John Mitchum on his relationship with Lee Van Cleef on and off the set of Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (1959):
Cindy [John's daughter] wasn't very old when she met Lee Van Cleef, who was then a heavy in Hollywood Westerns and crime dramas. Although the steely-eyed actor would go on to greater stardom as an anti-hero in For a Few Dollars More and other hard-boiled spaghetti Westerns, he was still struggling to make a reputation for himself. He had made his debut in the great film High Noon as one of the gunman who stalks Gary Cooper down the main street of town. I had worked with Lee on a 1955 cops-and-robbers thriller called The Big Combo (directed by Joseph H. Lewis) and we had become close friends.* Lee came to my house at lunch time to deliver our three-week-old baby girl her first complete toilette set: Brush, comb, mirror, powder and perfume. The tenderness he displayed stays with me much more powerfully than his screen image of filling cantankerous people full of holes. Lee, it could be said conservatively, had a drinking problem. On a sound stage in Hollywood, he took me into his dressing room and offered me a drink. I looked around and saw no bottle. Not to worry. From his flight bag, Lee took an elbow pad used to protect that vulnerable area in stunt falls. From its curved folds he extricated a beautiful silver flask molded to the same curvature of the pad. It was filled with vodka—but not for long.
Source: Them Ornery Mitchum Boys by John Mitchum (1989)
* Apparently John Mitchum couldn't recall that he worked with Lee on Guns, Girls and Gangsters and not The Big Combo (1955). Or won't admit it. I get it, though. The Big Combo is the better film by miles. Guns, Girls and Gangsters is basically an armored cars infomercial. (Jokes aside, I suppose he just had a bad ghost writer/copyeditor.)
