. . . .from two biographies for Robert Mitchum comes the following writing:

Deborah Kerr, Charles Laughton, David Lean, Laraine Day, John Huston - all have gone on record how much they admire him. I wonder wheather they aren't impressed because he's so aloof? Aren't people who can't be reached always the ones that intrigue you the most? Don't you find that especially when famous people run across someone who is not impressed with their fame, it's a very intriguing quality?
Back to Tobago.
Not for retakes of Fire Down Below, however, but for a new project called Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. The plot involves a nun, Sister Angela (played by Deborah Kerr), and a Marine, Corporal Allison, stranded on a South Pacific Island during World War II. Censorship problems had blocked previous attempts to bring it to the screen, but screenwriter John Lee Mahin and director John Huston were confident they could convey the bittersweet relationship without running into problems with moral policemen.
What eventually endows Robert Mitchum's performance with an unusual gentleness is Huston's direction, but it may be attributable to the actor's friendliness with Deborah Kerr. At their first meeting, she was somewhat apprehensive, greeting him with, "Good morning, Mr Mitchum. How are you?"
"Beaten to death by gorillas," the hung-over actor replied.
In recalling that exchange, Deborah Kerr said she was immediately prepared to like him. As they talked, she found him intelligent, sensitive and surprisingly gentle - the opposite of what she had been led to expect by his screen presence and the press. A camaraderie developed between them which lasted throughout this film and three more.
"within hours, we were sitting on the soft pink sand and I was listening to an extremely sensitive, a poetic, extraordinarily interesting man. Not just a vain actor concerned only with his role and his looks, but a perceptive, amusing person with a great gift for telling a story, and possessed of a completely unexpected vast fund of knowledge," she wrote of him in the introduction to Alvin Marill's Robert Mitchum on the Screen.
"Throughout the shooting of the movie, which was a trying, particularly rugged one, Bob was at all times patient, concerned, and completely professional, always in good humor, and always ready to make a joke when things became trying. . . . Here on this remote island in the Caribbean, I came to know and admire his facile acting. We discovered we could work together like a good doubles pair at tennis. His timing is always perfect and he makes the very difficult task of 'acting' seem as easy as falling off a log. . . . "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was a charming, touching, unusual story that could have verged on the tastless in less sensitive hands. . . . But Bob's wonderfully innocent bewilderment at his own predicament made the relationship between two human beings a most moving and gentle humorous happening."
Robert Mitchum's response to Deborah Kerr was and is, "The best, my favorite." He told the late Thomas Thompson, "She sure ain't the cool, unapproachable dame she makes out to be. She had had a wig shipped over from England to wear. It arrived late, sort of green, and she put it on and modeled it for me. She asked how I liked it, and I said, 'Well, it all depends. Are you a natural greenie?' She hit me and shouted, "You never even bothered to find out!' Later on, out of acute boredom, we decided to make a musical version of the picture, and she and I wrote great songs. One of them was to be sung by Deborah in her nun's drag, and it went, 'Since I met Father Dunne, it's a ball to be a nun, he's getting to be a habit with me.' Ah yes, life would be kind if I could live it with Deborah around."
Both Deborah Kerr and director John Huston became fervent Robert Mitchum booster.

Almost immediately, Robert Mitchum did a strange thing for a man who claimed to yearn for the seclusion of his Maryland farm. He boarded a plane for Sydney, Australia, his explanation being that director Fred Zinneman had offered him a part opposite Deborah Kerr and that he would go anywhere at any time for the privilege of "feeding lines" to this gifted actress. Once he made the extravagant claim that such an affinity existed between the two of them that she could play her part three thousand miles away in Switzerland and he could do his in Maryland and the result would be perfection.
Never has Mr. Mitchum been better in The S u n d o w n e r s. The ensemble playing of Kerr, Mitchum and Anderson captures a family feeling superbly and the range of emotion displayed by Mitchum equals Kerr's. Following The Sundowners, Mitchum completed two more films - The Grass is Greener again with Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons and Cary Grant - "This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny bits" - and Jack Webb's The Last Time I Saw Archie.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

. . . .and then there is the writing from the other book:

Robert Mitchum's agent had signed him to a two-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox. Although he believed his days of being forced to do this or that movie were over, the agreement with Fox turned out to have a couple of overlooked knots in it that effectively removed his power of veto. In London to shoot the interiors for Fire Down Below, he learned that he was about to start filming HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, with John Huston directing. Mitchum said the first thing he knew about it was when Huston's cinematographer, Oswald Morris, came by to measure him for a marine's uniform. The assignment was to turn out so splendidly and, on a personal level, so satisfyingly, that Mitchum would later claim that all he needed to know about the picture was that John Huston and Deborah Kerr were involved and he was there. But in fact the actor had a sizable if short-lived snit when he learned that Huston had first tried hard to get Marelon Brando for the role and that Heaven's three-month shoot, beginning a few weeks hence, would be done entirely in . . . Tobago. Nearly four months he had been down there, the sand was still coming out of his ears, and now he was getting on an airplane and going right back.
Deborah Kerr would get a dose of dengue and spent several days in the local hospital. but her most unrelieved agony was undoubtedly her wardrobe, the heavy nun's habit that had to be worn from dawn to dusk in the scorching tropical temperatures. "Talk about mad dogs and Englishmen," she gasped, scratching and sweating in the itchy costume. Mitchum claimed that two members of the crew wer employed entirely for the purpose of holding Deborah's skirts up between takes and "cooling her ass with a fan."
Laura Nightingale, a wardrobe girl on the film, described Mitchum's great sensitivity toward his costar to journalist Lloyd Shearer: Sensing that her feet were hurting from the sharp rocks she'd been standing on, "He just kneeled down, unlaced her white sneakers, removed them and messaged her feet. It was lovely and compassionate the way he did it. . . .Then he put her sneakers back on and said kind of brusquely to hide his tenderness, 'Gotta keep you alive for the next scene.' Then he walked away. Deborah was so touched she cried."
Deborah became Bob's great platonic love. He would speak of her ever after as his all-time favorite actress and the "only leading lady I didn't go to bed with" - an exaggeration in any case, but meant somehow as a compliment. When they met he had been expecting a prim Englishwoman like the rather frosty ladies she often played on screen, but Deborah turned out to be one of the boys. She was a rare delight, warm, wise, earthy. One time she was rowing a raft in open water during the tortoise-chasing scene, Huston costantly shouting, "Faster! Row faster!" The wooden oar split in half in her hands, and Deborah, in her damp nun's habit, screamed in fury, "Is that fucking fast enough?"
Bob, floating nearby, swallowed a gallon of saltwater laughing.
There is another spicy tid-bid I would like to write about but The Legion of Decency would rather that I make NO mention of it this late in the game.

Fred Zinnemann was at his zenith, the standard-bearer for mature, adult, big-budget filmmaking. His movies were the sort the tastemakers considered good entertainment and good for you, too, and his projects and associates were invarable award nominees and frequent winners. For The S u n d o w n e r s, Zinnemann cast Deborah Kerr as the loving, long-suffering wife (he had directed her to an Osca in Fom Here to Eternity) and Robert Mitchum as the bee-swilling, sheep-sheaing, irresponsible Paddy. Fred inneman had long hoped to work with him and had originally cast him opposite Deborah in Eternity, but Howard Hughes had refused a loan-out). Deborah's involvement convinced Bob to sign on, though it would mean flying to Australia with barely a day off after his Irish-location film completion. others hired for the film were Sir Peter ustinov as a comical remittance man, Glynis Johns as a saucy hotel keeper, Michael Anderson, Jr., as Sean, dina merrill as a station owner's wife, and a few native sons like Chips Rafferty taking supporting roles. The Carmody's racehorse was to be played by a well-known retired turf champion, Silver Shadow, and pulling the family cart would be a thirty-year-old named Sam, once awarded the title Most Handsome Milk Horse in a Sydney beauty contest.
Deborah Kerr, arriving with boyfriend Peter Viertel, the movie writer and novelist, renewed her respectful love affair with Robert Mitchum. "It was an honor to feed her lines," Bob said, "even in this godforsaken country."
Bob Mitchum's performance in The S u n d o w n e r s met with univerdal acclaim; it got five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Deborah Kerr, but mitchum, to many people's surprise, was not recognied by the Academy. however, he was named as Best actor by the venerable National Board of review in New york.
Although contactually entitled to top billing fo The sundowners, Mitchum ceded the position to Deboah Kerr at he request. "I told them byall means . . . and that they could design a twenty-four sheet of me bowing to her, I couldn't care less."
Mitchum remained in London to make The Grass is Greener for producer-director Stanley Donen. It was a Noel Cowad drawing room comedy about a high-born English couple and the restless wife's tentative fling with a rich Texas tourist. The all-star production had Mitchum working once again with Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons (his third go-round with each) and for the first time with Cary Grant, who took over when Rex Harrison withdew after the death of his wife, Kay Kendall.

Rex Harrison
Frank Sinatra
Ava Gardner

. . . re-print from another origin and location:
A LIFE IN MOVIES by Michael Powell
p.584

What can I say about Black Narcissus, but that we made it and that, like Gloucester's Bastard in King Lear, "there was good sport" in its making. It is a handsome picture, and in design and execution it had not often been surpassed. Giving the nuns off-white robes, or rather the colour of oatmeal, was an inspirattion. Their robes gave a key to the picture to which all other colours had to conform. The actresses had very little make-up, and what there was, unless they had weatherbeaten faces like Sister Philippa, was white and bloodless. This made the scenes where Sister Ruth confronts her Sister Superior with red lipstick, all the more shocking. It is the most erotic film that I have ever made. It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from the beginning to the end.
As predicted by Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron nearly stole the picture. Nearly . . . but not quite. Deborah is a modest lady, but she doesn't allow things like that to happen easily. She wrote to me some months later from Hollywood - she was working on a Clark Gable picture, The Hucksters - and said: "There is a new young actress in this picture, who is almost as big a menace to me as Sister Ruth. But not quite. Her name is Ava Gardner." Arthur Rank took a print of Black Narcissus with him to Hollywood and screened it for the moguls there.
"Gee!" they said. "Everybody should see this movie." Everybody did. Everybody has.
For after one good look at Black Narcissus, Louis B. Mayer had decided to send for his new star. But pronto !

Robert Taylor
Stewart Granger
James Mason
Van Johnson

. . . re-print from another origin and location: SPENCER TRACY - Pyramid Illustrated History Of The Movies by Romano Tozzi
p. 99, 100

A Guy Named Joe - 1943 starred a wonderful cast: Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, Van Johnson, Barry Nelson and Ward Bond.
Death figured largely in Spencer Tracy's next film, which paired him with Irene Dunne for the first and only time. The picture, directed by Victor Fleming, was an odd combination of romantic fantasy and aviation drama with a World War II background. MGM released the film as its 1943 Christmas attraction.

Although the critics had reservations about the film's merit, it found favor with audiences. A Guy Named Joe borrowed an idea from Topper and Here Comes Mr. Jordan, but played it for sentimental hokum rather than comedy. Tracy and Dunne are two pilots who are very much in love. They plan to marry, but Tracy is killed when his plane crashes into a Nazi carrier. He is allowed to return to earth unobserved by mortals, and helps the grief-stricken Dunne find happiness with another pilot - Van Johnson.

Mr. Johnson was a newcomer who soon became the idol of young movie fans. A Guy Named Joe did much to advance his career, but if it had not been for Tracy's intervention he might not have achieved stardom. After production started, Johnson was seriously injured in a motor accident. MGM decided to replace him and reshoot his scenes with another actor. Tracy insisted that they shoot around Johnson until he recovered and was able to return to work. Esther Williams, another future star being groomed by MGM, appeared briefly in A Guy Named Joe.

Tracy obviously enjoyed his cheerful "ghost" role, and was his usual likable self. His love scenes with Miss Dunne had a charming sincerity that made the picture seem better than it really was. A highlight was Dunne's singing of the tender old balled "I'll Get By (As Long As I Have You)." The title, incidentally, is figurative as there is no character in the movie named Joe.

Cary Grant