Tom Milne's recent reassessment of His Kind of Woman in Monthly Film Bulletin captures what critics evidently missed on its release in 1951: “His Kind of Woman is a thoroughly engaging oddity, a film noir which undergoes a startling sea-change into crazy comedy.... With all faults, an extremely striking film, beautifully written, shot and directed, while Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum strike electric sparks as perfect foils for each other and the supporting cast scarcely put a foot wrong.”
Mitchum is a gambler, down on his luck and harassed out of Los Angeles by unidentified assailants. He is hustled off to Morro's Lodge in Baja where, unbeknownst to him, gangster Raymond Burr plans to do away with him. Among the folks at Morro's are Jane Russell (who graces the film with her siren song, “Five Little Miles from San Berdoo”) and Vincent Price, an unemployed actor given to off-screen histrionics and, ultimately, heroics.
“The opening sequences...are extraordinarily effective in evoking the sense of a bleak urban maze in which there is no point in even looking for an exit. The undertone of anonymous threat...comes to fruition amid the tourist luxuries of Morro's Lodge, a sort of limbo...where nothing is what it seems, and where genuine menace...is indistinguishable from harmless eccentricity....” A highlight of the film is “the spectacle of Robert Mitchum solemnly ironing his money (‘When I'm broke, I press my pants')”--Tom Milne. (JB)