His Kind of Woman

A gambler named Dan Milner is made a strange offer: go to a resort in Mexico, wait there, collect fifty thousand dollars. Nobody will say why. At the hotel there is a woman called Lenore Brent, a film star named Mark Cardigan who believes he is a great hunter, and a steadily growing number of suspicious people. Behind it all is the deported gangster Nick Ferraro and his plan to get back into the country. John Farrow directs. Robert Mitchum plays Milner, Jane Russell plays Lenore, Vincent Price plays Cardigan and Raymond Burr plays Ferraro. What exists now is not one person's film. Howard Hughes, who owned RKO, disliked the finished picture and ordered extensive reshoots, directed uncredited by Richard Fleischer. The process dragged on for months, the budget went out of control, and Price's part swelled along the way. The result is a hybrid: noir for the first half, near parody for the second. Price quoting Shakespeare while attempting a rescue aboard a ship is the most remembered passage in it, and it belongs to no genre the film started in. Who it is for: viewers who like early fifties RKO noir and the Mitchum and Russell pairing. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone. This is two productions stitched together, and you can see the seam.