One of the first things I noticed about this entry was its running time. Weighing in at just on two hours it's considerably longer than other Mitchum films of the time, genre, and RKO titles in general, for example the follow-up teaming of Mitchum and Russell, Macao, the following year was much shorter as were Out Of The Past and The Big Steal. Fortunately it's not ALL flab but there's no hiding that Hughes shot it three times before achieving something he wanted to release. The result is a weird blend of two genres one anticipating My Favorite Year features a picture stealing Vincent Price as a blend of Errol Flynn and Jack Barrymore whilst the other is a bod- standard noir with spin in which Raymond Burr plays a Lucky Luciano type mafioso in exile who has eyes to get back to the States and hatches a plan that requires only a patsy of similar build, height, etc, from whom a plastic surgeon can graft the face onto Burr. Enter Mitchum's easy-come, easy-go gambler. Thow in the likes of Marjorie Reynolds, Charles McGraw, and Jane Russell and you have an elegant noir on your hands. Well worth a look.

The plot for this Robert Mitchum is an odd one. Dan (Mitchum) is a professional gambler whose life is suddenly a mess. It seems that someone is deliberately setting him up and making it impossible for him to accept a strangely vague assignment. Some gangsters (obviously the ones who sent him up) want him to go to a resort in Baja, Mexico and just wait...but for WHAT or WHO they won't tell him! Considering he doesn't have a lot of choice, Mitchum goes--where he meets all sort of oddballs--such as a woman pretending to be rich (Jane Russell), an obvious bit of muscle (Charles McGraw) and a hammy actor (Vincent Price). And, after being there for a while, he and the fake rich lady start to fall for each other...hard. So what's to become of this odd melange? See the film for yourself! "His Kind of Woman" is a great example of a film where the dialog is so snappy that the plot itself is secondary. Now this does NOT mean the plot is bad--the film is very well-written, as the WHAT and WHY turn out to be pretty interesting. But when Mitchum talks, he is the ultimate in 50s cool--with a wonderful world-weary style and sarcasm that sound, at times, like Bogart of the 1940s. In addition, his scenes with Russell are great--with a nice mixture of romance, sarcasm and heat! In addition, watch Price's character--he becomes VERY interesting as the film progresses. For lovers of Noir--or just a good film--this movie is well worth your time.By the way, if you've seen this film and "Key Largo", you'll probably see a lot of similarities. Now I am not saying that one film is a copy of the other or that it inspired the other--just that I saw some parallels.

Robert Mitchum shows up in Southern California, having just been released from the slams, and hasn't got a shoe to his foot. Some strangers show up and offer him ten grand to go on a mission to a Mexican resort where he will be given a lot more money. What is the mission? They won't say.So Mitchum, having nothing better to do, flies to the lodge on the ocean where a room is waiting for him. Nobody greets him. None of the other guests seem to know who he is or what he's doing there. The others are of diverse type -- seedy-looking guys with mustaches or dark glasses, Vincent Price as an egomaniacal actor putting moves on the nightclub canary he's squiring around, Jane Russell. Mitchum noses through them, asks questions, refuses drinks, does small favors, flirts with Russell. That's what he does for a full hour. That's ALL he does, while the plot stagnates and develops a severe case of pond scum.Finally he discovers that the mastermind behind his mysterious vacation is Raymond Burr, a deported gangster who wants -- somehow -- to take Mitchum's face and identity and make them his own, while disposing of what remains of the original Mitchum. That way, Burr will be able to sneak back across the border posing as somebody else.It's a LONG sucker too, and I found it nearly excruciating to sit through. I saw one second-unit shot of a beach somewhere. The rest was all shot on an RKO sound stage. The place is colorless. The art direction and set dressing is abominable. Nothing looks like Mexico. At best it looks like a failed attempt to duplicate somebody's sunken living room in the San Fernando Valley. If you must watch it, just for the hell of it, check out the paintings on the walls. I am no art snob but these are truly offensive. They fall into two categories. Some are bad paintings of sailing ships, straight off a motel room wall. The others look like something Juan Miro might have done on mushrooms.There are some tense moments towards the end, when Mitchum is beaten to a pulp aboard Burr's yacht and is about to be injected with a drug that will render him immediately unconscious and, when he wakes up, will have turned his brain to tofu. But this is undercut by Vincent Price's attempts at humor while trying to board the ship against the resistance of its hoodlum crew. While the film could use some comic moments, the suspenseful, action-filled climax isn't the place for them. Every dilatory slapstick gag associated with Price is an irritation because, only a few yards away, the scenes in which Mitchum is fighting for his life are treated in dead earnest.It's not worth much further comment. Mitchum walks sleepy-eyed through his part. Jane Russell has big knockers. Vincent Price was a much better narcissistic ham actor in "Theater of Blood." Two of the tunes are memorable: "Five Miles To San Berdoo," which is a variation of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," and the dance music played in the resort's night club, which is a shameless rip off of Gershwin's "The Lady Is A Tramp." It has a few virtues. One is that the photography is dark and menacing, very nicely done. (A beach scene fails completely.) Another is -- well, that's the only virtue I can think of. No -- wait! I thought of two more major cinematic breakthroughs! (1) When Tim Holt and Charles McGraw are listening to a report on a short-wave radio, the Morse Code is correct. "TOA" followed by a number, which Holt accurately interprets as "time of arrival." And the call sign of the station they're at is "XFO." Well, if it's a commercial land-based Mexican station, the call sign must consist of three letters and the first one must be "X". (2) Some brief but pleasing shots of two popular small airplanes of the post-war period: a V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza and a low-wing Ryan Navion. That's about it for the good parts.

Howard Hughes really should have stuck with his planes and Kleenex boxes and let the artists whose work he often produced be. The man was a businessman first and an artist second. In this movie he sells a light pointless product to '50s audiences, in what starts off as an intriguing though slightly contrived film noir. Robert Mitchum plays Dan Milner, the usual sleepy-eyed down-on-his-luck gambler, who is offered to have his debts paid by a $50,000 job down in a coastal Mexican resort by a deported American gangster hiding out in Italy. Of course he has to accept the job without questions for the plot to keep rolling on, and soon finds a love interest in Jane Russell's musical Lenore Brent. At the resort he meets an obnoxious stockbroker and Lenore's lover, movie star Mark Cardigan, who has recently made a trashy men-in-tights blockbuster and is too busy enjoying the hunting of local wildlife to notice the budding chemistry between Milner and his girlfriend.There are many great comedic moments in these scenes, but no real plot development. Milner confronts two suspicious noir characters in the supposed artist, but actual plastic surgeon, Krafft and thuggish Thompson. Both await the arrival of mobster Nick Ferraro, so they can graft relatively unconnected and unknown loner Milner's face onto him before sending him back into the states.The plot is quite ridiculous and a lot of time watching the film is waiting for something dramatic to happen. Meanwhile, Vincent Price's colourful thespian and Jim Backus' turn at bumbling broker Myron Winton are fun to watch, but the picture simply doesn't know what it is. Apparently the screenplay was being written while they were shooting the movie, the director was fired by Hughes and Robert J Wilke, who originally portrayed Nick Ferraro was replaced by Raymond Burr as the movie was in production. The tongue-in-cheek happy ending doesn't fit in what is supposed to be a film noir, and it feels as though it could have been a pretty decent entry in the genre if it wasn't for the meddling money behind the movie. Men like Howard Hughes' didn't understand the rules of the great genre and would rather have sold candy floss like this. Shame.