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"The First of My Stories":
 | “AS ORNERY AS ANY STARS COULD BE – THE STORY OF THE MITCHUM BROTHERS – ROBERT AND JOHN”
Together, they were perhaps Hollywood’s toughest screen duo, dreamy – eyed, tough, fist punching Robert Mitchum, that we all knew from the 1950 and 1960 era, and his lesser known younger brother John Mitchum. We later found him popping up in all kinds of films, but together they carved a niche, in the history of the movies.
John Mitchum, followed his movie-star brother, Robert, to Hollywood, and became a character actor in scores of movies and hundreds of television shows. He appeared on screen in the 1950s as John Mallory, and under his own name after 1962. John had small parts in 80 feature films, including "Stalag 17," "Submarine Command," "Chisum," "Paint Your Wagon," "High Plains Drifter," "The Outlaw Josie Wales" and "Bandolero!" On TV, he appeared on about 800 shows, including "Gunsmoke," "Perry Mason," "Dragnet," "Batman," "The Twilight Zone," "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie." He also had several roles on "Riverboat" (as Pickalong) and "F Troop" (as Hoffenmueller).
John’s most memorable role was as Clint Eastwood's detective partner, Frank di Georgio, in "Dirty Harry", and its two sequels: "Magnum Force" and "The Enforcer."
However John, a singer, songwriter and poet, had a far more unusual show business distinction. He wrote and co-wrote the pieces on the only album John Wayne ever made: "America, Why I Love Her," a 1973 RCA recording of patriotic poetry, recitations that were re-released after Wayne's death in 1979. Actor Forrest Tucker, a close friend, came up with the idea for the album while he and John were on location shooting the Wayne western "Chisum."
Tucker was so moved by the poem, that he had Mitchum recite it for John Wayne. Halfway through the reading, Wayne had tears in his eyes, and agreed to Tucker's suggestion, that he record an album of Mitchum's patriotic poetry. The album, which earned Mitchum a Grammy nomination, in the best spoken word category, was released through Mitchum's Big John Records.
Mitchum suffered a major stroke after the unexpected death of 46-year-old brother Jack from a bleeding ulcer. While still in the intensive care unit, Mitchum asked his daughter, to do everything she could to get the album re-released, under the title: "America, Why I Love Her." Cindy Mitchum said, was her father's proudest career achievement.
John Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1919. His father died in an accident before he was born, and he spent part of his childhood on his uncle's farm in Delaware, with brother Robert, who was two years older. In 1930 they joined their mother, who had remarried, in New York City, where their sister, Annette, was dancing in a Broadway show.
In 1933, the two Mitchum brothers, 16-year-old Robert , and 14-year-old John, hitchhiked and rode the rails to California, where Annette was living in Long Beach. A 1936 graduate of Long Beach Polytechnic High School, John later followed his brother's lead and went to work at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. After being drafted into the Army in 1944, he was assigned to the 361st Harbour Craft Company in Florida, and later was stationed in Hawaii, where he was assigned to the ‘G.I. Chorus’.
Discharged in 1946, John Mitchum was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard a year later, when an agent asked him if he was an actor. When Mitchum said he wasn't, the agent said, "So, do you want to be one?" Mitchum was taken to a studio on Cahuenga Boulevard, where the director of a pioneer saga called "The Prairie", gave him a once-over, and cast him as the naive young man in love with the heroine. He appeared in a handful of films with brother Robert, including "The Lusty Men" in 1952, and the 1989 TV movie "Jake Spanner, Private Eye," in which both the Mitchums played brothers! John Mitchum later said he didn't mind being overshadowed by his screen-legend sibling, who died in 1997. "There's no jealousy," he told people, “I feel very definitely that my forte is as a character actor."
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Moving On:
 In his earlier years, John Mitchum sang with the Roger Wagner Chorale, and conducted youth groups for the Los Angeles Bureau of Music, which was later incorporated into the city's Cultural Affairs Department. He also recorded "Our Land, Our Heritage: Stories of America's Great Songs" with actor Dan Blocker (Hoss on "Bonanza"). On the album, again issued by RCA, John sang songs such as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The Erie Canal," while Dan Blocker narrated special material, that Mitchum had written, about each tune's origins.
John Mitchum is survived by his wife, Bonnie; daughters, Victoria Mitchum of Granada Hills, and Cindy Azbill of Santa Barbara; and together they gave him eight grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
From a background that reads like the films they appeared in, both became a tough part of what was the rough side of Hollywood, as they brushed shoulders with the famous. Stars like Gloria Grahame, William Boyd, John Banner, Edgar Montillion (Monty Woolley), William Conrad, Guy Madison, Charles McGraw, and countless others.
They were not the only ones in the family to enter the movies incidentally; Robert had a son in ‘Thunder Road’. The lead in this 1958 film was originally offered to Elvis Presley. When the stars Manager Colonel Tom Parker, turned it down, Robert Mitchum not only took the part himself, but wrote the films hit song called ‘Whippoorwill’. Robert Mitchum was a performer who never wanted to be a star, but who embodied such seemingly contradictory iconic roles as the intelligent loser, the apathetic rebel, and the sexy but fatalistic slob, who later stood out as one of the last working reminders of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Where did I research my story on the Mitchum duo? Well I picked up a little bargain in a local Charity shop that I donate all my unwanted books to. The book is called “Them ‘Ornery Mitchum Boys”, Written by John Mitchum, and published by ‘Creatures at Large Press’ in 1989 in the USA, and a snip of a bargain at 20 pence!
© Film Guy Ernest 2003
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The Ronald Grant Archive:
 | Film Guy Ernie outside Pinewood Studios. No it's not true, this is me outside a 'Pine-wood' shop,near The Victoria Centre, in Nottingham!
A PART OF BRITAIN’S CINEMA HERITAGE HAS AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE:
The Ronald Grant Archive and Cinema Museum, is based in the old workhouse in which Charlie Chaplin stayed as a young child. When you open the front door, its magic; the place is crammed with cinema memorabilia, room after room packed full of it. In showcases, on every wall, there's a display, like a stunning panel of acid-etched glass, chandeliers, popcorn cartons, cinema ashtrays, light fittings, wooden display frames from foyers of the late 1930s.
There are signs and notices everywhere, rooms filled with stacks of film, endless shelves of magazines, posters, pictures, books, metal token tickets, and about a million photographs it’s been estimated. Here is one man's lifetime obsession, and the result is spectacular. There are rolls of cinema moquette, squares of carpet, specially designed for particular cinema chains, in patterns to die for, ashtrays, decorated seat ends, stunning light fittings, scent sprays from the 1920s.
The Old Workhouse isn't big enough to display this staggering collection, or even to contain it. Only a fraction is on show and, worse, unless a proper home is found, Grant fears that the whole lot could one day, be out on the pavement,
Ronald Grant left school and got a job as an apprentice cinema projectionist. He was enchanted by the projectionist's room. This was the perfect time for a cinema obsessive to start accumulating.
In the 1950s, all the old cinemas were closing down. Memorabilia was available, and Grant was there to save it from the knacker's yard. His father's house in Aberdeen was soon bulging with it, by the time Grant was 21, and he was then running three small village cinemas, which was something of a struggle. He painfully regrets all the treasures that he's had to leave behind, that he's failed to pack into the flats, houses, lock-ups, warehouses, outhouses, and ever-larger buildings that he's rented.
He worked in various cinemas to support the collection, for one tricky period as manager of Cosmo 2 Cinema and the adjoining Palais Dance Hall, in Aberdeen, and in 1965 he came to London and worked for the British Film Institute in Dean Street, London. This placed him bang in the middle of the film business, and a collector's paradise. In the evenings he went round the dustbins looking for treasures, and found letters, photos, film publicity material. It was a battle against the dustbin men, so he recalls.
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Finding the Treasures:
 | The collection turned itself into a business. And an acquaintance who worked for a publisher asked for some pictures to illustrate a series of part-works, beginning with ‘The Story of Pop’. Grant found Elvis, Cliff Richard, Bill Haley and James Dean in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’.
Then came ‘The Story of Cinema’, and he found that every day he was sending out massive packages, and in return the cheques came flying in. One of the collection treasures is "The Renée Adorée Box", which he found in Covent Garden market, which is kept in one of the countless choc-a-block rooms in the Old Workhouse.
Adorée was a beautiful young actress who achieved international fame in MGM's 1925 First World War drama ‘The Big Parade’, and died at the age of 35 years due to tuberculosis. The box contains hundreds of extraordinary photos of her, signed cards from the wreaths at her funeral, from Joan Crawford, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, and even the receipt for her grave in the Hollywood Cemetery.
Exploring the box you delve into her life and death, in a coffin almost swamped with flowers. The collection then became a picture library of sorts, not a proper business, just a big collection that people were borrowing material from.
In 1979, Ronald Grant met Martin Humphries, who became his great friend and colleague, and Martin made sure the invoices went out, and together they did a lot of accumulating together. They formed a dual collecting team from 1982. Martin had a good administrative sense and realised that, with a bit of organisation, the "business" could be significantly improved.
It needed to be. It was about to be hugely enlarged. Grant called in on the cinema company he had first worked for, James F Donald's Aberdeen Picture Palaces. They had closed many cinemas down and were dismantling projectors for scrap. Everything else was stored in an old church - a mountain of treasures waiting to be destroyed
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The Future of the Collection:
 The place was an Aladdin's cave with light fittings, loudspeakers, chromium hand-rails, door handles, big colour portraits of stars, thousands of seats, every conceivable design, fabric, stills, frames, signs, notices, mahogany doors, even song slides from the cinema organ. It was so difficult to choose what to take and what to leave behind.
They packed it into two 40ft furniture vans and took it to Brixton. The owner thought he was a lunatic for spending money on all this stuff. Now they realised they had the nucleus of a museum, what was once an amateur obsessive collection, now seemed to be something of historical and social importance, so they formed the Cinema Museum Ltd, which now has charitable status.
The board of trustees and patrons include Ken Loach, Gerald Kaufman and John Schlesinger. The massive collection was stored in the Old Workhouse, with the picture archive, as a separate business, but since the arrival of the internet, and September 11th; its future looks terrifying.
With a band of helpers they became involved in the collection, sorting it, cataloguing it, wallowing in it, trying to store, organise and look after it. You could move things around ten lifetimes, and still never be finished, but without the obsession, there would be no collection. With today’s modern technology there are people not used to picking up the phone, they use the computer, while there's another generation who still prefer human contact, and ring the specialist collection because they know that by making a five-minute phone call, they will end up with the pictures they want.
This mother of all collections is not just about eccentricity, Ronald Grant’s desire is to share his fabulous collection with the outside world, and make it more accessible.
At this time Grant’s desire is to find the right place for his own entire museum, they want more than money, they want influential sponsors to help find a permanent home for the collection, such as a large old building in need of a tenant, and it doesn’t even have to be in London, because moving towards electronic delivery via the Internet, has liberated them from geographical constraints.
I met Ronald Grant some years ago, in fact, a small part of his collection contains many items I sold him in the late 1970s, when I broke up my own private collection, and we spent the day together here in Derbyshire. Ideally Grant would like to be involved with the museum's future, but most of all, he wants it to be given recognition and be looked after.
As he leaves the building each night, he set’s the alarm, the police station is close, but he has a horrible feeling - as if he is leaving a child all alone in the dark. This is Grant's baby. How can he bear to leave it?
He tries not to think about it, he’s often there till 4am; because there’s so much to do, and thousands of things to sort out, in fact there’s a whole bloody lifetime of the stuff! While he’s there he knows it's all secure, and sometimes he works all night, leaving just as everyone else arrives for work. Ronald Grant’s priceless collection needs safe haven. Right now it's folded up asleep, but until they find a proper building to house it properly, its future is uncertain. It will be a national tragedy if they don't succeed, because the contents may be lost forever……………….
Abridged version © Film Guy Ernie 2003
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'The Big Parade ' (1925)
 | * King Vidor’s masterly epic starred John Gilbert as an American soldier, and Renee Adoree as the French farm girl he falls in love with. It apparently did not start out as an epic, although it ended up as one. The film drew large crowds when it opened at The Astor Theatre in New York City. The ideal combination of these two stars found them teamed together in other films: “The Show”, “The Cossacks”, The Pagan”, and “La Boheme”, all from the same period. *
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Some Popular Entertainers:
 | Tennessee Ernie Ford
With his smooth bass voice and warm country charm, Ernest Jennings "Tennessee Ernie" Ford became one of the first country music stars to cross both musical and cultural boundaries to reach a truly national audience during the 1950s. Working as a disk jockey and radio performer in California after World War II, Ford came to the attention of Capitol Records, which signed him in 1949. A string of hits followed, most of them in the "country boogie" style he helped pioneer that married boogie-woogie rhythms with country music themes and instrumentation, including "The Shot Gun Boogie," "Anticipation Blues," and "I'm Hog-Tied Over You." He became a national figure when his recording of "Sixteen Tons" became both a country and pop hit in 1955. He starred in his own television programs between 1955 and 1961 and later recorded a number of highly successful gospel albums.
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He Was 'The King of the Cowboys':
 | Roy Rogers
Roy Rogers, with his horse, Trigger, came to prominence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, following closely in the footsteps of singing cowboy Gene Autry. Rogers' rise to stardom transformed the "singing cowboy" from an isolated phenomenon to a recognized movie genre, and his popular success, added to Autry's, brought screen stardom in turn to Tex Ritter, Jimmy Wakely, Monte Hale, Johnny Mack Brown, and others.
None of them attained the iconic status of Rogers or Autry, but all of them contributed to the mythology of the straight-shooting, clean-living hero who is also sensitive enough, in a folksy, regular-guy sort of way, to pick up a guitar and sing a song or two. The singing cowboy movie was--at least in retrospect--a natural phenomenon for the 1930s. The old West was only a generation or so removed from movie audiences, and the cowboy films or "B" Westerns (as opposed to the weightier Western as conceived by John Ford) spoke to the public's sense of nostalgia.
Then, too, the arrival of sound in the cinema created a demand for music and singing, which dovetailed neatly with the Rogers-style Westerns, set in an increasingly stylized world not unlike the fanciful Ruritanian villages of light opera, which created a perfect backdrop for good-looking, guitar-playing, singing heroes.
Unlike Gene Autry, Rogers didn't have a western background, but he did come from a rural environment.
Born Leonard Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio, he moved to California with his father, a migrant laborer, and worked as a fruit picker and truck driver, as well as singing with a variety of country groups. In the California of the 1930s, country music was influenced by Hollywood pop and by Western Swing, and Rogers (then using the name Dick Weston) was in groups with names like Uncle Tom Murray's Hollywood Hillbillies, the International Cowboys, and the O-Bar-O Cowboys.
In 1934, with Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer, he formed a group called the Pioneer Trio which, shortly after, changed its name to the Sons of the Pioneers. The Sons of the Pioneers was a harmony trio, more influenced by barbershop and contemporary jazz-flavored pop groups like the Modernaires than by any country music, but they had a unique sound and, in Nolan, the advantage of a brilliant songwriter ("Tumbling Tumbleweeds," "Cool Water").
They became an important influence on the country and western music that followed them. Rogers, in fact, is the only person to have been inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame twice--once as a solo performer, and once as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers.
Rogers broke into movies in the mid-1930s, playing bit parts in Westerns, first for Columbia Pictures and then for Republic, Autry's studio and the leading purveyor of "B" Westerns. His first starring role was in Under Western Stars (1938), and for the next five years, he and Autry shared stardom at Republic, with Autry still considered the screen's "King of the Cowboys." When Autry went into the Air Force during World War II, Republic threw all the weight of its publicity machine behind Rogers, and his career really took off. From 1943 through 1954, he was listed by a theater owners' poll as the top Western star in Hollywood.
In a genre characterized by stylization, Rogers was perhaps the most stylized of all, as evidenced in his colorful and distinctive outfits, designed by Nudie of Hollywood. Other cowboys had been associated with horses, from Tom Mix (Tony) to Autry (Champion), but no other cowboy had a horse as colorful and identifiable as Rogers' palomino, Trigger, billed as "the smartest horse in movies." Other cowboys had sidekicks, but none quite as colorful as Rogers's Gabby Hayes. Rogers inherited Autry's title of King of the Cowboys, and his wife, Dale Evans, whom he married in 1947, was dubbed the Queen of the West.
Rogers became a symbol of an idealized America in the spirit and style of Norman Rockwell's paintings. He represented the normality that Americans were seeking in the aftermath of the war years but, eventually, his films proved too tame for later postwar audiences. His on-screen romances, generally with Evans, were shy and chaste, and his action sequences had a low violence quotient; he would shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand, toss away his own, and subdue the baddie in a rousing but fair fist fight. To a generation that had seen the horrors of war, this was at first reassuring, then tame and corny, and Rogers' popularity waned, along with that of the "B" Western.
A shrewd businessman, Rogers took his talents to television, aiming his initial show at younger audiences whose parents, the cowboy's former fans, enthusiastically encouraged their children to enjoy the innocent myths that Rogers perpetrated. The Roy Rogers Show debuted in 1951 and continued with first-run episodes until 1957, retaining the familiar style of Rogers' big-screen image. It was all there: Roy and Dale on their ranch, the Double R Bar; sidekick Pat Brady (formerly with the Sons of the Pioneers, replacing Gabby Hayes); wonder horse Trigger and faithful dog Bullet; Dale's horse Buttermilk and Brady's jeep Nellybelle.
The show's theme song, "Happy Trails" (by Evans, a skilled songwriter), remains a national catchphrase. Rogers' popularity through the 1950s was international, and of his over 200 fan clubs the one in London, with over 50,000 members, was estimated to be the biggest such club for any performer, anywhere on earth.
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Roy Rogers and His Wife Dale Evans:
 | In 1962, Rogers and his wife co-hosted a variety program, The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show, but most of his time since the late 1950s was given over to building a substantial business empire that included ownership of a TV company, interests in thoroughbred horses, real estate, and rodeo, and his well-known Roy Rogers fast food chain.
In 1967, he opened the Roy Rogers museum in Apple Valley, California. The most noteworthy display, among other Rogers memorabilia, was Trigger himself, stuffed and mounted in a rearing posture.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Rogers made a singing comeback, recording solo and as a duet performer with Clint Black and others. Some said it was a publicity move to advertise his restaurant chains by reviving his image for a generation that didn't know who he was.
Whether or not this was so, his legacy remained strong, with even Bruce Willis's character in Die Hard (1988), for example, invoking Roy Rogers as his ideal of courage and decent values.
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Contributions and suggestions:
Do you have any stories, pictures, or other information to submit to my Web Site?
If you have you can e.mail me at BMBGAT@aol.com,
and if it's suitable, I shall be pleased to post it on this site................ |  |
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Oscar, the Phantom of the Cinema
The Rex Cinema, latterly a snooker club, in Motherwell's Windmillhill Street, was built in 1936. The building incorporated part of the New Century Theatre (pictured in 1903) and some of the Theatre's scenery remained within the new premises. Many theatres are thought to be haunted and the New Century was no exception. It was when the theatre became a cinema that the nickname for the ghost was coined - he became known as 'Oscar'.
He never revealed his reason for haunting the cinema, though some say that a man committed suicide by jumping from the balcony into the stalls (a tragedy actually documented for another Motherwell theatre, the Old Music Hall,which is related on another my links).
However, Oscar made the atmosphere sufficiently spooky that the theatre management couldn't retain usherettes. Oscar seems to have recognized his cue - he abandoned the building when it was turned into a snooker hall.
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