Vincent Price and a Plan to Steal a Guy’s Face Make ‘His Kind of Woman’ a Midnight to Remember
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
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Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Film Noir Gets so Many Studio Notes it Achieves Sentience
I’m not the most important person in the world today who loves Venn Diagrams, but “His Kind of Woman” might be best explained as something that rests at the center of a series of overlapping circles. Almost all of those circles are “Howard Hughes wanted reshoots,” to be fair, but there are a number of factors that make this tropical fever dream a fun film noir b-side, best watched with a rowdy group of friends late at night. Alcohol is optional, because “His Kind of Woman” already has Vincent Price.
It’s almost worth going into the film without any of the background of the tortured production behind “His Kind of Woman.” But boy, it was tortured. The project involved director swaps, the recasting of its main villain, and at least one Robert Mitchum breakdown. Perhaps the wildest detail is a completely other film minding its own business (Richard Fleischer’s “The Narrow Margin”) was held hostage to the completion of this one by Hughes at his most imperious, which is saying something for the studio head who ran RKO into the ground. All that I armed our ace Alison Foreman with is that “His Kind of Woman” is a movie with a wild turn in it — which is why I would dare suggest a film with a $850,000 budget (in the year of our lord 1951!!) for IndieWire After Dark.
I’ve described it in the past as an experience that is spiritually aligned with what people five decades from now are going to feel if and when they watch, like, “John Carter” or something of that ilk. Going in, I had some vague awareness that Hughes, after he saw director John Farrow’s original cut of this movie, wanted lots of things changed, the multiple reshoots were a shambolic nightmare saved by Price’s theatrics, and that it lost a lot of money at the box office. This is all true, but is unnecessary to your viewing experience; it is unnecessary because it fails to capture just how fully manic Price’s takeover of the picture feels when it happens.
Up to this point, we’ve been following down-on-his-luck gambler with an iron jaw Dan Millner (Mitchum), sent to a ritzy Mexican resort at the behest of some shadowy gangsters, for reasons murkier still. The film stews in his chemistry with rich girl/singer Lenore Brent as they lounge around the resort and trade ennui-laced bon mots — and quite rightly so because Lenore is played by Jane Russell, who looks amazing whether she’s the woman in black or the woman in white, if you know what I mean. Price is her eccentric ex, an Errol Flynn-esque flunkie actor named Mark Cardigan, who also happens to be hanging around the resort.
Then, when the villains spring their dastardly plan — and I swear I’m not making this up — to take Millner’s face… off… and give it to their crime lord boss (Raymond Burr) so that he can return to America with a new identity. I’m being a little simplistic, but Hughes is the one who wanted this movie to have a sinister (German!!) plastic surgeon, not me. In any case, it’s here that Price activates two of the core circles in the Venn Diagram of “His Kind Of Woman’s” success and becomes the film’s new leading man.
Those circles — and I swear I’m not making this up — are “Shakespeare” and “Capes.”
Vincent Price often injects a certain knowingness and gleefulness into his movies, particularly his horror work. Whether you’re looking at his roles in everything from “House of Wax” to “Edward Scissorhands,” or just looking at the clip of him and Vampire Kermit on “The Muppet Show,” he has this incredible ability to set the audience at ease even as he’s genuinely going for an emotion. That is often what helps make him menacing: the fact that he shouldn’t be. He should not be a swashbuckling action star, either, but “His Kind of Woman” gives him a posse of bored hotel guests and Mexican cops and allows him to stride forth quoting “Henry V.” And Price crushes it.
“His Kind of Woman” should rate alongside Price’s often forgotten radio work (if you like this column I promise you will like “Three Skeleton Key”) as among his best performances. Certainly one of his most unexpected, energizing, and wholly elevating for what was a perfectly fine film noir to begin with. Does that mean Howard Hughes got something right?
Well, let’s not lose our heads. But “His Kind of Woman” should be a welcome surprise for Price aficionados, noir buffs, and anyone who, in the Marie Kondo meme sense, loves mess. —SS
The Aftermath: Only Midnights Could Know This Woman by Heart
Despite containing a delightful little ditty about Santa Barbara and snippets of my own alma mater’s fight song (“I’m a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech…“), “His Kind of Woman” is by no means a musical. Still, when bathing in the choppy waters of this densely scripted then cut-to-hell disasterpiece, I caught myself routinely considering the midnight merits of the standard sing-a-long.
Good, bad, or otherwise, film noir tends to transport. The shadowy promise of deep melodrama paired with that high-contrast visual melancholy that’s ideal for the moralistic extremes of the 1940s is timelessly alluring. No matter the year, audiences adore a beautiful-yet-tortured woman proclaiming something — anything! — about the hard-boiled basics of life, liberty, and love. Like a musical number, a single well-spoken line can completely suspend your sense of context and time, particularly in noir.
Still, it takes a special kind of propulsive cadence to keep someone so engaged with a story’s dialogue that with every twist and turn (no matter how ill-considered) you want to know and recite almost every word by heart. You say, “Fools get away with the impossible”? I say, “That’s because they’re the only ones who try it.” Now, you go!
Directors might make more headlines when they play musical chairs with their credits, but I would peel off a decent chunk of my own face to engage with the writer’s room responsible for whatever genre blend history says this is. Having enjoyed a sizable amount of cinema about organ theft before now (shout out “Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes,” an eventual After Dark pick to be sure), I was less intrigued by the bonkers plot in this wild misnomer of a movie than I was taken with its beat-for-beat bravado. As tightly written as “The Maltese Falcon” and as clever as “Lady from Shanghai,” “His Kind of Woman” sprays its cast of zany seaside characters with a steady font of gorgeous lines that be they either blunt, witty, sad, or stirring never run dry in the wrong way.
“My wife tells me I’ve never been in love with anything but myself.”
“Instead of walking out to sea, I came here. Do you still have our champagne?”
“This is the only time the guns were ever loaded with anything but blanks.”
“You know you could be a handy thing to have around the house if a man went broke.”
“He’s coming in on a private plane. I think he’s drunk!”
“Women are for weeping.”
My perpetual need to have captions on while streaming gives me away as something of a writer’s writer. Watching archival classics with digital text superimposed over the middle has never made black-and-white visuals more appealing, but it can sometimes serve as a stand-in for the communal experience of doing something in life and watching it happen on screen at the same time. The art of the exchange — be it through characters sharing double entendres or entire theaters getting caught up in call-and-response — is characteristic of film noir, midnight movies, and, yes, sing-a-longs. Stuck watching “His Kind of Woman” alone, reading the lines I was falling for just as they were said out loud became its own kind enjoyable synaptic circuit, reinforced routinely over the running time.
Sarah’s admittedly lavish praise for Price might be an understatement here (it’s quite possibly the best I’ve ever seen him!), but my fondness for Russell and Mitchum grew with nearly every scene they had. Seductive and pithy, the duo’s string of melody-less duets starts out robust albeit slow, before crescendoing into a brisk staccato that’s so bouncy you can almost picture a tiny iron acting as cursor over each of the words. “I guess that’s the way I affect people…” works better when you’re told, “Maybe it’s that you affect the wrong people…” by a crowd, or at least text crawl. —AF
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can stream “His Kind of Woman” on most VOD platforms. IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59 p.m. ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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