Poseidon Quickies: Let's Go "Home"

I haven't been posting a frequently as I might like and it's partly due to my usual level of "busy-ness," but it's also due in part to just not finding the right projects to post about. I will record and watch something, certain that it will be perfect for a tribute here, and then it just won't grab me enough to do the trick. One movie I did catch not long ago, Going Home (1971), is along those lines although there were a few details I wanted to share nonetheless. So here we are.

At the time of this movie, Robert Mitchum had retired from the screen following his well-received turn in Ryan's Daughter (1970), but he quickly grew bored and began looking for a new film to do. Allegedly, he was choosing between two location projects and got tipsy at lunch and signed on for the wrong one, this one! He'd intended to head to San Francisco to play a jazz musician, but instead wound up in some shopworn suburbs of Pittsburgh, playing a man reuniting with his son after having killed his mother years before. (Mitchum really had done more than a month of time back in 1949 after a marijuana sting operation.)

The now-grown son was played by Jan-Michael Vincent, who has been the subject of at least one eye-popping post here before. Vincent's career was on the ascent, having done a fair amount of TV (including having survived Lana Turner's The Survivors!) along with a few movies like Journey to Shiloh (1968) and The Undefeated (1969.)

Playing a rather haunted teen, he was already 27 (!), but had maintained his fresh, wholesome looks nonetheless.

Helping in some ways to mend the chasm between father and son is Mitchum's perky girlfriend in the movie, Brenda Vaccaro. She was more than two decades younger than Mitchum and only about five years older than Vincent.

A TV veteran herself since 1961, she'd made a successful move to films including Where It's At (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Summertree (1971), with more to come. She and Mitchum established great chemistry in their unlikely pairing here.

Though it's brief, we're treated to a shower scene with Vincent as he uses the trailer park bathhouse to get cleaned up soon after arriving.

Physical display was a key component of his work for the better part of his career. Two year's later, he'd be sporting a loincloth for part of The World's Greatest Athlete (1973.)

And, needless to say, no one who ever saw Buster and Billie (1974) ever forgot the sight of him emerging from the woods to skinny dip!

Vincent in his prime was in amazing shape with what had to be a low BMI.

Papa Mitchum had a couple of shirtless scenes, too. His sleepy-eyed looks were still discernible despite the passage of time.

And even though he claimed to accept this role by accident, he is excellent throughout. He never liked to talk about it much, or even admit it really, but he was a pro at portraying most of his roles.  

There's a hooty sequence in the film, too, which finds Vincent shaking his ass on the dance floor in some figure-hugging pants.

He and his date in the film (Barbara Brownell) really boogie down in this scene.

What might have been a really memorable and considerable movie for Mitchum and Vincent was demonstrably altered by MGM studio head James Aubrey (the "Smiling Cobra"), who cut - depending on what you read - either 12 or 21 minutes from the picture, excising things that might give it an R rating and then dumping the movie with virtually no fanfare into just four cities before pulling it. The director Herbert Leonard, who'd worked on a deferred salary to keep costs at bay said, "He unilaterally and arbitrarily raped the picture."

On the subject of rape, there is an already gut-wrenching assault against Vaccaro in the film, which was once even more violent judging by this lobby card. The pitchfork does not appear in the final cut.

Likewise, an entire scene with Sylvia Miles as a prostitute is missing from the final print despite appearing on a card. Miles had not only also worked on Midnight Cowboy (1969), but also was Oscar-nominated for that and yet had her worked ruthlessly excised from Going Home. As a long time sucker for tan lines, I would love to have seen this sequence in the movie.

The moment depicted here does show up in the film, though the framing is totally different. All we ever see is Mitchum's scarred knee (from a war injury) and then his face. Next, he's seem with his pants pulled up and fastened.

Both Mitchum and Vincent worked hard to craft the complicated roles they play in this uneven film. We may never know if the unedited version allowed their relationship to play out more believably. But this was not the end of their working together...

A dozen years later, they would once again play father and son in the mammoth TV miniseries The Winds of War.

The sprawling, epic production saw Mitchum as the head of a family that included Vincent and Ben Murphy as his sons, Polly Bergen as his wife and Lisa Eilbacher as his daughter.

I had to grin at the discombobulated nature of this publicity shot. Vincent is distracted one way, Mitchum another, and Eilbacher is all in with no idea that her costars have other things on their mind! Vincent and his on-screen love interest Ali MacGraw had all the spark of an extinguished campfire and were recast (with Hart Bochner and Jane Seymour) in the sequel War and Remembrance.

This very brief moment in Going Homs depicts an undie-clad Mitchum standing over the body of his deceased wife as his little boy looks on in tears.

A still photo of the moment (without that pesky post from the bed in the way) made its way into the world, to be seen many times. The sequence was used in the poster art for the movie as shown at the top of the post, but with models re-staging the action.

However, for Italian audiences, the sight of Mitchum in his mutande was apparently deemed too much...! So some trousers were superimposed over the 53 year-old's jockey shorts.

Said pants were appropriated from this other, later scene outside Mitchum's ramshackle trailer. And with that I am zipping up this quickie. Till next time!

"Intrigue"-ing

During the recent shelter-in-place due to COVID-19, it's been a dizzying time for me. Work has reached an all-time level of cray-cray and when I'm finished, I only want to veg out, often with undemanding, stringently-formatted programming like Flea Market Flip, Going RV or Lakeside Living (all 30-minute non-think shows found in marathon form on the Great American Country channel.) But there have also been some nights when I've taken time to watch movies that I otherwise might have skipped over or wouldn't have ordinarily DVR-ed. I've seen a LOT of movies, good and bad, during this lockdown. One movie that found its way onto my widescreen TV was a lesser-known 1956 Robert Mitchum picture called Foreign Intrigue.

The film was produced by a man named Sheldon Reynolds. Interestingly, he had previously created a syndicated spy TV series called Foreign Intrigue, of which there were 78 episodes and a few cast changes (and series name changes) along the way. This film is tied to the series in the remotest of ways with one supporting character from the show appearing in the movie. I found Reynolds' penchant for having his name appear in fancy-pants script (twice!) amid the otherwise standard typeface in the opening credits to be about the gayest thing evah, but he was apparently heterosexual. As producer, writer and director, it's more than clear who was in charge!

I'm not going to delve into the myriad plot details of this movie, but instead am merely going to point out a few points of interest and make a few comparisons that occurred to me while watching it. From the very start, Intrigue takes on the feel of a Hitchcock thriller. It's got portentous music (a concerto, in fact, created for it), eye-popping locations, unusual camera angles, deliberate use of color and - a particular Hitchcock motif - an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Mitchum, as a press agent for a mysterious millionaire, finds himself mired in mystery and danger upon the man's death and skips around Europe as several bodies pile up.

Mitchum is hardly an "everyman" and is sort of out of his comfort zone here, but gives it a college try. 

The film also contains a woman whose motives and morality aren't always made clear. The widow of the fallen (and rather aged) millionaire isn't exactly crestfallen over his demise.

This gal is portrayed by auburn-haired Genevieve Page. Decked out in a variety of carefully structured Pierre Balmain designs, she cuts quite a lithe figure throughout. One big blooper stood out to me, however, in one scene. She is seen wearing a lovely pair of brooches along her right shoulder, whose color complements her red gown. However, mid-scene, the brooches are suddenly facing the opposite direction! It's surprising that no one caught this gaffe on set.

A change of direction...

But no Hitchcock-style suspense film, actual or faux, would be complete without a blonde on hand. In this case, the young lady is portrayed by Ingrid Thulin. (She's billed as Ingrid Tuelin in this early role.) Strangely, both Thulin and Page receive "Introducing" credit in the film's opening even though they had both been working in movies for a period of years!

In time, Thulin would emerge as a highly-regarded actress in quite a few Ingmar Bergman films along with some decidedly cutting edge movies such as The Damned (1969) for Luchino Visconti. And she is a member of our very own (imaginary) Disaster Movie Club thanks to her appearance in 1976's The Cassandra Crossing.

Mitchum has a vaguely amusing cat & mouse association with a diminutive, bald man of espionage played by Frederic O'Brady. O'Brady's role is showy, unusual and pretty entertaining. He and the much bigger and brawnier Mitchum establish a certain degree of chemistry (and had fun palling around off-screen during filming as well.)

One thing Hitchcock films are decidedly NOT known for is beefcake. One is usually lucky to see a glimpse of the male form in one of Hitch's movies. Not so the case here as one sequence contains the sight of our hero removing his shirt (as O'Brady looks on with interest.)

"See somethin' ya like?"

Mitchum proceeds to shave while O'Brady looks on. There's a mild element of homoerotica, intentional or not, within the scene. The two eventually square off for a scuffle, though it isn't hard to guess who wins that one!

Peculiarly, Mitchum winds up in the unusual outfit of a suit jacket with no shirt underneath...!

There's a chase sequence that starts off on a winding stairwell. One might look down the middle and experience vertigo. But as I watched his film, whose plot admittedly has nothing whatsoever to do with Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), I couldn't help but take note of some visual similarities. Now I'm not accusing Hitch or anyone else of plagiarism. I'm merely saying that some of the visual (and marketing) elements of Foreign Intrigue seem to have perhaps, consciously or not, influenced artistic choices made in Vertigo.

It's easy enough to point to the ice cool, very lovely Grace kelly-ish blonde - a Hitchcock staple. (And Thulin might really have shone had she ever wound up working for the Master of Suspense. He is on record as having admired her and finding her understatedly sexy.)

But what of this? The spiraling twist of white-blonde hair, curving up and around in a whirlpool to nowhere...

...that emerged as a key motif in Vertigo with mystery woman Kim Novak.

Novak was styled (and lit) in a far more "Hollywood" way than Thulin, with heavier brows, but lighter lips. However the general visual aura is similar in many ways.

Still not convinced? Take a look at the tightly-structured, grey-toned suit that Miss Thulin wears in Intrigue and compare it to Novak's from Vertigo. Different fabric, yes, and different detailing, but with the same basic silhouette and with turned up cuffs on the sleeves.

Thulin as an actress bears little similarity to Novak, but the overall type of look she was given in this film does lend itself to comparison to famous Hitchcock blondes, notably the heroine of Vertigo. To me she looks at times much like one Kristin Scott Thomas (the merits of who I am occasionally debating with a good pal of mine!)

"The Swedish Patient?"

Thulin's mother is one of those highly elegant, but rather controlling, types that Hitch liked to use in some of his films. Think Leopoldine Konstantin in Notorious (1946) or even Miss Jessica Tandy in The Birds (1963.)

Like I say, the scenarios are vastly different, as are the personalities involved, but there's just that certain something that made me associate one film with the other.

Vertigo is a top ten favorite film of mine and, though it was a sometimes difficult role and experience for Novak, I don't think she was ever better in a movie. And as most of us know, she was a replacement for Vera Miles, who'd already been planned for the film from practically the start.

The uncanny or coincidental similarities I've been remarking upon in this post extend beyond the films to even the marketing portraits that were generated to sell them to the public:

Or how about this?

I leave it in your hands to decide whether one film may have influenced another.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Editor's Note~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As I was (finally) getting around to posting again, I was informed by my company that I'm going to have to take on even MORE work than I already am. As a result, it's going to make posting here regularly even more scarce than it has been (and that's saying something!) I am going to attempt to switch formats for a while, putting up briefer posts but hopefully with more frequency. Also, as a turd cherry atop the shit sundae I'm already going through, blogger suddenly will not let me upload multiple pictures at one time, allowing me to then click on the ones I want and putting them where I choose. I have to do each. one. singly. So that's another reason why I'm going to have to switch to less labor-intensive posts for a while. Wish me luck! Thanks for reading.