Robert Mitchum - The Signature Collection (Angel Face / Macao / The Sundowners / Home from the Hill / The Good Guys and the Bad Guys / The Yakuza)

Robert Mitchum - The Signature Collection (Angel Face / Macao / The Sundowners / Home from the Hill / The Good Guys and the Bad Guys / The Yakuza)
by Burt Kennedy, Fred Zinnemann, Josef von Sternberg, Mel Ferrer, Nicholas Ray

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Deborah Kerr, Eleanor Parker, George Kennedy, Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum
Director: Burt Kennedy, Fred Zinnemann, Josef von Sternberg, Mel Ferrer, Nicholas Ray
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Japanese (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 658 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-01-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video

Movie Reviews of Robert Mitchum - The Signature Collection (Angel Face / Macao / The Sundowners / Home from the Hill / The Good Guys and the Bad Guys / The Yakuza)

Movie Review: The Many Faces of Robert Mitchum
Summary: 4 Stars

Nowhere have I read that Robert Mitchum-The Signature Collection purports to contain his best films, although perhaps the title subtly insinuates that to be the case. Perhaps it should have been called A Robert Mitchum Portrait or The Many Faces of Robert Mitchum instead. I would actually prefer the latter because that's precisely what the films included in this box set show. There is film noir, there is some drama, there is light comedy and there is a hokey pseudo-western.
I had never seen any of these films before I bought the box set. My purchase was based on my enjoyment of other Mitchum films, mostly of the film noir genre. After viewing these, I came away with a much better appreciation for Mitchum's talents. Though these are not all great films by any means, each offers at least something to enjoy. Here is my ranking from best to worst:
1) Angel Face: I like noir and this is a great noir film. Robert Mitchum is easily lured in by a strange and spoiled rich girl (Jean Simmons) he meets when he is on an emergency call to her home. He already has an attractive and stable girlfriend but since he fancies himself a ladies man he's always looking for greener pastures. He should have gotten out while he was ahead. He suspects she is trouble but he let the wrong head do his thinking and pays for it. The end is gripping though I quite expected that was where the film was leading. Five stars!
2)Home From The Hill: There is a lot going on in this film besides the obvious. This is small-town East Texas where a man has to be a man or he doesn't make it. Mitchum is the biggest land-owner and employer in the area, but has made lots of enemies because he can't stay away from other men's wives. At the beginning of the film, he is shot by a cuckolded husband, at the end he is shot by an outraged father who mistakenly believes that Mitchum has pupped his daughter. In the middle is the story of Mitchum's two sons, one illegitimate but self-reliant, the other a feckless mama's boy that Mitchum eventually turns into a man. The question is, will the boy be just like his father, or will he seek his own path? Its a very well-written and well-told story. When you are not spellbound by the storyline, look around and see how everyone, including the minor characters, interacts. It will give you a fairly authentic look at rural East Texas society at the time. Five stars!
3)Yakuza: I found this to be an illuminating peek into the inscrutable customs of Japanese society. East meets West? Oh, yeah! Its a good story about a business deal gone bad and how the Japanese mafia, i.e.Yakuza, would likely deal with it. Great action and great acting. Mitchum is an old Japan hand from his post-WWII occupation days and has old contacts there who are obligated to him. So he is sent back by a friend in trouble with the Yakuza to try to rectify the problem. Can his old contacts help? The answer is spellbinding! Sidney Pollack has made a very interesting film. Five stars!
4)Macao: A quasi-noir that supposedly takes place in the former Portuguese colony of Macao. I never did figure out why Mitchum was there, or why love interest Jane Russell was there either, but he gets into a lot of life-threatening situations because he is thought by the local crime boss to be a cop when actually its someone else. You get exotica, a little romance, some knife-throwing local toughs, and a fat, greasy, and corrupt colonial cop to liven up the action. Not a masterpiece but not at all unwatchable. Three stars.
5)The Sundowners: This could be a Disney film, really. Mitchum stars as a restless Aussie who wanders the country with his family in a wagon and takes odd jobs when he must. His philosophy is easy come, easy go. His loving wife Deborah Kerr tries hard to get him to settle down to no avail. They hook up with another wanderer Peter Ustinov who provides a lot of comic relief. To me, some of the best parts of the film are the views of the Australian outback and life at a sheep station. The best action sequence is the harrowing escape from a raging bush fire. You see so many examples of Australia's unique fauna throughout you could be forgiven for thinking that somehow you are really watching a DVD of a Discovery Channel feature. And then there is the hokey Dimitri Tiomkin score that often makes the action seem silly as his scores usually do. Overall, the movie is light-hearted and enjoyable, but eminently forgettable. Three stars.
6)The Good Guys and the Bad Guys: You have to be kidding! One of the stupidest movies I've seen, it would never even make it into release nowadays. Come to think of it, I don't remember it from when it was released. Mitchum probably felt embarassed by the outlandish storyline. Actually, he does have sort of a sheepish look about him. The best thing about the movie is the setting in the beautiful environs of Chama New Mexico. You have to see it in order to appreciate how lame it is. Probably went straight to the kiddie movies on Saturday morning TV. One star.
Despite my comments about the last couple of films, overall I would recommend Robert Mitchum-The Signature Collection to any fan who wants to own a representative sampling of his work. I'll certainly be enjoying it more than once.

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Summary of Robert Mitchum - The Signature Collection (Angel Face / Macao / The Sundowners / Home from the Hill / The Good Guys and the Bad Guys / The Yakuza)

Includes: Angel Face (1952), Macao (1952), The Sundowners (1960), Home from the Hill (1960), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969), The Yakuza (1974).

Big bad Bob Mitchum: Seriously, is there anybody you'd rather watch in a movie? Mitchum had the cool looks, a dancer's sense of balance, and a thoroughly modern amusement about his own stardom. Somehow he made you invest in a movie, while simultaneously communicating his own smirky suspicions that the whole thing was a joke. Mitchum gets boxed in Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection, a six-disc batch of random but rewarding Mitchum vehicles. Highlights are two noirish outings, and two prestigious auteur pictures that allowed Mitchum to play outside his usual job description. The one authentic noir is Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1952), with Mitchum as an incredibly passive hero bewitched by Jean Simmons' spoiled rich girl. True to its title, the film is utterly deadpan in tracking the downfall of Mitchum's easily-seduced male.

The quasi-noir is Macao (1952), a compulsively enjoyable piece of nonsense produced by the ever-meddling Howard Hughes. It's credited to director Josef von Sternberg, but it was largely reshot by Nicholas Ray (according to a Mitchum-Russell interview included on the disc, Mitchum wrote some of the new scenes). Doesn't matter; the combo of Mitchum and Jane Russell (re-teamed from the even kookier His Kind of Woman) is enough to carry this slice of backlot exotica. Both actors look skeptical about the material and amused by each other, and Russell gets to sing "One for My Baby."

Home from the Hill (1959) is an underappreciated change of pace for both Mitchum and director Vincente Minnelli. Mitchum, all authority as the super-manly patriarch of an East Texas family, supplies the brawn; Minnelli brings the same sensitivity to the emotional effects of color and movement that he brought to his musicals. Biggest surprise here is that two young-cub Georges, Peppard and Hamilton, are both very good in the male-ing?nue roles. Another long film, Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960), is a gentle and wise account of a nomadic family of sheep-herders in Australia. Mitchum and Deborah Kerr bring a beautiful sense of mature romance to their relationship, and Zinnemann catches the beauty of the country. Plus, you learn how to shear a sheep.

The clinker in the set is Burt Kennedy's The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, a 1969 Western that can't decide whether it's sending up High Noon or playing it straight. Mitchum's the aging Marshall eased out of his job, George Kennedy is the equally aging varmint whose gang (led by whippersnapper David Carradine) plans a train robbery. One can imagine John Wayne as the Marshall and Mitchum as the rogue, but the movie would still fall flat. Finally, The Yakuza (1975) finds Mitchum in his weathered seventies form, and easily the best thing about Sydney Pollack's stately film. The Paul Schrader-Robert Towne script heads to Japan for some cultural lessons and much finger-severing. All in all, the set shows the range of a perpetually underestimated actor who never stopped being cool. --Robert Horton

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