After his incendiary performance as killer Max Cady in J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962), Robert Mitchum lapsed into a busy but artistically fallow period, during which the laconic actor's career choices were notable more for the roles he turned down than those that he accepted. After refusing the Tony Curtis and Clark Gable parts in The Defiant Ones (1958) and The Misfits (1961), respectively, Mitchum similarly passed on The Wild Bunch (1969), Patton (1970) and The French Connection (1971) so that he could be free to star in Two for the Seesaw (1962), The Winston Affair (1963), and Five Card Stud (1968). He briefly considered retiring in 1968 and spent the better part of a year at ease, visiting friends, only to return for a plum role in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), for which many critics considered him miscast. It would not be until he signed on (begrudgingly, of course) as the star of Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) that Mitchum would be matched with a project worthy of his talents, capping a bizarre ten-year sidebar particularized by an agonized affair with actress Shirley MacLaine and wry cameo appearances in such star-studded fare as The Longest Day (1962), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) and What a Way to Go! (1964), in which he subbed for a prohibitively expensive Frank Sinatra.

During this time, Mitchum also agreed to play an American trapper tracking a rare tiger-leopard hybrid in the Malaya-set melodrama Rampage (1963), opposing veteran hunter Jack Hawkins for the love of gimlet-eyed orphan Elsa Martinelli and hanging his binocular case on the rounded shoulders of an aging Sabu. A Warner Brothers release directed by former film noir specialist Phil Karlson, Rampage was adapted from a 1961 novel by Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe, a former British intelligence officer who saw action in North Africa during World War II and escaped execution in an Italian concentration camp. After stints as a big game hunter and actor, Lyle-Smythe penned a series of adventure novels based on his experiences, signing most of them as "Alan Caillou" (his professional surname derived from his wartime alias) and later emigrated to Hollywood, where he wrote for such weekly series as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Rat Patrol, wrote such features as Village of the Giants (1965) and The Losers (1970), and turned up in character parts in such films as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

In later years, Robert Mitchum would dismiss Rampage as "a lot of dancing girls, banjo playing and bull." In his own memoirs, Anything for a Quiet Life, costar Jack Hawkins recalled that a bored but playful Mitchum enjoyed antagonizing cast and crew alike by pretending time and again to lose his shooting script. Mitchum otherwise enjoyed the paid vacation to Hawaii, where exteriors were shot (and where he trucked his entire family during a period of reconciliation with wife Dorothy). Stateside, Mitchum maintained his characteristically unflappable game face for endless process shots filmed against rear projection screens and within soundstage caverns studded with polystyrene boulders. Happily, a disinterested Mitchum is never an uninteresting Mitchum and the actor brings his unique admixture of drowsy indomitability to conversation scenes set aboard steamships and locomotives before a tense climax set on the streets and rooftops of Munich. Kicking it up a notch is a fine score by Elmer Bernstein, punctuated by a catchy title song composed by Bernstein and Mack David.

A career blip for Robert Mitchum, Rampage marked the penultimate feature film appearance of East Indian actor Sabu (born Selar Shaik Sabu in Mysore, Karapur, in 1924). The puckish teenaged star of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Jungle Book (1942) and Cobra Woman (1944) became a US citizen in 1944 and served the American war effort during the Second World War as an Air Force bellygunner but found diminished career opportunities during peacetime. In England, Sabu added value to Powell and Pressburger's exquisite Himalayan melodrama Black Narcissus (1947) and kicked around the Continent for ten years with only a handful of feature film assignments to show for his efforts. In December 1963, only two months after Rampage's American premiere, the 38 year-old actor died of a sudden heart attack at his Chatsworth, California home. His final film, Disney's A Tiger Walks (1964), was released posthumously.

Producer: William Fadiman
Director: Phil Karlson
Screenplay: Robert I. Holt, Marguerite Roberts (screenplay); Alan Caillou (novel); Jerome Bixby (screen story, uncredited)
Cinematography: Harold Lipstein
Art Direction: Herman Blumenthal
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Film Editing: Gene Milford
Cast: Robert Mitchum (Harry Stanton), Elsa Martinelli (Anna), Jack Hawkins (Otto Abbot), Sabu (Talib), Cely Carillo (Chep), Émile Genest (Schelling), Stefan Schnabel (Sakai Chief), David Cadiente (Baka).
C-98m.

by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:
Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" by Lee Server (St. Martin's Griffin, 2002)
Mitchum: In His Own Words by Jerry Roberts (Limelight Editions, 2002)
Robert Mitchum on the Screen by Alvin H. Marill, (A. S. Barnes, 1978)
Robert Mitchum by David Dowling (W. H. Allen, 1985)
Alan Caillou obituary, Variety, October 3, 2006
Interview with Alan Caillou, Starlog, March 1998