Bravo channel's Charles Champlin interviews Robert Mitchum 1994 37 min

INTERVIEW : One Icon, Hard-Boiled : Robert Mitchum has been making it look easy for 50 years--the acting part anyway.
Video by Don Kelsen
RARE ROBERT MITCHUM INTERVIEW from his home in Santa Barbara, California.Robert Mitchum was to be a schedule guest at the 5th Lone Pine Film Festival. (1994) Due to a filming conflict in Europe, he had to cancel. Feeling sorry for the cancellation he agreed to do an interview with Charles Champlin, notable columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times and Bravo channel personality. Mitchum talks of his early days at Paramount and filming in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine in Hopalong Cassidy films and other westerns. Mitchum also speaks of his youth and being on a chain gang at age 15. Champlin is introduced by Dave Holland, founder of the Lone Pine Film Festival.
The public and private Robert Mitchums do not seem strenuously different. He has a fast and often sardonic wit. When he was asked if a photographer could come along to take some pictures, he replied, “Nudes?” He is certainly aware of his stardom and the difficulty of walking in public, but he lives as unstarry a life as possible. He reads widely and abundantly and wrote and sang two albums of songs in the 1950s.
His seeming nonchalance served him well and was its own form of damage control at the time of his dubious arrest for possession of marijuana in 1948, an item hardly newsworthy by present Hollywood standards but potentially serious then. But posing cheerfully in prison garb pushing a mop, Mitchum seemed simply, well, Mitchum.
Like James Cagney and a few other icons who came up a hard road, Mitchum has seemed to regard acting as a job of work, more lucrative than many, sometimes astonishingly so. Yet the laid-back airs need to be regarded with some skepticism.
Despite his long-ago protests to Loretta Young that he didn’t care about the lighting, he knows his craft. Being natural on camera is itself an act, maybe the hardest of all, and not to be seen acting is ironically a high compliment for an actor. Whatever else is true, icons don’t survive by accident.