Witty, pretty, slick and desperately all over the place, His Kind of Woman throws Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum together for an adventure down Mexico way. Starting out as noir, it goes into a strange, almost existential holding pattern for its curiously satisfying central section before eventually deciding on a comedy finish, helped along by Vincent Price’s amiable buffoonery.
Mitchum plays Dan Milner, a teetotal (clearly an industry joke) gambler on his uppers who’s persuaded by some heavies to go to Mexico and await further orders. In exchange Milner will have his debts wiped out and get a nice payout on top. What Milner doesn’t know is that he’s been chosen for the Mexico layover because he’s similar in build to Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr), a wanted gangster living in exile who wants to go back to the USA. Which he’ll be able to do once he’s stolen Milner’s face. Face/Off? Something like that, though it’s never quite spelled out (undoubtedly because the operation was impossible when this film came out in 1951).
All this unbeknown to Milner, who hangs around in this strange, otherworldly place – limbo, if you’re being metaphysical – populated by a curious group of people, most of whom are either on the run or pretending to be something they’re not. These include Price’s actor Mark Cardigan, a ham (another industry joke) of the first order. Martin Krafft (John Mylong), a writer who never seems to do any writing. Myron Winton (Jim Backus), a nosy midwestern salesman always vaguely pitching. Frightened blonde Jennie (Leslye Banning) and her new husband. Tough-guy Thompson (Charles McGraw, who also provides narrated voiceover). Shifty resort manager Jose Morro (Philip Van Zandt), a threat beneath the unctuous smile. And Russell’s Lenore Brent, who pitches herself as a member of the uber-rich class, something Milner doesn’t buy but doesn’t call her out on because… she looks like Jane Russell.
Both stars, in fact, look great, their outfits tailored to their physiques – his big and boxy to accentuate his upper body (and to conceal that Mitchum is not as bulky as Burr, who he’s meant to resemble physically), her dresses cut low to emphasise the same. (“Christians can have big breasts too,” Russell once shot back at a reporter who’d asked about how her faith sat with her bombshell image.)
Anyway, breasts or chests, Russell and Mitchum are great together, she wry, he terse, batting lines back and forth as if this were a screwball comedy. In a strange sort of way it is. Or maybe was. The film was shot, finished and ready to go when studio boss Howard Hughes decided it needed a few rewrites. Depending on who you believe, the film was either substantially or entirely reshot, this time with Richard Fleischer directing (John Farrow had originally been in the driving seat), with Hughes doing rewrites on the hoof. Some of it was then reshot again.
So a mess, an odd beast, though with a definite theme running through it of the authentic versus the phoney – no one is quite who they say they are, except maybe for Mark Cardigan, who really is a ham and keeps breaking into speeches from Shakespeare to prove it.
The looks are lovely, with the cinematography by Harry J Wild, whose lighting and attention to exposures makes this an exquisite watch, a film as if shot by Ansel Adams, master of the monochrome photograph.
There are dark things rumbling around in this movie, and big themes too. While it doesn’t really work, it is watchable right to the end, sometimes in a WTF way, which is better than no way at all.
His Kind of Woman – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
