“I never take any notice of reviews - unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now." – Robert Mitchum

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

If one assembled a list of the most iconic actors of the film noir genre, Robert Mitchum would surely rank at the top of the list. With his deadpan façade and slow, monotone verbal delivery, Mitchum encapsulated the disillusioned hero of the postwar crime genre. In many of his most famous movies from the postwar era, including Out of the Past (1947) and Angel Face (1952), Mitchum plays anti-heroes who are victims of circumstance, but even as he is placed in situations beyond his control, he maintains a cool, if dispassionate countenance. Mitchum was, in short, neither a hero nor a villain but someone who seemed to defy the often-simplistic distinctions between protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain