Robert Mitchum was one of the most charismatic stars of the 'classic Hollywood' era. His screen persona was the essence of cool: tough but vulnerable, accepting of his fate with languid charm and easy humour. His films have often been seen through the lens of film noir, but they had something else in common too: the characters he played in Out of the Past, The Big Steal, His Kind of Woman, Second Chance, Where Danger Lives, and Angel Face seemed irrevocably drawn to Mexico. Mitchum's sequence of films south of the border coincided with the advent of the 'golden age' of Mexico's own film industry, a new cinematic wave that drew on serious artistic influences from the muralists to Sergei Eisenstein, and that was led by director Emilio Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa whose 1943 film María Candelaria, starring former Hollywood siren Dolores del Río, had won a prize at Cannes. Under the Roosevelt administration's 'Good Neighbour' policy - a wartime effort to court fri...