Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert Read Online Free PDF Page B

Screw that cop and the boat that brought him."
    "Now we gotta go back through the tunnel," Tim said. "I'm upset. I am really upset."
    On the other side of the tunnel, Tim pulled over next to a state highway department parking lot and backed into it down the exit ramp. A state employee came slowly out of a shed, wiping his hands on a rag and watching Tim's unorthodox entry.
    "Ask that guy," Mitchum said. "Offer him a certain amount to lead us there with a snowplow."
    Tim got out and got some instructions from the state employee. The instructions required a great deal of pointing and arm waving, and their essence seemed to be: Go back that way.
    Tim tried it again, back through the tunnel, across the bridge, down the overpass to a red light where a police squad car was stopped in front of the Mercury. Mitchum jumped out of the car and hurried up to the squad for instructions. He got back just as the light turned green.
    "You'll see a sign up here that says Blaunox," he said. "That's what we need. Blaunox."
    "I'm out of gas," Tim said.
    "I got a letter from John Brison today," Mitchum said. "John's in Dingle, in Ireland. Where we shot Ryan's Daughter."
    "I am really upset," Tim said.
    "According to John," Mitchum said, "they've formed a Robert Mitchum Fan Club in Dingle. The membership is largely composed of unwed mothers and their brothers."
    "Where the hell are we?" said Tim.
    "That's what happens when you shoot on location," Mitchum said. "It's nothing but a pain in the ass."
    He began to whistle "Seventy-six Trombones" again, softly, but not too softly.

     

JULY 9, 1997
    11 week people have been asking me who I liked better Jimmy Stewart or Robert Mitchum. I wouldn't play the game. They were both one of a kind. Each had a style, a grace, a bearing, a voice, a face, a walk, that was unmistakable and irreplaceable. To be forced to choose between them simply because of the unhappy coincidence of their deaths is meaningless. Who would you choose: John Wayne, or Jimmy Cagney? Bette Davis, or Marilyn Monroe. See what I mean?
    And yet, when the obituaries had been written and the tributes had been televised and the AMC cable channel had devoted one day to Mitch's movies and the next day to Jimmy's, I confess I felt a certain sadness that Mitchum's death was to some degree overshadowed by Stewart's. Here's how I read the general reaction: When Mitch died, we lost a legendary old movie star. When Jimmy died, we lost a national treasure. Both of these "opinions" are of course judgments made in an instant by newspeople who-let's face it-may not have ever seen most of the films either man made. In the last week I've been amazed at how many people knew who they were but had forgotten, or never knew, what they'd done.
    "What was his best movie?" people have asked me. With Mitchum, I answered Night of the Hunter, or maybe Out of the Past. With Stewart, I answered firmly: Vertigo. And then I paused for a reaction, and got none. They hadn't seen any of them.
    The one movie they'd all seen was It's a Wonderful Life, which on Christmas Eve seems to play on every channel not solely devoted to selling zirconium necklaces. James Stewart, in that one film, passed beyond the kind of fame you get as a movie star, and became a kind of cultural icon, a saint of our secular church. For Stewart to die was for George Bailey to die, and the ending of the film provided the perfect curtain for his life: one more star in heaven, and one more angel. In her words at Stewart's memorial service, his daughter, Dr. Kelly Harcourt, evoked the character and the film by calling him "the richest man in town."

    That was the James Stewart that the news shows and the newspaper editorials eulogized-the actor who appeared in a movie that has become one of the few things we all seem to share in our fragmented society.
    He also appeared in darker and more difficult roles, including above all Vertigo but also Rope, Winchester 73, Rear Window, Anatomy of a Murder, and The