Cameron Mitchell

He was an occasional leading man in B pictures and a second lead in some A films and some good ones, too.  His tenure at 20th Century Fox produced his best work.  In two of his best films, he's a charming, warm-hearted good guy but there can be no doubt he made a career out of playing flotsam. 

One couldn't be surprised that that last statement might have caused Cameron Mitchell's parents some concern.  You see, both were ministers.  He was the fourth of seven children (and he himself would have seven children), born in 1918 in Pennsylvania.  

He played baseball in high school and was apparently good enough as a pitcher to attract attention from some major league teams but he had other ideas.

Perhaps being from a large, God-fearing family he got lost in the crowd because it seemed he was always trying to grab more attention.  It's likely that led him into performing.  He had something inside him that was burning to get out.  He needed to express himself and did so with an earnest forwardness.  There came a time when he could add an entertaining aspect to what he had to say.

From there he realized he could easily express what he needed to in acting and in bringing characters to life.  Of course his father wanted him to become a clergyman but Mitchell had his heart set on the stage.

At 16 he was performing on the Broadway stage in a minor role in Jeremiah while working as a page at NBC Radio City alongside another future actor, Gregory Peck.  The following year he appeared with Lunt and Fontanne in The Taming of the Shrew.  Fontanne took a special interest in the young actor and coached him on some things that he kept with him the rest of his professional life.  

In 1940 he married a Canadian woman from a prosperous family.  They had four children and were married for 20 years.

Next was a brief turn in The Trojan Women and then he joined the Air Force as a bombardier.  Becoming a civilian again, he found himself in Los Angeles and decided to check out becoming a movie actor. 

Mitchell was hired by MGM in 1945 where he remained for three years in mainly lackluster roles in both A and B movies.  Among them were They Were Expendable with John Wayne, the silly High Barbaree, Cass Timberlane with Spencer Tracy, a decent horse story Gallant Bess and in 1948, the year he moved on, two Gable pics, Homecoming and Command Decision.  He would be fortunate to  work with some of the biggest names in the business.

In 1949 his star took an upward turn when Elia Kazan hired him to play Happy Loman, the younger son, in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  The play, with Lee. J. Cobb as Willie Loman, Mildred Dunnock as his wife Linda and Arthur Kennedy as older son Biff, was a certifiable hit.  

When Salesman became a film in 1951, only Dunnock and Mitchell repeated their roles.  Fredric March took over for Cobb and Kevin McCarthy was in for Kennedy.

20th Century Fox signed him to a seven-year contract and he dove into his best work and most fame while working for them.  First up was the western The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1952) about an odd collection of travelers trapped in a snowy mountain cabin.  Mitchell plays a murderer married to a radiant Anne Baxter.

He plays a county prosecutor who, along with his father-in-law, Walter Pidgeon, a newspaper editor, fights corruption in a small town in the tension-filled noir, The Sellout (1952).  John Hodiak, Audrey Totter, Karl Malden and Thomas Gomez round out the cast.  Mitchell then played Marius in one of the gazillion productions of Les Miserables (1952).

Kazan reunited Mitchell and March for Man on a Tightrope (1953), a grim story of a Czech circus owner and his troupe trying to get to freedom by performing for Germans during WWII.  Mitchell plays March's mysterious son-in-law, married to Terry Moore.  It took me a few viewings over the years to appreciate this fine film.

Sharing a scene with MM, Grable & Bacall

Mitchell hit a bonanza, klieg lights and a measure of continued fame when he was dressed up and looking handsome in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).  Although all of the fuss surrounded Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall, Mitchell hit his marks in a rare nice guy role as a secretive millionaire wooing Bacall.

Garden of Evil (1954) is one of my favorite westerns of the 50s because it stars Susan Hayward at her fiery best as a woman in Mexico who hires a trio of Americans to help her retrieve her injured husband in hostile Indian territory.  Mitchell, Gary Cooper and Richard Widmark are the Americans with Mitchell, of course, being the worst of the bunch.  The return trip is pumped with treachery, death and excitement.  Strap on those guns.

Though beautiful to look at, Désirée (1954) seemed bloated and banal to me.  Jean Simmons fills the title role as the romantic interest of Napoleon, overacted by Marlon Brando.  Mitchell is out-of-place as his brother Joseph.  I remembered it as two hours+ I wouldn't get back. 

Mitchell enjoyed one of his classiest role as Doris Day's piano-playing accompanist who loved her and stood by her during her abusive marriage to manager James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me (1955).

Mitchell, Day, Cagney

He made his final film with Gable in 1955, The Tall Men, the story of a cattle drive with Mitchell playing Gable's troubled brother.  Jane Russell, Robert Ryan, bandoleros and a helluva lotta cows were also in evidence.

In 1955-56 Mitchell made two movies with Richard Egan, another Fox player the studio was trying to turn into a big star.  In The View from Pompey's Head (1955), Egan plays a NY lawyer with southern roots who travels to the south to investigate why an author has not received his royalties.  Of course things turn much rockier when he meets up with an old flame, Dana Wynter (still one more Fox contract player being groomed for stardom) and her slimeball husband (Mitchell).  While not great, this is one of my favorite Egan films.

Tension at Table Rock (1956) is a good B western about an ex-gunslinger (Egan) and a traumatized sheriff (Mitchell) who are at odds over Mitchell's wife (Dorothy Malone) and the arrival of a large herd of cattle.

I wish I knew how Mitchell ended up third-billed in a big musical but in 1956 there he was in Carousel playing lowlife criminal Jigger Craigin.  Looking blond and handsome he was even given some songs to sing.  Unfortunately the film didn't score so well at the box office and what attention went to the film's stars landed on Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones.  

Mitchell married his second wife in 1957 and they had three children.   The marriage lasted 17 years.

The actor had another good year in 1957 with the lead in two films and arguably his most compelling role in a third.  Loaned out to RKO to make All Mine to Give, the film remains one of those he is most famous for.  Part of that for his fans, at least, is that it was a rare good guy role and he was the male lead.  It is a sentimental movie that caused tears to fall.

With Glynis Johns

Based on the novel, The Day They Gave Babies Away, Mitchell and Glynis Johns play Scottish immigrants and parents of six children who arrive in Wisconsin in 1856.  The story highlights happy times along with profoundly tragic ones.  The father dies and not long after the mother follows and the children are left on their own.  The sentiment gets pretty strong when the children make the decision to be turned over to various families to raise.    

Playing a serious drug addict is one of those roles actors like and Mitchell was no exception in his turn as boxer and WWII hero Barney Ross in the well-titled Monkey on My Back.  While heavily fictionalized and unimaginatively told, it contains a solid, gritty performance by Mitchell.

My favorite Mitchell performance comes in No Down Payment, director Martin Ritt's sometimes uncomfortable look into the lives of four neighboring subdivision couples with connecting yards.  They are friends, I suspect, only because they're neighbors.  Each couple is troubled which doesn't make for a very happy movie.

Clearly the worst off is Mitchell's character.  There are his issues with being a man, self-esteem, alcoholism and his fists.  He brags about becoming the city's new police chief and then loses the opportunity due to his poor education.

He sexually assaults his nextdoor neighbor (Patricia Owens) and he and her husband (Jeffrey Hunter) get into a fight in which Mitchell beats him to a pulp.  Of course, he gets his comeuppance. 

(Caption for above picture, from left, Sheree North and Tony Randall, Barbara Rush and Pat Hingle, Joanne Woodward and Mitchell, Patricia Owens and Jeffrey Hunter.)

The character is detestable but Mitchell gave a polished performance displaying the many nuances that brought this man to life.  My guess is he lost fans on this film... certainly those who can't separate actor from character.

This would end his long run of mainly notable films and good roles that had begun with his start at Fox in 1952.  He would make films for 43 more years but no time on the big screen would ever again be as prolific as that which ended with No Down Payment.

During most of the following decade Mitchell hightailed it to Italy, a country which welcomed name stars from the U.S.  Good for Italy... bad for the U.S. stars.  He made countless sword and sandal pics along with horror films and fantasy flicks.  He desperately needed the money.

In 1965 he filed for bankruptcy.  He said he was stupid and made bad investments.  He also took a shot at the parasites that live off you and the misplaced trust he put on people.

He did manage to make a well-known American film in 1967, the western Hombre where he played a sheriff-turned-outlaw.  Paul Newman is the star and Mitchell was reunited again with Fredric March and also with Barbara Rush who worked with him in No Down Payment.

Cameron Mitchell is probably most well-known for playing the hard-drinking, two-fisted Buck Cannon in High Chaparral (1967-71).  I regret I've never seen a single episode.  Chances are he thought the role would parlay him into future successes.  Unfortunately that was not to be.

Mitchell married his third wife in 1973 but three years later the marriage was annulled because it was discovered his divorce from wife #2 was not final.

Throughout the 1970s Mitchell was mainly a television actor although he returned to the big screen in 1972 to play a vicious racist in the Sidney Poitier-Harry Belafonte western Buck and the Preacher and then played another one in the Lee Marvin-Richard Burton flop, The Klansman (1974).

Also in 1974 he filed for bankruptcy a second time in nine years.  He said he considered suicide but when he thought of how his father would feel about that, he filed for bankruptcy again.  He just could not get a handle on his money, although he also wasn't making as much as he had during his heyday.  There were those seven kids and the divorces and some missing work because he was in jail for not paying child support.  I still like to act, he told an interviewer, because I don't like myself very much and acting is an escape.

He did one season on another television show. Swiss Family Robinson (1975-76) and continued for years with guests shots in one TV series after another.  He was in a good film, My Favorite Year (1982), but was far down in the cast playing a gangster for laughs.

The last of his films up for discussion is probably the most unusual I've ever written about in this blog.  He made a hard-core porn called Dixie Ray, Hollywood Star (1983).  Mitchell would claim he had no idea it was a porn.  Uh-huh.  In his role of a police detective he had no sex scenes but to say he had no idea it was a porn would indicate that he didn't read the script and/or the sex scenes were added after his work was done.  Both are unlikely.  He was always in great need of money and that is likely the reason he did it. 

Throughout the 80s and for the rest of his acting career he was mainly still a television actor.  However, he made a great many horror films, most of them overseas, and he became known for schlock work.  It was sad. 

Mitchell, a life-long heavy smoker, died of lung cancer at age 75 in 1994 in Pacific Palisades, California.  Prior to his passing he had reunited with his first wife. 

And here's another usual film offering.  Sometime between 1970 and 1976 Mitchell began filming Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind.   It was said to be a satire on masculinity with the focus being on a Hollywood director who emerges from self-exile with plans to complete work on an innovative movie.

And then the plot turned into real life.  Welles, as was often the case with films he directed, ran out of money and the movie was not finished when Welles died in 1985.  Over the years a number of people tried to get it completed and released but it didn't happen until 2018.  Surprisingly it got mainly favorable reviews.

Of course by the time of its release at least a quarter of the cast, including Mitchell, had passed away.  Others in the cast included John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Lilli Palmer, Edmond O'Brien, Mercedes MacCambridge, Susan Strasberg and Paul Stewart.

Next posting:

A 40s comedy