Robert Mitchum’s Back in ‘Complete Charade’

You can tell the old, retired, slightly run-down gumshoe is back on the job. He offers his younger brother, an ex-cop, a pint of Levy’s Select Irish Whiskey to help out. “House brand,” he explains.

So it goes for Robert Mitchum in “Jake Spanner, Private Eye.” But his new movie, airing Nov. 15 on the USA Network, is not the “Farewell My Lovely” or “The Big Sleep” kind of classic Mitchum detective movie.

“This is a complete charade,” Mitchum says of this cable venture, which co-stars his brother, John, as the ex-cop; a son, Jim, as a cop, and Ernest Borgnine as retired mobster Sal (The Salami) Piccolo.

The film, he reports, includes one scene “with a bunch of naked girls around the pool. I think it’s all done very discreetly.”

Students of the cinema may consider “Spanner” close in spoof spirit to Mitchum’s “His Kind of Woman.” That 1951 epic makes one suspect that, during filming, the cast partook of strong drink and had fun.

“I don’t remember what it was all about,” Mitchum insists. He does recall the fun part. And that producer Howard Hughes made the cast film it twice, the idea being to make a good film a great one. That was no fun, he says.

Mitchum, whose more recent work includes the two ABC mega-miniseries, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War,” has a dry, sardonic sense of humor befitting a star who has logged 46 years in movies and TV movies.