Robert Mitchum Movies

The American Film Institute ranked Robert Mitchum as the 23rd greatest male actor of all-time.
The American Film Institute ranked Robert Mitchum as the 23rd greatest male actor of all-time.

Want to know the best Robert Mitchum movies?  How about the worst Robert Mitchum movies?  Curious about Robert Mitchum’s box office grosses or which Robert Mitchum movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Robert Mitchum movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

The American Film Institute published their 50 Greatest Screen Legends in 1999. To qualify the performer had to have made their screen debut before 1950. The list presented the Top 25 actors and the Top 25 actresses of all time. One of my goals here on this website is to write a page on the 50 Greatest Screen Legends. With the publication of this page I am now exactly half way to my goal…..as I have done a page on 17 of the Greatest Actors and 8 of the Greatest Actresses. Which gets us to the subject of this page …..coming in at #23 on the Greatest Screen Legend Actors poll is Robert Mitchum.

Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) was an Oscar® nominated actor who appeared in 135 acting roles in movies and television between 1942 and 1997. He first gained fame appearing in the World War II movies, 1944’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe. In the late 1940s, early 1950s he appeared in some of the greatest film noir movies ever produced….1947’s Out of the Past, 1950’s Undercurrent and 1952’s Angel Face. Other high watermarks in his career included…1954’s River of No Return(Marilyn Monroe), 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, 1962’s Cape Fear, 1967’s El Dorado and 1973’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

His IMDb page shows 135 acting credits from 1942-1997. This page will rank 82 Robert Mitchum movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and movies that were not released in theaters were not included in the rankings.

Robert Mitchum in 1955's The Night of the Hunter
Robert Mitchum in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter

Robert Mitchum Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.

Robert Mitchum Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Robert Mitchum movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Robert Mitchum movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Robert Mitchum movies by yearly box office rank or trivia
  • Sort Robert Mitchum movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Robert Mitchum movie received.
  • Sort Robert Mitchum movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the search and sort buttons to make this a very interactive page.
Robert Mitchum appeared in 135 acting roles....he received only one acting nomination in his ENTIRE career....a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® nomination for The Story of G.I. Joe.
Robert Mitchum appeared in 135 acting roles….he received only one acting nomination in his ENTIRE career….a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® nomination for The Story of G.I. Joe.

Possibly Interesting Facts About Robert Mitchum

 

1. How he got to Hollywood. Robert Mitchum was born in Connecticut in 1917, moved to California in 1936, got a job working as a machine operator and was pushed by his sister to join the local theater guild.

2. As a machine operator he suffered a nervous breakdown that resulted in temporary blindness. To avoid stress he decided to try and become an extra in the movies. It was a decision that worked out very well indeed.

3. One producer did numerous screen tests on Robert Mitchum….and even after numerous tests the producer could not decide if Mitchum was the worst actor ever or one of the most natural actors ever. The screen tests and the extra work eventually led him to the low budget Hopalong Cassidy movie serials.

4. His first real break was getting a supporting part in a big budget high profile movie….. 1944’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. The next year he got an Oscar® nomination for The Story Of G.I. Joe as Best Supporting Actor. This would turn out to be his only role that got him a nomination for acting (that includes Emmy®, Tony® and Golden Globes®)….135 roles and 1 nomination.

5. Robert Mitchum was married one time in his life and that was to Dorothy Mitchum for 57 years. They had two sons….Christopher and James and one daughter Petrina.

6. In 1948 Robert Mitchum was arrested, convicted and served jail time on charges for possession of marijuana. At the time of his arrest it was assumed this would destroy his promising career…instead it seemed to back up his tough guy anti-hero persona…. his career only lasted another 49 years.

7. Roles Robert Mitchum turned down over his career…..George C. Scott’s role in Patton, Gene Hackman’s role in The French Connection, a role in The Wild Bunch, and the Tony Curtis part in The Defiant Ones.

8. Later in his career, he became the King of the mini-series as he starred in not one not two but three of the most popular mini-series ever….1983’s The Winds of War, 1985’s North and South and 1988’s War and Remembrance.

9. Robert Mitchum’s voice is considered to one of the most distinctive voices to ever be heard on movie screens. This very deep singing voice was recorded on numerous records over the years and has been heard in many of his movies.

10. Probably the best Robert Mitchum tribute site is The Ultimate Robert Mitchum Headquarters.  Every Mitchum fan should be checking out this website….as it is filled with many many awesome Mitchum links.

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

Check out Robert Mitchum’s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time

afi top 25 actorsAFI’s Top 25 Screen Legend Actors….with links to our movie pages on the Screen Legend

1.   Humphrey Bogart  58 Movies Ranked….from Casablanca (1942) to Swing Your Lady (1938)
2.   Cary Grant 58 Movies Ranked… from North by Northwest (1959) to Born To Be Bad (1934)
3.   James Stewart 73 Movies Ranked Mr. Smith Goes to Washington(1939) to Big Sleep(1978)
4.   Marlon Brando 37 Movies Ranked….from The Godfather (1972) to Christopher Columbus (1992)
5.   Fred Astaire 39 Movies Ranked The Towering Inferno (1974) to The Amazing Dobermans (1976)
6.   Henry Fonda 81 Movies Ranked… On Golden Pond (1981) to City on Fire (1979)
7.   Clark Gable 63 Movies Ranked….from Gone With The Wind (1939) to Parnell (1937)
8.   James Cagney 61 Movies Ranked….from Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) to Boy Meets Girl (1938)
9.   Spencer Tracy 53 Movies Ranked….from Boy’s Town (1938) to Up the River (1930)
10. Charles Chaplin 12 Movies Ranked….from The Kid (1921) to A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
11. Gary Cooper 67 Movies Ranked….from Sergeant York (1941) to Fighting Caravans (1931)
12. Gregory Peck 53 Movies Ranked To Kill a Mockingbird(1962) to Amazing Grace & Chuck(1987)
13. John Wayne 83 Movies Ranked….from True Grit (1969) to Brannigan (1975)
14. Laurence Olivier 48 Movies Ranked….from Rebecca (1940) to Inchon (1982)
15. Gene Kelly 40 Movies Ranked….from Anchors Aweigh (1945) to Viva Knievel! (1977)
16. Orson Welles 75 Movies Ranked….from Citizen Kane (1941) to Treasure Island (1972)
17. Kirk Douglas 71 Movies Ranked….from Spartacus (1960) to Diamonds (1999)
18. James Dean 3 Movies Ranked….from East of Eden (1955) to Giant (1956)
19. Burt Lancaster 67 Movies Ranked From Here to Eternity (1953) to Executive Action (1973)
20. Marx Brothers 18 Movies Ranked….from Horse Feathers (1932) to The Story of Mankind (1957)
21. Buster Keaton 28 Movies Ranked….from The Cameraman (1928) to The Intruder (1936)
22. Sidney Poitier 46 Movies Ranked….from In the Heat of the Night (1967) to Fast Forward (1985)
23. Robert Mitchum 83 Movies Ranked….from The Longest Day (1962) to Matilda (1978)
24. Edward G. Robinson 67 Movies Ranked 10 Commandments(1956) to BiggestBundleofAll(1968)
25. William Holden 66 Movies Ranked….from The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) to Ashanti (1979)

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101 thoughts on “Robert Mitchum Movies”

  1. 1 A film columnist once cynically observed that in Hollywood you couldn’t trust even your ‘friends’ and Jane Greer proved that this was a sweeping statement. Early in his film career Bob Mitchum had troubles with the Law so that it was apparently difficult for a time to encourage some actresses to co-star with him. However Jane who had worked with Mitch in Build my Gallows High [aka Out of the Past] stood by him and at a very crucial juncture agreed to be his leading lady in the film nor The Big Steal [1949]. For her loyalty in that respect alone I would have welcomed your video tribute to her but her interesting career in its own right merits recognition. NB WH tells us that Big Bob replaced Raft in the Big Steal.

    2 A superb 96% video presentation with lots of goodies – for example the POSTERS from You’re in the Navy Now, Billie. The Company She Keeps, The 1945 Dick Tracy, Against all Odds, Station West and Run for the Sun starring Jane and my own very favourite actor – sorry Mumbles, Duke and Chuck – Richard Widmark! I’ve said before on this site that I loved the tag line on the original posters for Run for the Sun. WIDMARK A TIGER OF A MAN IN A SAVAGE NEW ROLE!

    3 Some of your very best STILLS are in this one _
    (1) The opening very saucy one. I’m sure that Big Bob thought that with beauty like that on his side he didn’t need his other ‘friends’! Certainly one can believe her claim in your opening quote that Howard Hughes was obsessed with her. (2)Jane with Liz Scott in The Company She Keeps
    (3) They Won’t Believe Me – Jane with Robert Young and Susan Hayward.(4) A Greer profile would not be complete in my view without pictures of her and Mitch together and you have faithfully included 3 excellent ones from their two co-starring noirs Build my Gallows High and The Big Steal

    4 Once again you’ve stolen a march on the poor old snowed-under Work Horse but as is usually the case he has already covered his a** elsewhere to some extent as your Greer top 5 have all been given ratings on the Cogerson pages of her co-stars and Bruce’s 72% average for the 5 is not too far short of your own 75% average for the same 5. Anyway yours is a very atmospheric profile of a very sexy lady from an era of cinematic history which regretfully is long gone along with some of the greatest ever film noir male personas and their counterpart femme fatales.

    Reply

    1. STEVE

      My previous post is about your Jane Greer video and I’ve placed it on Mitchum’s page as Jane does not yet have a Cogerson page.

      Reply

      1. Thanks Bob, appreciate the review, rating, comment, info, trivia and comparison.

        Glad you enjoyed the video.

        I thought naughty Jane deserved some attention from us film buffs. And she was a memorable femme fatale in one of Hollywood’s great film noirs – Out of the Past (UK title Build My Gallows High, which was the name of the original novel).

        According to IMDB “She quickly married crooner Rudy Vallee after fleeing a possessed Howard Hughes, who kept her virtually a prisoner during her first few months. An enraged Hughes pressured her and ruined the marriage. She returned to Hughes and her contract.”

        Maybe Bruce can add her name to the request list.

        Btw have there been any sightings of el capitan or is the site still on autopilot? 🙂

        Only one Jane Greer film scores 10 out of 10 from my sources and you can guess which one it is. The others don’t get past 8.

        Reply

        1. STEVE

          1 I didn’t know Build my Gallows High was the original title for Out of the Past and thought it was the other way round but I find both alternatives very thought provoking. Anyway just to be sure maybe we’d better check with John in the matter. Remember how he chastised us when he thought we’d got Dick Powell’s Murder my Sweet and Farewell my Lovely the wrong way round! I think he kept after us on that one to almost the extent that he did over Crawford/Loy or the billing issue.

          2 The Work Horse has gone AWOL a lot lately and I am again worried that he might soon desert us altogether and delegate the site to knowledgeable people like you or Flora. In that respect as WH is someone of an academic himself the words of Matthew Arnold’s classic poem which I’ve posted before on this site keep recurring in my mind lately:

          The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
          Of quick inventive brain,
          Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,
          One summer-morn forsook
          His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,
          And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,
          And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
          But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

          Reply

          1. 🙂

            Haven’t seen John in a while either, was it something you said Bob? Or is the UMR going thru the summer doldrums? [wink]

            I was looking at the AFI list Bruce posted on this page, the Top 25 Actors, the only actor I haven’t done a video on from there is Sidney Poitier, who along with Kirk Douglas is still with us. Poitier should be on my next batch of actors after I’ve completed this latest round of classic Hollywood actresses.

          2. Hey Bob….good breakdown on Steve’s Jane Greer video. Sorry it took Mitchum’s 100th birthday to see this comment you made in June. Good story of how she was so supportive of Mitchum after his troubles. Good stuff as always.

    1. Hey Jane….no problem….your site is without a doubt one of the best Mitchum websites out there….hope my link gets you some traffic. Job well done.

      Reply

  3. 1 I don’t see any ‘conflict of interest’ in placing on Cogerson my comments about Steve’s videos (and certainly meant no disrespect to anyone) because as I have explained previously the videos plus Bruce’s updates are giving me the opportunity to compensate for my past missed opportunities to make comments on Cogerson.

    2 Accordingly if I placed the video comments on another site I would want to copy to, or duplicate on, Cogerson a lot of what I am saying to Steve which does anyway often draw on Bruce’s stats to illustrate certain points.

    3 Also since Bruce and Steve operate from different concepts I do not see them as competitors but rather as complimenting each other and even where they have varying views on a movie’s rating or a star’s impact I regard that as giving their readers/viewers a choice of informed opinion which makes everything more interesting and is very healthy It would be a dull old world if everybody liked Chuck Heston and nobody liked Willis or Widmark !!

    Reply

    1. Well said Bob. And replying to your comments here gives me even more excuses to criticize Bruce’s rankings… it’s a sort of hobby of mine… I’m kidding Bruce!! I love your charts, especially when they mesh with mine. 😉

      p.s. now there’s a word you don’t see very often these days – ‘mesh’. I want to revive that word in everyday usage.

      Reply

  4. 1 “Robert Mitchum crept up on us,” said Katharine Hepburn meaning that initially they were not impressed by Bob’s acting but gradually revised their opinion upward.

    2 I consider that in his prime Mitchum’s career had 3 stages. The first was in the forties when as often as not he was really a supporting actor, and the third was from about 1954 when he was the star of big budget pictures like Heaven Knows Mr Allison, River of No Return and The Sundowners.

    3 The middle phase was from 1949 until 1953 and was the one I personally prefer when he was at his better best and well suited to the series of modest black and white Film Noir/crime dramas that he made for Howard Hughes’ RKO: The Big Steal, My Forbidden Past, His Kind of Woman, Macao, Where Danger Lives and The Racket. I think that in those days Big Bob was at his most iconic.

    4 Your main selections are from the 1954 onward period and most moviegoers would probably agree with you, but I’m pleased that you have included 5 of the movies from my own preferred period.

    5 The surprise inclusion is the 1991 Cape Fear as I always thought that having him and Greg reprise their roles in that remake was a gimmick and they didn’t have much to do in what were cameos. However you redeemed yourself by including the marvellous Peck/Mitchum 1962 version which along with Not as a Stranger was my fave Mitch film outside Bob’s Film Noir pics – and the latter film is the surprise OMISSION.

    6. “In 1966 Howard Hawks invited me onto the set of his filming of El Dorado and as Duke
    Wayne and my brother Bob walked side by side down the street and towards the cameras I had the impression that 3 men and not just 2 were coming towards me.” – John Mitchum. What massive screen presence the camera always captured in those two Greats ! and of course the Mitchum powerhouse further heightened the iconic impact of your usual fine range of poster reproductions.

    Reply

    1. I was watching El Dorado just a few days ago, one of my favorites. A reviewer at IMDB says about the film “….it is one of the most emotionally satisfying films I can remember. I weep in the closing moments every time I see it because I realise that I am about to lose these wonderful, wonderful characters who have transported me into a kind of heaven for the past two hours.”

      Thanks for checking out my Mitchum video, I can’t even remember doing a Mitchum video that’s how bad my memory is. Sorry I omitted a favorite of yours I had to select 30 out of about 80 and some good films have fallen by the wayside. Bruce lists all the noteworthy movies from the filmography on his page, I have to be more selective. Btw Not as a Stranger is 51st on the critics chart on this page.

      Reply

      1. ps. I wasn’t going to include the remake of Cape Fear but since the original was up there I thought why not compare the ratings on the two films.

        Reply

          1. I hope you don’t mind Bob posting his comments here Bruce. Posting comments on my video channel can be hit and miss as you know. And we can always compare our ratings here.

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