THE KIGGINS AND I WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER

Appeared in Vancouver Vector (Feb. 3, 2014)

 
When Robert Mitchum died July 1^st, 1997, my current wife and I were living in Spokane, Washington. After Mitchum’s death, I hurried to the Spokane library to find a Mitchum film. I wanted to experience the actor’s craggy, dimple-chinned, celluloid likeness one more time, to pretend, for a moment, he still lived and worked in Hollywood. The only Mitchum film on the shelves was “River Of No Return”, a western. Released in 1954, “River” came out a year before the original Kiggins closed its doors in Vancouver and I graduated high school in Dayton, Ohio and set off for a hitch in the Navy. Also, the Kiggins opened its doors in 1936, only one year before I was born more than half a continent away in Ohio. Our life lines have crossed from the beginning.

Mitchum made “River of No Return” with Marilyn Monroe and Rory Calhoun and a child actor named Tommy Rettig. Every Hollywood cliché and shallowness was packed into that film! It’s a spiritless, good guy versus bad guy contraption, two men fighting over a powerless woman, and not much to differentiate one from the other—some marauding “hostiles” thrown in for good measure. Mitchum, whose star was brightest, was designated the good guy. Rory Calhoun of lesser fame was cast as the bad guy. Monroe acted herself—a helpless female in need of Joe Dimaggio’s protection. Rettig was her child.

Otto Preminger directed the effort and fought with Monroe’s interfering acting coach and with Mitchum’s heavy drinking from start to finish. The acting of all three older actors was about as bad as they could do. Rettig, more stable than his older costars, immediately disappeared from studio films to become Lassie’s supporting actor, Jeff Miller, on TV from 1954-1957. He went on to become a software engineer who died in 1996 at age 54, only a year before Robert Mitchum passed away.

As I watched “River” again in 1997, the film revealed itself to be the sort of villain that seduced and ruined movie theaters like the Kiggins all across the nation in the 1950s. Theirs was a loveless match to begin with—a dying studio system’s formula film and a fading theater. Embarrassed by recollecting my early taste in films, I wondered what I’d seen, as a 17 year old, in Robert Mitchum. Other of his films are much better like "The Night of the Hunter".

The “River of No Return” was no different than your average formula film today. The major difference between a bad film in the 50s and a bad film today is that the special effects weren’t computerized in 1954 and the bad guys these days are rotting people rather than rotten characters, fairy tale ogres and demons, popular villains from comic books and animated fish while the good guys are little people, fairy tale spirits, comic book heroes, cartoon autos and toys…and animated fish.

Watching “River of No Return”, I was forced to remember why I’d grown tired of Hollywood films and what led me to seek out claustrophobic, seedy art houses and shadowy black and white foreign films in the 60s to take their place. I remembered, with a touch of bittersweet nostalgia, falling out of love with Doris Day next door only to fall head over heels in love with dames like the Kiggins in every gyp joint and fog-shrouded port on the Atlantic Coast from Key West, Florida to Nantucket, Massachusetts. I recalled why my heart pounded for the prostitutes who frequented the dark dives that lined the narrow, cobbled streets of Old San Juan in Puerto Rico where I was a lonely gob, and why my psyche chased Eurydice through the Carnival streets of Rio de Janeiro in Marcel Camus’s 1959 film, “Black Orpheus”.

Had I foresight, I’d have known from the first time I entered an art house and got my initial whiff of the exotic and smoky perfumes of ambiguity and ambivalence how my insatiable curiosity and my taste for something different guaranteed that the Kiggins and I were fated to meet and fall in love on the streets of Vancouver. It’s too late for passion now. The refurbished Kiggins, with a face lift and wearing new shades of lipstick and eye shadow, is a real vamp and seducer while my exterior resembles a faded shirt left overnight in the dryer. Still … if the physical attraction is missing, we can be soul mates. Can’t we?