Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server

Author:Lee Server [Server, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Actor, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Film & Video, movie star, Nonfiction, Performing Arts, Retail
ISBN: 9780312285432
Google: PfZJxlOdjg4C
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2002-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

Foreign Intrigue

IN JUNE 1955, THE Norwegian tramp Fern River carried the Mitchums across the southern Atlantic from New York. For a week they moved slowly over an empty ocean, doing nothing. There was nothing to do. Sit in the sun, read—half his luggage was books—eat in the tiny dining room. It had taken a day out of New York for the six other passengers—retirees and college professors—to get used to the movie star on board. Now he was just Bob, stretched out on the deck, telling stories at the captain’s table at dinner. One morning he woke up, looked through the porthole, and saw Africa on the horizon. They moved up along the coast of Morocco that morning and entered the port of Casablanca. The Norwegians advised them to stay on the boat as there had been much unrest in the country of late and many foreigners attacked on the streets. Bob said, “Hell, they were probably just having a little fun with ‘em.” He and Dorothy and two other passengers hired a taxi to take them around. They left the car at the entrance to the walled medina and walked through the old gated entrance, settling down for a drink at a cafe on the square. Gawkers began to whisper to each other, gathering for a look at the famous visitor. In no time, Mitchum recalled, the square had filled with “ragheads,” maybe three hundred people pushing, edging forward, surrounding them on the narrow street. People whistling, shouting in Arabic. Somebody, said Mitchum, “remembered that it was to crowds like this that revolutionaries come to start a riot.” He got his party up and moving as the crowd followed, many of them chanting his name, eyes full of fire. The others hurried to the car, unsettled, with hundreds of Moroccans in cotton frocks closing in behind them. “Get in the car, Bob!” someone shouted. But Mitchum paused, basking like a Roman emperor, until someone grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him into the car and the driver hit the gas.

And on to Europe.

Sheldon Reynolds was American television’s expatriate boy wonder, only twenty-six in 1951 when he began producing, directing, and writing a weekly series called Foreign Intrigue, a cloak-and-dagger drama distinguished by its authentic European backgrounds. Reynolds staggered Hollywood TV producers with the amount of production value he could squeeze into a low-budget show—each episode seemed to be shot in a half-dozen countries. This he accomplished through a variety of clever improvisatory strategems, shooting exterior sequences for an entire season at each location, then returning to his bases in Paris and Stockholm to write scripts and shoot interior scenes that would match up with what he had shot on the streets of Rome and Berlin and so on. The show was a hit, running for five seasons and 156 episodes. Then Reynolds came to Hollywood, wanting to “expand his horizons” and set up his first feature film. He shared the same agent with Robert Mitchum, and so they were brought together for a meeting on the set of Not as a Stranger.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.