Bob, certainly prowled though many films like he ‘owned the place’ although, in typically self-deprecating fashion, he said this: “People say I have an interesting walk. Hell, I’m just trying to hold my gut in.”
For most of his life Mitchum was also uncaged. After being expelled from High School, he travelled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including a ditch-digger and a professional boxer. He experienced many adventures during his years as one of the Depression era’s “wild boys of the road.”
However, in Georgia he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang . Years later, in August 1948, he was arrested by narcotics officers for marijuana possession and sentenced to 60 days at a California prison farm.
But in film he always seemed free. Roger Ebert called Mitchum ‘the soul of Film Noir’ and this was true in films such as Crossfire, The Big Steal,. Otto Preminger’s Angel Face and Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur ,where Mitchum’s cynical, mischievous attitude, along with his lascivious droopy eyes and lazy mouth, were ideally suited to the role of the anti-hero.
However, the Charles Laughton helmed The Night of the Hunter is still considered by many to be Mitchum’s best performance, playing a psychotic criminal who poses as a preacher to find money hidden in his cell mate’s home.
Hell, Mitchum was so cool that he recorded a calypso album and Julian Cope wrote a song about him. And on …
Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I read a lot of Colin Wilson‘s books, mostly his novels and mostly via Hartlepool Public Library. He even wrote a crime book- The Killer- that was set in Hartlepool. There was a lot that I liked about him and his books.
Along the way, I discovered he’d written a book called The Book Of Booze. And for some reason, I wrote to him about it. And for some reason, he replied.
I didn’t have the letter for years and thought I’d lost it on my travels but it recently turned up in a pile of old photos. And on …
And here’s a photo of me with #bydgoszcz writer Robert Gawlowski, whose biography of local hero Marian Rejewski is available in ENGLISH or in POLISH.
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