His Kind of Woman (1951)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m not going to say that His Kind of Woman is a good or great movie, but I will say that if you’re looking for something halfway between romantic drama and film noir, this is a very representative example of form as of the early 1950s — and that does double if you start looking at the film’s typical production problems. The story itself sees a tough guy (Robert Mitchum) travelling to a Mexican resort, where he encounters a beautiful singer (Jane Russell) and a movie actor (Vincent Price) with marital problems. After various shenanigans, the film eventually realizes it has to go with dead bodies, gunfights and something more suspenseful. The escalates to a tidy action-driven conclusion with a heavy helping of dumb comedy and that’s that. Even if you don’t know about His Kind of Woman’s rocky production history, you can certainly see the evidence of an abrupt change of direction. In front of the camera, you have a few icons of the time being used as per their specifications. Mitchum is reliably enjoyable, Russell is the bombshell and Price plays to type as an actor prone to hamming it — he was never subtle, but maybe this is the film that validated his approach. The film’s genre-hopping is almost like getting an anthology of many of the era’s most distinctive genres. The last half feels like a desperate afterthought of action and comedy, but the film is strong whenever you have Mitchum and Russell going through their romantic material, or contemplating Hollywood’s backstage through one actor’s behind-the-scenes insecurities. His Kind of Woman’s representativeness grows even stronger one you read about the film’s production and find out that this was another one of RKO’s films that eccentric billionaire-producer Howard Hugues endlessly tinkered with during his tenure as the studio’s owner, much to the detriment and belated release of the film. The result speaks for itself as a bit of a mess, but a very pleasantly circa-1950 kind of mess.