Howard Hughes bought RKO and its stable of stars in the late forties. Hughes looked at his properties and decided that he would couple his two most impressive sex symbols, Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in a tough low-budget film noir. A reliable crime thriller director, John Farrow, was engaged to shoot the movie. Hughes began publicity right away -- he posted billboards around LA showing Mitchum and Russell in an embrace with fireworks bursting behind them. The name of the picture was His Kind of Woman. Hughes mental health was deteriorating at this time and he interfered in the production of the film. Unsatisfied with a rough cut, he decided that the movie's ending needed more bloodshed and sadism, more "oomph" as it were. So Hughes fired Farrow and brought on Richard Fleischer to re-shoot the ending. This was supposed to take about two or three weeks. But Hughes was unsatisfied with initial efforts and began to expand radically the scope of the climax, adding a yacht and various gun battles and torture scenes. The heavy, initially played by Lee van Cleef, was replaced by a standard issue villain with a pedigree in B westerns and, then, finally, by Raymond Burr. The scenes involving the bad guy were re-shot three times with the three actors before finally being approved by Hughes. The three-week re-shoot became a one year ordeal that ended only when Mitchum went berserk on the set and drunkenly smashed it to pieces. The resulting film, finally released in 1951, is long, uneven, and fantastically entertaining.
In a prologue, the film's viewer learns that Ferrara, a mob boss, has been deported to Sorrento but yearns to return to his rackets in the good old USA. With a sinister ex-Nazi surgeon, Ferrara hatches the plan of kidnapping Robert Mitchum, a man who is about his height and weight, and, then, engineering some kind "face-swap" -- mercifully, the full details of the "face-swap" are never exactly explained. Using Mitchum's face, Ferrara plans to return to the US, discarding the faceless, one supposes, corpse of Mitchum's character in the sea. To this end, a down-on-his-luck professional gambler, Milner (played by Mitchum) is recruited for a gig at an upscale resort in Baja California. (Mexico is the place where you go for illegal operations.) After being roughed-up by some gangsters (Mitchum gets pummeled about every fifteen minutes in the film), the hero is taken to a private airstrip where a chartered plane has been commissioned to fly him to a refuge for the rich and infamous, Morros Estate on the Pacific coast of Baja. At the cantina, Milner meets a comely wench singing a catchy tune "Five Little Miles to San Berdo" -- this is Jane Russell, a grifter like Milner, playing an ingénue socialite. Of course, she's also on the plane to Morros Resort, bound to visit her married, actor boyfriend, Cardigan (Vincent Price). Cardigan turns out to be a surreal hybrid of Errol Flynn and the Barrymores -- he's the star of ridiculous Hollywood swashbucklers with aspirations toward Shakespeare. Morros estate is populated by a pungent cast of rogues and scoundrels -- Tim Holt (now stout) is on hand as an FBI agent undercover and working to stop Ferrara (offshore on a yacht) from coming to the US; Jim Backus plays a wealthy snobbish gambler so well that he spent his dotage playing the same role as Thurston Howell the Third on Gilligan's Isle. And, of course, there's Morros, the resort-owner imitating the saloon-keeper in Casablanca and Vincent Price chewing up the scenery as the extravagant and flamboyant Cardigan. After a variety of low energy subplots involving Cardigan's interest in hunting and his infidelity, Jane Russell's attempted seduction of Milner, and Milner's rescue of some young honeymooners who have accrued gambling debts to Jim Backus, the film kicks into high-gear with an extended climax that seems to last about an hour. Vincent Price, who has always played heroic men in his films, gets to become a real hero -- he engages in a lengthy gun-battle with three thugs, buying time for Milner to infiltrate Ferrara's yacht. (Tim Holt is face-down dead on the beach by this time.) Milner fights his way through gangsters on the yacht, only to be captured and picturesquely tortured in various ways by the sadistic Ferrara. (He gets beat up, flogged with a belt buckle, pitched into a steam-filled hold to be boiled for awhile, and, then, the sinister Nazi-doctor menaces his arm with its veins standing out like ropes with a giant syringe filled with some kind of amnesia serum -- Mitchum is shirtless for the last forty-minutes of the picture.) In a series of efficiently staged slapstick scenes, Cardigan recruits the local Federales as well as some of the rich playboys at the resort to attack the yacht. As they embark from the dock, with Vincent Price waving a rifle at their helm, the boat sinks, but they commandeer another, sail out to the yacht, and attack the army of bad guys on the boat. There follows a battle involving much gunfire, fist-to-fist fighting, and people leaping around on deck. Ferrara is killed -- we see him lying belly up on the deck of the ship with his eyes baroquely open. Mitchum ends us with Jane Russell and the rueful Cardigan, now an approved and real action hero, goes back to his wife. When Jane Russell embraces Mitchum, he neglects a steam iron with which he has been ironing his trousers and the hot metal sizzles a hole through his pants, an apt enough metaphor for the sexual encounter that is about to begin. (It's a bit like the train roaring into the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest.)
The plot is ridiculous but the details are wonderful. When he gets bored, Mitchum irons his money. Both he and Jane Russell are human caricatures -- they dramatize secondary sexual characteristics in the most exuberant way possible -- and it's undoubtedly fun to see them together: Mitchum's face is inexpressive, like a rough-hewn piece of granite and his shoulders seem to be about two-yards wide: he walks stiffly like the Talmudic Golem -- his sexual apparatus is always at ready and hard as a rock it seems, a characteristic reflected in his general posture. Russell's legs extend all the way up to her huge breasts which are cantilevered into an alarming overhang above thighs and belly -- she is always dressed to kill. They have a distinct, if cartoonish, chemistry and Hughes was right, it seems, to pair them in this film. Vincent Price is endearing and excellent, muttering Shakespearian asides as he leads his feckless troops into battle. The Nazi doctor is sinister and has a number of weird lines -- like all movie Nazis, he is highly cultured and amuses himself with playing solitaire chess. (Hughes was so obsessed with this character that he personally wrote all of the doctor's lines and, then, provided tape-recording line readings to the actor as a guide to how he wanted the man to be portrayed.) There's some wonderful comedy, including a scene in which Cardigan, a gourmand has lovingly prepared a duck that he has shot for a dinner with Milner and Jane Russell. Things deteriorate when the mobsters intervene and Cardigan's wife appears: throughout the scene Cardigan carries the plucked fowl like a rabbit under his arm. Raymond Burr gets some alarming close-ups that highlight his strangely tender sadism -- his huge wet eyes glow with joy as he plans to shoot Mitchum in the face. Unfortunately, like almost all movie sadists, he delights in "haranguing" -- that is, ranting about how he doesn't like to "shoot corpses" and wants Milner to be fully conscious before blowing off his head. Of course, this harangue gives the injured Milner a chance to recover his senses and he proceeds to deliver a much-needed beating to the bad guy. The movie has the weird improvised insouciance of Beat the Devil -- it's well worth watching.
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