It was 1942, and the studios were unsure how to pitch Robert Mitchum to the American public. "He looks kinda mean around the eyes," said one producer. "Sounds like a gorilla," suggested another. The teenage readers of Photoplay magazine were a little more forthcoming: "He's got sex appeal in an evil sort of way," said one. And another: "He has the most immoral face I've ever seen"–a delightful way of putting it, as if the face had been up to stuff without its owner knowing, sloping off to bars for a slug of bourbon, leering at girls and then coming back all pie-eyed.

That's how it is with Mitchum, though: Body and face feed you a completely different story. He has the body of a brute–torso like a tree, shoulders that don't know when to stop–but it comes topped off with the face of an angel: perfect Cupid's-bow mouth, dimpled chin, and an unbroken line of brow and nose which calls to mind at least four major Greek deities. Only those indolently hooded eyes give the game away: You look at those lids and wonder what's been keeping Apollo up at night.

"Quite a lot" is the answer, and sometimes not just nights. On the set of Not As a Stranger , which starred Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Broderick Crawford and Lee Marvin ("not so much a cast as a brewery," said Mitchum), drinking began in the morning, and by the evening the cast had abandoned acting in favor of more pressing tasks, like trying to eat Sinatra's wig or track down Marilyn Monroe, who wasn't even in the movie: The Wrong Door Heist , as it became known. Lee Server's new biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don't Care , is so packed with stories like this that Mitchum's career at times seems like one long binge with occasional breaks for shooting. You finish it feeling exhausted but healthy, flushed with respect for a time when people took the job of hell-raiser seriously, and very slightly guilty for doing anything as weedy as reading a book–rather than using it, say, to throw at a cop or club a horse.

At 590 pages, it would leave a sizable dent. Mr. Server comes to Mitchum from a previous biography of Sam Fuller, where he presumably refined his taste for bad behavior and his nose for the varying bouquets of bullshit. Other biographers might shy away from an attribution like "… he told her, or said he did," but Mr. Server knows it only draws you closer to the campfire, and to the rich baritone burr of the actor's voice. Mitchum may have attracted tall tales, but none so tall as the man himself. His childhood was the sort of thing that used to make Charles Bukowski go all soppy: fatherless, lawless, a matter of "broken windows and bloody noses." He left home at 14, and after a few years of hitching rides on the railroads, and a spell on a chain gang for vagrancy, Mitchum had steeped himself in all the essential gentlemanly arts. He knew how to catch and cook a squirrel, how to disarm a man with a long length of chain and how to pinpoint the exact region from which a crop of marijuana hails–proving himself a very Henry Higgins of hemp.

All of which should be enough to make Johnny Depp weep. Modern-day stars like to court a naughty countercultural thrill by trashing their mini-bar every now and again; but most, if forced to reveal a typical diary entry from the age of 14, would most likely unearth something like "changed agents" or "fired mom." The way Mitchum takes shape in this book, though, he seems less a man than an advance loan on the 1960's in human form. It's little wonder the Hollywood of the 40's didn't know what to do with him. It took 20 pictures before he made his mark, in The Story of G.I. Joe , in which he sported the softly fatigued look of a man who has just been through the hell of war. Even better, though, was Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past , in which he sported the softly fatigued look of a man acting opposite Kirk Douglas. An intriguing match: a head-to-head between the two biggest cleft chins in the business. You worried that, if they got too close and actually brushed chins, they might lock together like Lego.

As it was, Douglas took an instant dislike to Mitchum and tried to out-underact him–a more or less impossible task, like trying to limbo under the carpet. "Bing Crosby supersaturated on barbiturates" is how James Agee described Mitchum's acting style; and throughout his career, critics would complain that he had only two basic expressions: laconic and asleep. The important thing, though, is that they happened at the same time. All the great movies stars have faces that do this; many can smile and many can frown, but only Robert De Niro can do both simultaneously. Mitchum has one of the great two-faced faces, great for duplicitous plots. He made a herd of Westerns, but it was in the hot gloom of film noir that he first bloomed, where the lighting was low to keep the morals company; and if he looked half-asleep, well, what more receptive state for the unfurling of a waking nightmare?

Mitchum squinted his way through Out of the Past , Blood on the Moon , Where Danger Lives –all lit by Nicholas Musuraca–as if even the darkness was too bright. "I'm afraid I threw you a little into shadow then," worried Loretta Young after a take during the shooting of Rachel and the Stranger . "Honey, I don't give a damn," replied Mitchum: He'd been playing shady characters for years. Shadiest of all, of course, is his preacher in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter , a fairy tale composed of looming expressionist shadows, most of them cast by Mitchum himself as he loiters around the children's front door like the big bad wolf. "I'll be back ... at night," he threatens, and the more you find out about the man, the more redundant that last clause seems. He is the night.

Alongside his beautifully insolent turn as Max Cady in Cape Fear , Night of the Hunter contains what is probably Mitchum's best performance. It is certainly the one certifiable masterpiece in the backlist, but then Mitchum was never really about masterpieces; appearing solely in top-quality cinema would have struck him as a form of snobbery, like only wanting to mix with dukes and earls. Hardened Mitchum fans must instead venture much further afield, deep into the boggy marshland of the B movie, where cultists roam and the threat of bumping into Jayne Mansfield grows stronger by the hour. There you will find such gems as Thunder Road , the one truly personal movie that Mitchum made–he served as actor, producer, writer and composer–and one which, naturally, immortalized the heroic plight of the moonshine smuggler. Or Bandido! , a lurid Mexploitation flick in which, in the middle of a battle field, Mitchum orders a taxi . It is for such moments that the Mitchum fan lives–little flares of cool in the night of a thousand drive-ins.

This will make the book tough going for dedicated auteur theorists. Time and again, Mitchum hooks up with a great director–Nicholas Ray! John Huston! Sam Peckinpah! Jacques Tourneur!–and your heart leaps at the thought of the beautiful collaboration to follow, only to see it all fizzle out in a glow of mutual respect and no further movies. The news that he was to have starred in The Wild Bunch is particularly hard to take, and has you pounding the floor in a very un-Mitchum-like show of exasperation–until you remember that his great, autumnal, end-of-the-road role came in 1975, in the form of Farewell, My Lovely , in which Mitchum, looking more and more like a de-tusked walrus, competes with L.A. to see who can look more derelict.

"Did it matter what fucking picture you made? They were all just masturbation aids," writes Mr. Server in a sympathetic bout of belligerence. He is very much a proponent of the Nick Tosches school of Method biography-writing–all empathic second-person and tough-guy prose, the better to buddy up to his subject: "[J]aws were broken, fingers were broken, blood everywhere. Good times." Fair enough, but then he goes and writes something supple and sly, like his description of Villa Rides as "noisy, colorful, violent, watchable, forgettable," or his dismissal of Secret Ceremony as "modernist esoterica," which rather lets the cat out of the bag: You can't strike delicately glancing blows against modernism and still come on like your knuckles are raking the ground. Lee Server is, in other words, not nearly as dumb as he makes out, which makes him the perfect biographer for Mitchum, whose drunken boorishness was but a thin cover for deep wellsprings of courtesy and professional respect. "You pretend you don't care about a damn thing," Howard Hawks once said to him, "and you're the hardest working so-and-so I've ever known." Mitchum replied: "Don't tell anyone."

Tom Shone was film critic for The Sunday Times of London; he is now a staff writer at Talk.

In The Sixth Sense , Mr. Willis plays a child psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who is sitting at the top of his profession in Philadelphia, the home base also of Mr. Shyamalan, writer-director of Praying With Anger and Wide Awake , two films I have never seen, though the titles alone reflect a mental-spiritual predilection that may explain some of the quiet strangeness of The Sixth Sense in the currently noisy and overstated movie scene. Thus, after an initial burst of violence in which Dr. Crowe is shot by a former child patient grown up into homicidal and suicidal madness who then kills himself, the rest of the movie, heart and soul, is devoted to the slow recuperation of Dr. Crowe from the traumatic loss of self-confidence.

He takes on the doubt-ridden treatment of an 8-year-old boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), whose divorced mother, Lynn Sear (Toni Collette), is concerned about the boy's strange antisocial behavior both in school and at home. The theme of divorce and its disruptive impact upon children is echoed in Cole's case history by that of Dr. Crowe's adult assailant and suicide, Vincent Gray (Donnie Wahlberg). Yet, the two cases diverge spectacularly when Cole finally reveals that he sees and hears dead people, whose bizarre grimaces and movements terrify him. We get to see these ghosts as well with a minimum of special effects trickery. Meanwhile, Dr. Crowe's marriage to art gallery owner Anna Crowe (Olivia Williams) is gravely threatened by his lack of attention.

What Mr. Willis brings to his role is an extraordinary patience and stillness, illuminating the mental processes of Dr. Crowe in his laser-beam penetration of a troubled little boy's psyche. The gaining and keeping of trust is uppermost in Dr. Crowe's mind and method. In the end, the little boy is helping his doctor as much as the doctor is helping him, and their necessary final parting is indeed sweet sorrow. Along the way, however, the dimensions of the two female characters keep shrinking almost to the vanishing point, and the very gifted Ms. Collette and Ms. Williams as Cole's mother and Dr. Crowe's wife are left almost completely in the dark about what has transpired between Cole and Dr. Crowe. A process of healing is implied for both women, but their emotional warmth is inadequately projected. Still, at least The Sixth Sense is one of the rare current movies about healing rather than harming.

The Second Time Around Is Never Like They Say It Is

John McTiernan's The Thomas Crown Affair , from a screenplay by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer, based on a story by Alan R. Trustman, comes out at a time when people are so starved for old-fashioned glamour and elegance that they'll embrace this feature-length coming attraction as the real thing. Not that the original 1968 version with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway was any world beater, but McQueen and Ms. Dunaway (a psychiatrist in the remake) at least had a smidgen of chemistry together even without the toplessness and nudity of the 90's to throw some logs on the fire. Pierce Brosnan is, as always, so lightweight as a screen personality that he makes Roger Moore look substantial. As for Rene Russo, so appealing in action movies, she is unable, except in one nightclub scene with a virtually see-through gown, to project the effortless ease of the stylishly shady lady.

She has received a great deal of publicity for daring to do sex scenes at the ripe old age of 45. The implication is that the moguls of the sexist 90's have been unusually cruel and inhuman to middle-aged actresses. Yet if you look back to the supposed Golden Age of women's pictures in the 30's and 40's, few actresses on the far side of 40 played anything but mother roles, and many achieved that status by the age of 35. Life magazine marveled in 1943 that a 38-year-old Jean Arthur could convincingly play a heavy petting scene on a Washington, D.C., stoop with Joel McCrea in George Stevens' The More the Merrier . The cream of the jest was that McCrea himself was 38 years old. Yet, double standards and all, what makes today's movie moguls sexist is not so much the age-casting of actresses, but the advanced ages of the male stars who still play bedroom scenes on the screen. Let's face it: The camera is cruel; it makes everyone look 10 years older and 10 pounds heavier. That's why the most sensual actresses look in real life as if they lived entirely on carrot juice.

Denis Leary takes top honors in the cast for acting a little, while the two leads spend most of their time posing with a variety of luxury items. Mr. Brosnan's gentleman thief seems to exalt needless virtuosity over larcenous efficiency. I hate show-offs, particularly when it comes to something as crucial to the capitalist system as stealing.

What Did Deep Throat Ever Do to Hollywood?

Andrew Fleming's Dick , from a screenplay by Mr. Fleming and Sheryl Longin, plops down on the screen as a thoroughly misguided, terminally unfunny fantasy-farce-satire of the Watergate scandal. I can't help suspecting that the only reason that the script got the go-ahead from the powers that be was that someone in the decision-making process decided that today's kids would get orgasms from the obscene ambiguity of the film's title, with extra mileage from the "true" identity of "Deep Throat" from the Woodward-Bernstein journalistic saga of the dethroning of Dick Nixon. And sure enough the last sentence of the script manages to combine "Dick" with "sucks."

Dick Nixon resigned from office in 1974, and this is 1999. Twenty-five years is a long time for a topical satire to keep its freshness and snap. The kids don't remember the names of all the players, and we graybeards still chuckle over the hilariously glowering Nixon of Dan Aykroyd, the heavily and commandingly accented Kissinger of the late John Belushi and the thoughtfully fatuous David Eisenhower of Bill Murray on the70's SaturdayNightLive shows that were contemporaneous with the Watergate frolics in Washington. Dan Hedaya makes a good Nixon until the script makes him out to be not merely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but mean to his dog, his wife and his daughters. This excess of satiric overkill made even this yellow-dog Democrat a bit uneasy. As much as I rejoiced at Tricky Dick's downfall at the time, I regarded Julie Nixon's unwavering devotion to her father as worthy of an Antigone.

The biggest problem with Dick , however, is that its two ditsy teenage heroines are played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams with so much tongue-in-cheek smugness that they kill all the laughs. Their exploits are performed with such embarrassing clumsiness that the plot collapses around them. To top it off, they manage to giggle their way into political correctness on the Vietnam War, and on the benevolent effects of the hippie drug culture on American life and even on the cause of world peace. They are faux-naïfs to a fault, even to the point of mocking the euphemisms of all authority figures.

To put a point to it, Dick is no Election . It is as mean-spirited between the generations as Election is fair-minded. What remains a little surprising is all the ridicule heaped on Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) with the one overly extended sight joke of the exaggerated Mutt-and-Jeff pairing of the two journalists, Woodward towering over the diminutive Bernstein.

Out of the Closet And Onto the Screen

Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train , from a screenplay by Danièle Thompson, Mr. Chéreau and Pierre Trividic, based on an original idea by Ms. Thompson, unwinds as one of the most forceful reminders that what Oscar Wilde once designated "the love that dare not speak its name" has now burst out of the closet onto the screen with more and more challenges for critics of all sexual persuasions hitherto permitted to be politely "tolerant" and "understanding" in mealy-mouthed variations of Terence's "nothing human is alien to me." This won't do anymore for an intelligently uninhibited confrontation of sexual diversity and carnal warfare like Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train .

Having gotten that off my chest, I don't know what else to say about a film I had trouble following and understanding. There are 16 characters involved in a funeral cortège from Paris to Limoges for the burial of a famous painter named Jean-Baptiste, and briefly seen in flashbacks in the acting persona of Jean-Louis Trintignant, who also plays the painter's very much alive shoe-merchant brother Lucien. There is a house in Limoges that becomes a bone of contention. There is a troubled marriage. There are noisily volatile homosexual triangles, bisexual intrigues, an H.I.V.-positive diagnosis, and far above the fray is the mischievous and malignant spirit of the painter who continues to torment his supposed friends, lovers and admirers from beyond the grave by herding them together into a brawling band of betrayers and betrayed.

I must beg off being more specific. The film is too floridly demonstrative and diffuse for my taste. The neuroses of its characters are too exotic. The narrative is too muddled, the mise en scène too furiously busy. I pass.

May I Recommend Instead

If you've never seen Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974), see them at once, ahead of all current releases. If you've seen them once or more, I don't have to tell you that these imperishable classics can be seen again and again over the years with undiminished enjoyment.

I'm still in movie-star mourning over Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum and Red Skelton. I kept thinking what an icon the man everybody called Jimmy became to every small-town boy during the many Christmas reruns of It's a Wonderful Life . He was the quintessential Frank Capra hero for too many reasons to count, but with so much phony emoting and bogus posing passing for acting these days, he'll be missed for his sincerity, courage and honesty. Mitchum was another class act. He was the droopy-eyed, chain-smoking king of the tough guys. With him, the camera never lied. And the sight of Red Skelton in a ballet tutu still makes me laugh. He was from a school of wholesome, slapstick clowns that seems to have closed down forever. It was also sad to watch those Yuletide reruns of Holiday Inn , knowing that Marjorie Reynolds was no longer that classic film's sole survivor. Somewhere, I hope she's back in the arms of Fred Astaire.

One of the things I miss most in today's brain-dead, morally bankrupt movie industry is the polish and pleasure I derived from the great character actors of yesteryear. In 1997, the curtain was lowered on another whole gang of them: Jesse White, Celeste Holm's husband Wesley Addy, John Beal, baggy-pants comic Joey Faye, distinguished Edward Mulhare, irreverent rascal Burgess Meredith, and tough guy turned TV producer Sheldon Leonard. I will also miss two of my favorite fat guys, Stubby ( Guys and Dolls ) Kaye and Chris Farley, the obese bad-boy comedian who followed in the fatal footsteps of his idol John Belushi.

And who could forget everybody's favorite TV father, Brian Keith? Another great loss for the screen was the marvelous, underrated Richard Jaeckel, the angel-faced kid in so many action films who finally proved himself an artist of wide and challenging emotional substance when he got an Oscar nomination in 1972 for stealing scenes from Henry Fonda and Paul Newman in Sometimes a Great Notion .

It was adios for some other legendary behind-the-scenes giants of the silver screen. Fred Zinnemann's face may not have been recognized at Kmart, but as the director of such monumental motion picture classics as High Noon, The Member of the Wedding, From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma! and A Man for All Seasons , he contributed mightily to film history and was the last of a dying breed of craftsmen who seem to have been replaced by numskulls. Joining him this year behind that Cinemascope lens in the sky were action director Samuel Fuller (King of the B's) and Hallmark Hall of Fame' s distinguished director, George Schaefer. I will also miss those skillful, slickly penned screenplays written by Dorothy Kingsley during the Golden Era of movie musicals.

And absolutely nothing will look the same without legendary M-G-M hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff. He's the man who saw every glamour girl from Greta Garbo to Ann-Margret before dawn, without a stick of makeup, and turned them into magazine covers by sunrise. A world-class raconteur with a wicked sense of humor and a photographic memory, it was Sydney who knew where all the bodies were buried. Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe never made a move without him. He once told me the night before the Johnny Stompanato murder, he ran into Lana Turner at Hughes' Market in Hollywood; she was buying steak knives.

It was a year of irony, even in agony. While Diana, Princess of Wales, was cemented in martyrdom during a week of royal slobber turned by the media into a feeding frenzy at the alligator cage, nobody paid the same attention to the death of Mother Teresa, patron saint of the disenfranchised. Similarly, Gianni Versace's violent and shocking demise at the hands of a lunatic made world headlines, but scant column space was devoted to fashion genius Jean Louis, whose timeless elegance during the great days of movie allure won Oscars for proving a woman is not a sometime thing. This brilliant couturier left behind a legacy of museum-quality high fashion that can never be duplicated and a wife whose name is still Loretta Young. Even while today's stars look like orphaned ragamuffins, the name Jean Louis on the inside label still means money in the bank.

The senseless death of John Denver cast a pall on the music scene, but I was more bereft over the final charts on the scoring pads of Burton Lane, the supernaturally gifted composer of Finian's Rainbow , and Saul Chaplin, who arranged the gorgeous music for so many great movie musicals like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story . I'll never forget the songs Burton Lane wrote with the late Alan Jay Lerner for the M-G-M musical Royal Wedding and for the Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever . And Saul Chaplin's dazzling orchestral arrangements for the George Gershwin songs in An American in Paris still keep my downstairs neighbors awake when my turntable gets busy at 2 A.M. And speaking of that epic M-G-M classic, 1997 also lost the soigné French singing star George Guetary, who stopped the show with "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise." An American in Paris was his only American musical, but while everybody remembers Gene Kelly, I remember Mr. Guetary. Ooh la la, and how.

More musical goodbyes in 1997 include fond farewells to Laura Nyro, the influential pop singer-composer of the 60's and 70's who opted for early retirement, as well as jazz trumpeter Doc Cheatham, rhythm and blues queen Lavern Baker, jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, ace bebop guitarist Chuck Wayne, blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon and Arthur Prysock, a crooner in the Billy Eckstine tradition. Final bows were also taken by Mae Barnes and Thelma Carpenter, two nightclub entertainers who laid the bricks and mortar for what has now become known as the world of cabaret. New York will never be the same town after midnight without Beverly Peer, Bobby Short's bass player and a longtime fixture on the cafe society scene.

Impresario Rudolf Bing said goodbye to the Metropolitan Opera, real estate tycoon Harry Helmsley said ciao to Leona Helmsley, and Pamela Harriman bid an adieu to political friends and enemies in boudoirs and embassies everywhere. No more tournaments for golf pro Ben Hogan, a one-man profile in courage whose life in sports was immortalized in the biopic Follow the Sun , in 1951. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, herself a symbol of courage in the face of adversity, came to a tragic end that will be pondered by future generations. And it was one last sign-off for station identification for Charles Kuralt, as well as TV's first female news correspondent, Nancy Dickerson. If game shows ever make a welcome comeback to the wastelands of trashy television, they won't be the same without game-show host Dennis James, or George Fenneman, the longtime foil for Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life . I remember them well.

Nothing underwater will retain the sense of mystery and adventure now that Jacques Cousteau has hung out his snorkeling gear to dry. Acting techniques will lack drama without two of the theater's most influential teachers, Sanford Meisner and Actors Studio founder Robert (Bobby) Lewis. The art world will lack a certain luster without the cartoons of Roy Lichtenstein and the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning. My horoscope will seem flat without Jeane Dixon's astrology. Swedish films will lose their lyricism without director Bo ( Elvira Madigan ) Widerberg. George Solti conducted his last symphony. Maurice Levine left a gap in New York's cultural landscape and the "Lyrics and Lyricists" shows at the 92nd Street Y will never be the same without his guidance and passion for Broadway show tunes. Tamara Geva, the great ballerina and first wife of George Balanchine, and Alexandra Danilova both retired their toe shoes from the dance world. Brandon Tartikoff, the man who saved NBC, is desperately missed now that NBC needs saving all over again. And it was one last chapter for Harold Robbins, Emmy Award-winning journalist Marie Torre, author James Dickey, Beat poet laureate Allen Ginsberg, and respected writers Emily Hahn, Leo Rosten, Veronica Geng and William S. Burroughs. They should bronze the typewriter of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Murray Kempton. I'll never feel the same about the South Pacific now that James Michener is gone, and I left my heart in San Francisco with columnist and good friend Herb Caen.

Really, I ask, can 1998 be any worse? We've got a whole year to find out.