“Alcohol, after all, is good for nothing except when you need a bullet removed from your behind.”
Best known for tough-guy roles in Westerns and noirs (Shane, Sudden Fear) and for his one-handed push-ups after winning the 1991 Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Jack Palance worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines and briefly as a boxer before entering the Army Air Forces in World War II. After studying drama at Stanford postwar, his big break came as Marlon Brando’s understudy in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). His first movie role was Panic in the Streets (1950). Palance was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his third movie, Sudden Fear (1952), as well as his fourth, Shane (1953). He became a fixture of action movies and Westerns over the next several years, also playing a Hollywood producer in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963, released in America as Contempt). Having achieved early success in television, winning a Best Actor Emmy in 1957 for a Playhouse 90 production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, he returned to the medium as his film career slowed. Palance’s tenure as host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1982–1986) put him back in demand as an actor, a resurgence that culminated with his third Oscar nomination and first win for a supporting role, in City Slickers (1991).
THEY SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE called it a night hours ago. The evening had begun, after all, with a brawl at a charity dinner set up by RKO’s publicists. (The dinner, that is, not the brawl.) Jack Palance and Robert Mitchum, currently in Mexico City filming Second Chance, were supposed to present the local chapter of Boys Town with a $5,000 donation on the studio’s behalf. That part of the event had gone just fine. But then some American college students showed up, and one of them, eager to see just how tough a guy Mitchum really was, challenged him on the way to the men’s room. Mitchum, of course, laid him out. When the kid’s friends decided to make a bigger issue of it, Palance and Mitchum were ushered out the back door—and taken (for some inexplicable reason) straight to a nightclub on the Reforma.
So began round two.
There’d been drinks at the dinner, of course, and more at the club. Mitchum’s wife, Dorothy, had tagged along, as had Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, a famous actor and director of Mexican cinema. The trouble began when a drunken general approached the group’s table. Palance and Mitchum would offer differing versions of exactly what happened next. Mitchum said the general hit Fernández in the head with the butt of a .45. Palance told Mitchum biographer Lee Server that the general tried to hug him (Palance)—and that he’d pushed him—and the general, being drunk, had fallen. However it actually happened, as Palance would note, “suddenly there was this big drama going on.”
However it actually happened, as Palance would note, “suddenly there was this big drama going on.” And by “drama,” he meant “machine guns.”
And by “drama,” he meant “machine guns.”
Two machine guns, courtesy of the general’s entourage. By the time bullets started to fly, Mitchum and Dorothy were already in the limousine. Palance was still inside—though not for long. He picked up a table, hurled it at one of the general’s men, then hurried through the kitchen, while Fernández, who apparently also had quite a temper and carried a pistol at all times, provided cover. Once Palance was out, Fernández followed. Mitchum said Fernández made it to the limousine and promptly collapsed—”a delayed knockout from the general’s strike.”
It was now time for Palance to disappear. The general, not surprisingly, had a nasty reputation (false arrests, torture), so Palance switched hotels, registered under an assumed name, and kept as low a profile as possible until RKO spread enough money around to make the problem go away.
“Of course, when I got back to the States,” Palance later said, “I found old Mitchum had taken all the credit for my rescue.”