Monday, January 14, 2019

James Stewart vs. Robert Mitchum

Tonight at 8:00 PM, TCM is running a documentary that I hadn't heard of before: James Stewart, Robert Mitchum: The Two Faces of America.

James Stewart and Robert Mitchum died one day apart in July 1997, and they made one movie together, the 1970s version of The Big Sleep. According to the synopses of the documentary I've read, the man who made it claims that the different images of the two actors: Stewart as the all-American good guy and Mitchum as the bad-boy image of traditional masculinity (at least, those are my impressions of the two actors' images; I of course haven't seen the documentary) are a metaphor for the two faces of America.

I was wondering if the documentary was being distributed by the same people who distributed the Frankenstein documentary that TCM ran back in October. A brief internet search brings up this site distributing it; a search doesn't bring up the Frankenstein documentary from last October.

The rest of the night's TCM lineup is a mix of Stewart and Mitchum films, not including The Big Sleep.

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