Mitchum gets his first big clue from France Nuyen, the beautiful nurse with a sense of integrity. The film tips its hand pretty early in suggesting that Wynn may be capital letter CRAZY. Even worse, Wynn's character is a racist. The question may be, is Wynn crazy because he's a racist, or a racist because he's crazy? One could also view Man in the Middle as a kind of companion piece to Crossfire, with Mitchum also taking on the Robert Young role. In the older film, Robert Mitchum could not possibly have been the murderer of the Jewish soldier, primarily because he's Robert Mitchum and too damn cool. In Man in the Middle, it is axiomatic that Mitchum will prevail without much sweat. Considering the literary source, a novel by Howard Fast, with a screenplay by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse, there is little of the tension between loyalty and idealism that another actor might have conveyed.

Marlon Brando had the film rights before changing his mind about being in the film. Might Mitchum have done Man in the Middle to dispel rumors of his own rumored racism that dogged him following his rejection of the starring role in The Defiant Ones? Man in the Middle is less incisive than it might have been. What remains is a gallery of effective supporting actors including Trevor Howard, Sam Wanamaker and Barry Sullivan to help make the film watchable if not overly meaningful.

Mitchum limps again in El Dorado. Server writes about how the original film was to be more serious until Howard Hawks and John Wayne pushed screenwriter Leigh Brackett to duplicate Rio Bravo as much as possible. By the time he made El Dorado, Mitchum's own aversion to acting became more pronounced. Second billed to John Wayne, Mitchum appears in half of the film. Mitchum's character is named J.P. Harrah, but the film is mostly Howard Hawks' last hurrah, one last attempt to reclaim commercial viability after that failures of Man's Favorite Sport? and Red Line 7000. I had forgotten that Hawks redoes the ending of El Dorado with his final image of John Wayne limping into the fadeout of Rio Lobo. I know there are some who love El Dorado. Too often, I got the feeling that Rio Bravo was a river that should have been best visited once.