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| Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman. |
I almost missed it, and I'm really glad I didn't.
I refer here to the 1951 RKO release His Kind of Woman, featuring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Raymond Burr, Marjorie Reynolds, Jim Backus, and Tim Holt. It had been playing for months on the Criterion Channel before leaving on August 31, and were it not for a friend's offhand recommendation, I wouldn't have caught it.
It's probably the nuttiest film noir I've ever seen. Consider this: the final act is a variation on one of the hoariest situations in popular American cinema. In this scenario, two narrative strands are involved and linked by crosscutting. In one strand is an imperiled character; in the other is the person coming to the rescue. Think of the girl being tied to a railroad track and the dashing hero rushing to save her on a galloping stallion. Only here the person in peril is not some fair-haired damsel but beefy Robert Mitchum, who's being tortured, beaten, and threatened with the injection of a memory-erasing drug. And the rescuer, of all people, is Vincent Price—playing, appropriately enough, a hammy Hollywood actor—whose conveyance is not a handsome horse but a rowboat, which is filled, incidentally, with a ragtag band of Mexican police and hotel guests whom Price has commandeered to assist him. At one moment there's brutal, edge-of-the-seat action; in the next there's some of the silliest slapstick this side of the Marx Brothers. Quite the contrast.
The plot, I should mention, is noirish enough: A cynical gambler down on his luck, Mitchum is lured into a shady scheme hatched by deported gangster Raymond Burr, who wants to assume Mitchum's identity in order to get back into the States. The action unfolds mainly in a resort hotel in Baja California, where Mitchum spends most of his time trying to figure out what he's gotten himself into. That's when he's not being distracted by Jane Russell, a gold-digger who's passing herself off as a Boston-bred heiress. It could easily have been played straight and wound up as a routine crime picture. Luckily it became something else.
The movie had a wild production history. The director of record is John Farrow, but when his cut was rejected by studio head Howard Hughes, Richard Fleischer (uncredited) was brought aboard; he ended up reshooting much of the picture not once but twice, as actors were fired and new ones hired. Mishaps and production delays abounded. A fight scene got out of hand, causing injuries that shut down filming temporarily. Hughes was so obsessed with minutiae that at one point he ordered some floor tiles custom-made in Milan and flown to Hollywood for the reshoot of a two-minute scene—a move that reportedly cost more than the movie's original budget. A yacht in which Mitchum is held prisoner during the final act proved too big for any of the tanks at RKO, and a new one had to be constructed. And so on and so on.*
His Kind of Woman shouldn't have worked, but somehow, amazingly, it does. Hughes's madness paid off, resulting in one very entertaining picture. Film historian John Belton, in his book on Mitchum's acting career, called it "sublimely ridiculous." Yep, that says it.
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* I'm indebted to Mike Kemp, a fellow member of the "Classic Film Noir Lovers" Facebook group, for supplying these details in response to my post about the movie.
