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Monday 28 September 2009

quote

"We had never seen any creature like him on the screen before, but we had seen them down at the filling station, so we recognized Mitchum for what he was: jailhouse aristocracy-the best of the worst-a loser with a winner's heart. However often he fell, he would remain a "stand-up guy" we knew. He would never snitch off a friend, or pardon his failings with some lame excuse, or ver, ever change. That was the glory of jailhouse aristocrats: They could be killed, but they could not be defeated. The pity was, they rarely ever won."

Dave Hickey expliquant bien mieux que moi pourquoi j'aurais voulu etre Robert Mitchum. In "Mitchum Gets out Jail", in, Luc Sante/Melissa Holbrook Pierson Ed., Ok You Mugs-Writers on Movie Actors, Granta, 1988.

5 comments:

  1. Et puis, pour s'excuser d'une aussi longue absence, un second quote du grand Dave Hickey (sur lequel on reviendra vite, promis juré craché) - c'est sur un truc musical et exténuant d'élégance à propos de la mort de Chet Baker et c'est extrait de Air Guitar, Essays on art & Democracy, Art issues.Press, Los Angeles, 1997 (pour ceux qui auraient 20$ à investir dans un livre parfait d'un journaliste jamais traduit ici):

    "When a friend of John O'Hara's called to inform of Georges Gershwin's death, O'Hara responded appropriately, shouting into the phone: "I don't have to believe it if i don't want to!". Would that i could have been so willful. When Terry Allen called me in San Diego with the news that Chet Baker was dead, i just said, "Aw, shit!" and hung up. Because i believed it, and believing it, i sat there for a long time in that cool, shadowry room, looking out at the California morning. I stared at the blazing white stucco wall of the bungalow across the street. I gazed at the coco palm rising above the bungalow's dark green roof. Three chrome-green, renegade parrots had taken up residence among its dusty fronds. They squawked and flickered in the sunshine. Above and beyond the bungalow and the palm, the slate-grey pacific rose to the pale line of the horizon, and this vision of ordinary paradise seemed an appropriate, funereal vista for the ruined prince of West Coast cool."

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  2. dave hickey, c'est peut etre lui le roi du cool. il habite a Vegas, depuis que j'ai lu ses trucs, mon reve c'est de passer 15 jours la-bas et qu'il me fasse visiter la ville... ce serait un beau reportage tiens donc...

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  3. Mitchum répondant à Jane Greer dans La Griffe du Passé :

    - Is there any way to win?
    - There's a way to lose more slowly...

    comme le notait Vanity Fair dans son n° spécial Film Noir de 2007, Mitchum était dans ce film au sommet de son style "lethargic chic"

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  4. "Lethargic chic"... c'est irrésistible comme description. On cherchait une attitude pour se confronter à 2009-2010, j'ai l'impression qu'on vient de trouver...

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