The weirdest film noir ever
Or at least, the weirdest I've ever seen: His Kind of Woman!, exclamation point included. A Howard Hughes production, which may help to explain it. With Robert Mitchum as a down-on-his-luck gambler, Jane Russell as a gold-digging chanteuse, Raymond Burr as a mafia kingpin, and...Vincent Price as a ham actor? oh yeah.
It seems the gangster is plotting to kill the gambler and assume his identity, which somehow requires flying him down to a resort in Baja California, to which the singer is also headed because she has set her cap at the actor, who is there because he is an avid big-game hunter. (Honest!) A kind of filmic cognitive dissonance begins to set in, with Mitchum inhabiting one movie and Price the other and Russell shuttling haplessly between them, culminating in Price organizing a Keystone Kops-style rescue party to row out to the gangster's yacht where Mitchum is having the shit beaten out of him.
Oh, there was one sequence when Russell and Mitchum are walking on the beach and she begins to hum "Five Little Miles from San Berdoo," the song she was singing in a bar when they first met, and he begins to whistle the tune along with her. It lasts about five seconds (then they stumble on the body), but it was just a charming moment.
Also, Robert Mitchum shirtless was...beefy. The norm of male attractiveness has definitely changed over the years.
It seems the gangster is plotting to kill the gambler and assume his identity, which somehow requires flying him down to a resort in Baja California, to which the singer is also headed because she has set her cap at the actor, who is there because he is an avid big-game hunter. (Honest!) A kind of filmic cognitive dissonance begins to set in, with Mitchum inhabiting one movie and Price the other and Russell shuttling haplessly between them, culminating in Price organizing a Keystone Kops-style rescue party to row out to the gangster's yacht where Mitchum is having the shit beaten out of him.
Oh, there was one sequence when Russell and Mitchum are walking on the beach and she begins to hum "Five Little Miles from San Berdoo," the song she was singing in a bar when they first met, and he begins to whistle the tune along with her. It lasts about five seconds (then they stumble on the body), but it was just a charming moment.
Also, Robert Mitchum shirtless was...beefy. The norm of male attractiveness has definitely changed over the years.