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We have watched this movie several times.

The first time was simply because this movie stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.

Every viewing after that is because of Vincent Price.

Price doesn't just steal a scene: he steals the entire movie,

If you've never seen this film, you're in for a treat.

If you have previously seen it, then you know what I mean: watch it again for Vincent Price.

A broke California gambler is paid thousands to travel to a resort in Mexico and meet someone who'll instruct him on what comes next. The plot is initially quite muddled and does not become clear until about halfway through. It starts as a film noir, turns into a romantic comedy, and finishes with furious action. Russell is a sultry presence and she and Mitchum have good chemistry. However, Price steals the film in a hilarious turn as a hammy Hollywood actor. The action scenes are not convincing. The bad guys take forever to aim their guns, allowing Mitchum and Price adequate time to react. There is also a ridiculously protracted scene where bad guys try to stick a needle into Mitchum.

This brilliant and mind-boggling film noir might be more properly called an anti-noir, doing for the crime movie what 'The Missouri Breaks' would do for the Western. It's not every noir hero who both offers marriage guidance AND does his own ironing.

'His Kind of Woman' is, in fact, three movies. It starts off as a fairly straight film noir, although its poker-faced pastiche of 'Out of the Past' is a little TOO poker-faced. Then, when the hero goes to Mexico to meet the other characters, the plot stops dead and enters narrative limbo, in a kind of noir precursor to Bunuel's 'The Exterminating Angel': Six Noir Characters In Search Of A Plot.

Then lunacy truly takes hold, as the plot eventually arrives, and Vincent Price, playing a barmy ham actor, takes over from Mitchum (magnificent as ever, baffled and goaded by a plot even less alert than he!) as the presiding spirit, and turns a moody thriller into the giddiest farce, where all the unpleasant aspects of film noir (fatalism, misogyny) are happily overturned. Proof that genre-busting didn't begin with Melville or Godard.

In Lee Server's biography about Robert Mitchum the recounting of the making of His Kind of Woman could actually be the basis of an interesting film itself.

Jane Russell of course was the personal creation of Howard Hughes and when Hughes bought RKO Studio, Robert Mitchum was his number one male star. It was only natural that Hughes seek to team them and in fact they do go well together.

But Howard Hughes filmed this thing essentially three times with three different actors playing villain Nick Ferraro a Hollywoodized version of Lucky Luciano. First it was Howard Petrie, then Robert Wilkie, and finally Raymond Burr before Hughes got a Ferraro he liked.

Besides that the original film had few laughs in it and Hughes did get a good streak of inspiration when he hired Vincent Price as the film was being re-shot for the second time and integrated scenes with him into the plot. Price plays a Hollywood swashbuckling movie star, shades of Errol Flynn, who really steals the film from both stars. It's a part that calls for Price to overact outrageously and he does so. His Kind of Woman is worth seeing for him alone.

The basic story has drifter/gambler Robert Mitchum being persuaded with money and other less gentle means to go to a resort located in Baja, California. Of course who's ultimately hired him is our gangster villain Burr and let us say that His Kind of Woman may have been the inspiration for Faces Off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage a few years ago.

Tim Holt makes a brief appearance here as a Federal cop who warns Mitchum of what is in store for him and gets killed for his trouble. Holt was starring in B westerns for RKO and occasionally doing other film appearances like this one. When he went to war back in the mid Forties, RKO looked around for another replacement to be its B western hero and Mitchum got his first big break and his first starring role. But irony of ironies, Mitchum moved on to bigger and better things and Holt kept grinding out B films that were good, but way beneath his talent.

Other assorted familiar movie faces like Charles McGraw, Marjorie Reynolds, Jim Backus, and Alberto Morin are in His Kind of Woman and give it a comfortable feel.

His Kind of Woman is one of the great noir films ever done, even if it had to be shot over and over to get it right by Mr. Hughes's lights.

This is an odd but entertaining film.

Don't take any of the story too seriously -- the film seems to be a satire of classic cliches including a slick but really, really evil villain vs. the crude but sort-of worthy hero. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it does have a happy ending which should come as no surprise. The real treat of the film is Price mocking himself as a B-picture actor who gets a chance to be heroic and plays it for all the melodrama it's worth.