Free Republic

When John Huston's crew arrived on the island of Tobago in September of 1956 to begin filming his new picture, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 20th Century Fox were hoping that it would repeat the massive success of The African Queen – another story about a mismatched couple stranded in the wilderness, pitted against a well-armed enemy in a backwater of a global war. It was a war picture, but a decade since World War Two had ended these had gone from propaganda pictures (Bataan, Destination Tokyo) to gritty dramas full of battle scenes (Battleground, 12 O'Clock High) to adventure pictures...

On the surface Holiday Affair (1949) is a standard Christmas-in-the-big-city movie – a less mawkish Miracle on 34th Street with touches of His Girl Friday, Holiday, Bachelor Mother and Remember the Night. Making the picture was anything but regular, from the legal troubles of the leading man to the sexual harassment of his co-star by the famously eccentric and lecherous owner of the studio. Holiday Affair was the second film Robert Mitchum made after he was released from a stint at Wayside, a prison farm in Castaic, California where he was sentenced to forty-three days after being arrested for marijuana...

Robert Mitchum was born in Connecticut one hundred years ago - August 6th 1917 - and had the kind of childhood that gives you plenty to talk about in interviews, although Mitchum rarely did. His father, a railroad worker, was crushed to death before his son's second birthday, and young Bob was eventually sent to live with his grandparents in Delaware. He was expelled from middle school for getting into a fight with the principal. Kicked out of high school, he drifted round the country, hopping freights, sleeping in boxcars, picking up a little dough digging ditches, getting jailed for...

Robert Mitchum speaking from the grave? If you apply his words about the war back then and apply them to today....not a damn difference if you ask me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNawbuG4mTg God, I miss this man....class act.