Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum

Robert Mitchum – aka ‘Mr Bad Taste’, ‘Trouble Himself’, ‘The Man with the Immoral Face’, ‘Daddy Bad’ – was the original Hollywood bad-boy and one of the greatest screen actors of the twentieth century. But his pre-fame life is cloaked in mystery, the truth hidden within conflicting tales of time spent as a Depression-era hobo, prizefighter, escaped felon – and secret poet.
Writer and broadcaster lloyd robson trailed the Eastern Seaboard in search of Mitchum, his poetry, America, a surrogate father, and how to be a man. Oh Dad! is the result – a boozy, drugfuelled attempt to define masculinity in the modern age and to match the standards set by the ultimate man and the personification of Film Noir, Robert Mitchum.
******************************** Writer and broadcaster Lloyd Robson spent three years in search of Robert Mitchum. The result is a book which falls between several stools. It is biography, travelogue, reflection on manhood and lloyd’s own drunken, gonzo journalistic search for the screen icon. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
Writer, broadcaster and poet Lloyd Robson has been hailed as ‘a national treasure’ by Niall Griffiths and ‘just not what people expect a poet to be’ by Peter Finch. Having never read any of his work before, I came to his latest book with few conscious expectations, but some considerable curiosity. Such openness is precisely what is needed to get the most out of this genre-defying doorstopper of a book, which offers a richly-textured blend of road stories, film criticism, life writing and personal musings on what it means to be a ‘real man’. And the writing is as multifaceted as the content. Seemingly bedevilled by a father who fails to appreciate his son’s ‘sissy’ sensitivity and poetic inclinations, Robson goes in search of a role model who can embrace both his father’s notion of ‘a man’s man’ and his own, more fluid idea of what it means to be a whole person in the modern world. Robert Mitchum emerges as his ideal – a man with a big, bad-boy image who also wrote poetry and somehow pulled off the mean trick of having an enduring and loving marriage whilst dallying with a fair few beauties. Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum is an account of Robson’s literal travels around America, visiting places of significance in Mitchum’s life and researching some of the best- and least-known stories about the actor; but it is also the story of the author’s and his hero’s metaphorical and psychological journeys through life. I imagine the book might appeal more to men than to women, but to call it a ‘man’s book’ would be as crass as the stereotypings Robson seeks to debunk. -- Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com