MM24: Right Hand/Left Hand - The story of M-I-T-C-H-U-M feat. John Semley
Added 2024-06-12 11:00:08 +0000 UTCAh little lad, I see you listening to my podcast, would you like to hear the story of The Night of the Hunter and The Friends of Eddie Coyle? The story of good and evil? Of a psychotic preacher stalking the Depression-era South, killing women and menacing children? Of a pathetic broken down ex-con in 1970s Boston, who turns to snitching on his bank-robbing, arms-dealing “friends” to get out of a minor prison sentence? Hot dog you’re in a for two winners starring a legendary actor with a distinct and laconic style named: M-I-T-C-H-U-M. Oh and what’s that little lamb? It looked like they were goners, but Hesse and Will are joined by brother John Semley, who you may remember from last season’s episode on Clint Eastwood.
Comments
The story of right hand left hand is sampled in Surf N' Destroy by Hawaii Samurai which I recognized thanks to this episode! Wouldn't have found that movie otherwise
Lizard
2025-07-25 19:07:22 +0000 UTCI don't care how drunk you are, putting ketchup on a hotdog is real sicko behaviour
Jimmy McMillan
2024-07-22 01:35:41 +0000 UTCThere are tons of 50-something guys in the Boston area who look like they're 80.
John S
2024-06-27 17:38:33 +0000 UTCLove this episode. Unrelated but would love to hear tou do an episode on Jacob's Ladder.one day.
Tim Holland
2024-06-19 03:44:11 +0000 UTCIf you’ve not seen Nicholas Ray’s THE LUSTY MEN, it’s great— and it’s possible that Mitchum was never better. Fragile tough rodeo riders.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-06-14 16:44:30 +0000 UTCBondurant is supposed to stand in for the IRL Robert Mahue, no?
Rohmer Simpson
2024-06-14 16:37:58 +0000 UTCAmazing scene as well.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-06-14 16:36:17 +0000 UTCAll of Hesse's impressions were James Cagney until this one. And this was just sitting there waiting to be deployed!
THEKILLERWHALE
2024-06-14 16:06:24 +0000 UTCMitchum plays another murderin’ preacher in 5 CARD STUD, opposite Dean Martin. It’s not a great movie but it’s got some scenery chewers.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-06-14 14:57:29 +0000 UTCguys: $10k in 1930 is $200k today, $20/week in 1973 is literally like $150/week in today’s money and $1500 from 1973 is $10,000 all we have to do is invent a time machine and we can go back and live like kings!
Adam Foster
2024-06-14 13:45:17 +0000 UTC2 of my all time fav films, great episode.
Daniel Shea
2024-06-14 13:08:06 +0000 UTCAlways so happy when a Will and Hesse Movie Mindset ep drops 😍😍😍
Drew
2024-06-13 23:47:50 +0000 UTCI could go for a hotdog
bruce
2024-06-13 21:18:18 +0000 UTCFINALLY movies I care about! NOTH is the greatest movie ever made, and FOEC is one of my favorites. M T C H U M
Tony Millionaire
2024-06-13 18:40:33 +0000 UTCThe Mitchum impersonation is the best thing and should become a regular character in the Chapo Extended Universe
Jason Chapa
2024-06-13 13:56:19 +0000 UTCCharles Laughton costarred in “Witness for the Prosecution”(1957), alongside Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich. Still one of the best twist endings of any film I’ve seen.
Michael B. Jordan B. Peterson
2024-06-13 13:36:33 +0000 UTCOne of your best episodes Rewatched The Night of the Hunter after listening. Thanks.
Yeah but in my defense
2024-06-13 12:14:24 +0000 UTCI dont always love the movies on movie midnset but night of the hunter and sunset blvd are now my two favorites (and now personal fav) ive learned through the show, THANK YOU
Morgan
2024-06-13 11:42:16 +0000 UTCGreat episode
JLV90
2024-06-13 10:03:49 +0000 UTC1st sentence
A
2024-06-13 09:40:31 +0000 UTCWill brings up the Cohen Brothers alluding to this movie in True Grit visually but it also does so in the soundtrack. Not only is there a wonderful rendition of Leaning on the Everlasting Arms that plays over the credits but the tune is used as one of the main motifs in the score itself: https://youtu.be/c26hIle6lKY?si=iuCwocKJcIvkOZHf Edit: also similar shades of a headstrong and intelligent kid handling themselves well when they're way out of their depth.
Michael Talley
2024-06-13 05:40:49 +0000 UTCI love Night of the Hunter. If you like the screenplay I would highly recommend Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family, both by James Agee, the screenplay writer. ADDITIONALLY, Laughton apparently made a few direct homages to director D.W. Griffith not only through casting but through his squaring of some of the shots, that's what Leonard Maltin said in the bonus features DVD.
Matt James Rich
2024-06-13 04:48:41 +0000 UTCHow did I not realize that Harry Dean Stanton was in Two Lane Blacktop?!?! Gotta watch that again it’s been ages.
Evan Thomas Phillips
2024-06-13 03:18:39 +0000 UTC“Please little lad, won’t you look yonder and tell the court if that is the man that killed your mother?” John’s inability to answer reflects his conflicted feelings of guilt and identification with Powell as a father figure. The film emphasizes the parallels between Ben Harper and Powell and their symbolic collapse into each other in John’s mind. One of the most poignant moments occurs when Powell is finally dragged out of the barn and arrested. Instead of triumph or vengeance (as the mob of townspeople will later express), John feels grief-stricken and cries out, “Don’t!” He says this because all this has happened before: the staging of Powell’s capture repeats and mirrors the early scene when John witnesses Ben Harper being subdued, arrested, and hauled away, at which point John is prematurely initiated into the heroic role that forces him to take the place of his father. Then a replacement father arrives, and this one is even worse: it’s Powell, a crazy murderous weirdo who instantly gains total authority over John because the legal construct of marriage makes wives and children the property of husbands and fathers. Powell’s psychotic misogyny is merely the extreme version of the same model of masculinity that John’s community will expect him to identify with and perpetuate. With her sadistically folksy wisdom, Icey drills into Willa the community’s principles that women must consent to being objects exchanged in marriage and a man must rule in every home. This film depicts marriage as, at best, something you must joylessly endure as you’re used sexually by your husband, whom you cannot reject or divorce (“canning”), or at worst a process of psychological torture that ends with your murder (Bluebeard). When John flees, he is burdened with the totem representing his mother: Miss Jenny, a female doll stuffed with currency, the evidence of a crime. It is also the legacy his father bequeaths him (“When you grow up, that money’ll belong to you”). The community reveals its hypocrisy about its complicity in these perverse social relations when it turns into a lynch mob, also led by Icey, and projects its own guilt onto Powell, even though the townsfolk loaded the proverbial gun for him. In this context, the prosecutor's question to John really cannot be answered. John is at a crossroads in the last segment of the film; he’s a “a little thing” confronted with the dead-end prospect of growing up and becoming a man in a community that can barely suppress its guilty misogyny and love for mob violence (it’s no surprise Uncle Birdie’s bad conscience immediately assumes he will be blamed for Willa’s murder). No wonder, at the very moment of Powell’s arrest and John’s apparent triumph, John actually breaks down and tries to give him the doll (“Take it back! I don’t want it, Dad, it’s too much!”). This is a legacy he does not want to continue. With whom will he identify? All the failed father figures? His dead mother, whose meekness, insecurity, and lack of aggression left her fatally vulnerable and unable to protect her children? His incredibly tender Christmas gift to Lillian Gish reveals his choice: he gives his love and allegiance to her. John’s heroism is confirmed by his perceptive ability to reject an identification with patriarchal authority and instead align himself with Gish, who bests Mitchum’s Looney Tunes Terminator by being her own kind of perpetual motion machine that generates both compassion and a positive kind of aggression that protects little things. Surrounded by enemies (the demonic preacher, small town mobs, the ritualized exchange of women, the Depression), she’s created an alternate world where orphaned and abandoned children are taken in and treated as kin regardless of their patrilineage, where teenage girls are not punished for their rebellious desire, and where no patriarch presides over the household.
emalco
2024-06-13 02:53:33 +0000 UTCI love the little gag in Ellroy novels that Pete Bondurant keeps getting mistaken for Mitchum at the airport. Game recognize game.
drizzly_november
2024-06-13 00:15:05 +0000 UTCGUYYYYY LAAAFLEURRRR
Malaparte_Animal
2024-06-13 00:13:05 +0000 UTCGigachaddic vibrations
Malaparte_Animal
2024-06-13 00:12:16 +0000 UTCI cannot stress enough how fuckin gooood this entire season of MM is. Maximal contributions from all the guests + our beloved hosts rounding into top form before our very [slopspoiled] ears
Malaparte_Animal
2024-06-13 00:10:22 +0000 UTCHard not to see the kid and Mitchum’s character and not think of Bart and Sideshow Bob.
Drew
2024-06-12 23:38:29 +0000 UTCSam Shepard! RIP to a great one.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-06-12 23:22:36 +0000 UTCEXACTLY!
Watermane
2024-06-12 21:35:55 +0000 UTCSo disappointed no one on the panel is familiar with George Higgins’ work.
Ernest Ambrus
2024-06-12 21:19:25 +0000 UTCpass
buttface
2024-06-12 19:37:48 +0000 UTCLooking forward to this one. I saw a clip of Night of the Hunter in that show Sugar the other day and it looked cool as hell.
ZeeBee
2024-06-12 19:06:06 +0000 UTCCould you maybe mention the titles of the fucking movies between all that early 2010s hipster style venue advertising speech in the description? Thanks
dingbat44
2024-06-12 19:03:14 +0000 UTCFYI, the novel that "Friends Of Eddie Coyle" is based on is by the same author that wrote "Cogan's Trade", the basis for "Killing Them Softly". Peter Boyle's character is Brad Pitt's boss in KTS.
Bobby Lawn
2024-06-12 18:56:58 +0000 UTCYeah, The Town takes a lot from Eddie Coyle, like the shot of the hostage walking blindfolded into the sea. And in the Fenway heist, the gang bluffs that they've got the guards' families under the gun: "The Lindas want you to open this door!"
drizzly_november
2024-06-12 17:57:32 +0000 UTCFriends of Eddie Coyle is possibly the best Boston movie. Captures the seediness of the city in a way that the Departed never did and that I think the Town wanted to emulate
C D
2024-06-12 17:49:04 +0000 UTCMitchum? I hardly knew em
Marc Silverstein
2024-06-12 17:35:33 +0000 UTCBLOOD ON THE MOON is great young Mitchum. An RKO Noir Western directed by Robert Wise.
Jason Edmiston
2024-06-12 17:27:19 +0000 UTCThunder Road, the song and movie, are still fire. https://youtu.be/o1CYKDoYCIM?si=mt9yymSW3LU-16mP
Kenny Hedges
2024-06-12 16:28:32 +0000 UTCNight of the Hunter was such an amazing movie. It’s so surreal. It feels almost Lynchian.
Pancy Nelosi
2024-06-12 16:07:08 +0000 UTCThis sounds awesome!!!
Kevin Spicer
2024-06-12 15:57:37 +0000 UTCThis was the standout scene to me! I think it answers the question of why John didnt testify. At the end of the day a part of him still wanted a father figure, even if it was a crooked murder like Powell.
J T
2024-06-12 15:47:43 +0000 UTC"Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse." Genius.
THEKILLERWHALE
2024-06-12 15:42:55 +0000 UTCCouldn’t have picked two better films for Mitchum. Maybe Cape Fear would be the only other one you could swap in. And has there been a Bill Holden focused ep yet? There should be.
Zach H.
2024-06-12 15:42:20 +0000 UTChttps://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/773a673e-615a-4406-b6fd-3820d2ca3b94#Ejbi8mXV.copy
T
2024-06-12 14:59:11 +0000 UTCmovie mindset's at its best whenever will and hesse get to do old hollywood voices
Fingerless
2024-06-12 14:56:28 +0000 UTCCan I recommend White of the Eye (1987) Its fantastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_of_the_Eye
Bass Fishing '87
2024-06-12 14:55:04 +0000 UTCSpeaking of strange actor biographies, Alex Rocco was a real-life Boston gangster in the Winter Hill Gang who helped kick off a gang war and fled Boston after Leonard Nimoy coached him to lose his accent.
drizzly_november
2024-06-12 14:13:39 +0000 UTCBy coincidence I just watched the Night of the Hunter last weekend, and goddamn is Robert Mitchum a beast in that. It kind of makes me want to check the book to see how of the role was just Mitchum, because my impression is the real Harry Powell was just posing as a chaplain as a one-off. Either way it was neat to see where the other half of DeNiro’s take on Max Cady came from
Christopher Small
2024-06-12 14:11:21 +0000 UTCAre we not discussing the arrest scene in Night of The Hunter when John brings the dolly with the money to Mitchum shouting “take the money daddy, I don’t want it, it’s too much” while crying and hitting Mitchum with the doll, while the money spills everywhere?
Semi-Solid Snake
2024-06-12 13:53:23 +0000 UTCEddie coyle is the realest Boston crime movie because none of the characters actually live in Boston proper
A Gee Cook
2024-06-12 12:34:29 +0000 UTCNUMBAH FOUR, BOBBY ORR! What a future that kid's got.
drizzly_november
2024-06-12 12:16:04 +0000 UTC(and maybe it's the Catholicism speaking, but I've always taken John's refusal to testify as evidence that what happened is something he can't even say, and that even the audience hasn't seen the entirety of it, because it also can't be shown)
Michael S. Judge
2024-06-12 12:14:34 +0000 UTCI hate to get too obvious with the symbolism, but the collapse of any trust for adults in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, the realization that your "protectors" can be the most dangerous thing in your life, seems like a pretty obvious allegory for child molestation. You know Mitchum wants the kids for money and violence, but his disgust with adult sex and rabid determination to catch an 8-year-old boy pretty much reeks of pedophilia every time I see this thing
Michael S. Judge
2024-06-12 12:06:17 +0000 UTC🎵My, my, my, my Mitchum🎶
Robert Armstrong
2024-06-12 11:44:07 +0000 UTCBe the first be the best
George Lochinski
2024-06-12 11:13:58 +0000 UTC
