THE STAR WHO DIDN’T CARE

“Judging by the richness and intensity of Mitchum’s best screen performances, Charles Laughton could well have been right when he speculated that the star of The Night of the Hunter might have been worthy of the great classical stage roles. But in Hollywood, serious art is only made by ruthlessly single-minded men who are prepared to go to the wall rather than submit to the pressures of a collaborative process of creation that is founded on compromise–and Robert Mitchum, for all his considerable gifts, was never that kind of man…”