His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 18) I watched an unusually long (two hours even) 1951 film noir, sort of, called His Kind of Woman, executive-produced by Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) for RKO during the troubled seven years (1948 to 1955) in which he owned the company outright. The film began life as an unpublished story by Gerald Drayson Adams called Star Sapphire (though no sapphire, or any other sort of jewelry, appears as a plot element in the finished film). John Farrow, Mia Farrow’s father and a sporadically interesting director with two all-time great noirs on his résumé, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (both made at Paramount in 1948), was assigned to direct and Robert Mitchum, then RKO’s biggest leading man, was set to star. The originally assigned writers, Frank Fenton and Jack Douglas, turned in a script with comic-relief elements, and when Hughes took over the project as a personal production he not only assigned his biggest female lead, Jane Russell, to be Mitchum’s co-star, he ordered the writers to build up the character of ham actor and movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). He also not only ordered them to insert a sadistic Nazi refugee plastic surgeon, Martin Krafft (John Mylong, who two years after this film would appear as “The Professor” in Phil Tucker’s legendarily awful Robot Monster) but wrote the dialogue for this character himself and even recorded tapes of the character’s lines so Mylong would deliver them as Hughes wanted them. (The character appears in the film as an uncanny premonition of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece about nuclear war from 13 years later.) John Farrow, who had worked well with Mitchum on Where Danger Lives the year before and expected an untroubled shoot, was appalled when he turned in what he thought was a fully finished film and Hughes demanded extensive changes. Hughes persuaded Richard Fleischer to take over the project and direct the reshoots by offering Fleischer the chance to remake his already completed film, The Narrow Margin (one of the better “B” noirs of the period), with a bigger budget and “A”-list stars. When Fleischer said he was satisfied with The Narrow Margin as it was, Hughes threatened to scrap the movie altogether and not release it unless Fleischer did the retakes on His Kind of Woman.

Hughes also supplied a new writer, Earl Felton, and summoned Fleischer and Fenton for story conferences either at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the office he rented at Samuel Goldwyn Studios (amazingly, during the entire seven years he owned RKO he never set foot in the studio at all; instead he rented an office from Goldwyn and ran it from there). Much to Felton’s irritation, Hughes supplied him only with milk, and an occasional half a sandwich, instead of the steady supply of Scotch Felton was used to having by his side as he worked. What resulted from all this taking and retaking was an odd and quirky tale of a mystery man, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum), who’s recruited by some equally mysterious crooks for a job assignment. They’re willing to pay him $50,000 total and $5,000 in advance, for which he’s told to go to a resort town in Baja California, Mexico and stay at a high-end resort called Morro’s, run by José Morro (Philip Van Zandt). Milner doesn’t know what the job is and neither do we until halfway through the movie. It seems that a gangster named Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr, though the mercurial Hughes used two other actors, Lee Van Cleef – later a star in Italian “spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960’s – and Robert J. Wilke, in the role and shot all their scenes before throwing out all that expensive shooting and having Burr take over the role: a good move, actually, as Burr steals the film in every scene he’s in) was expelled from the U.S. and deported to his native Italy by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before its name was changed to the now-notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ferraro’s gang had hit on the idea of finding a no-account drifter with no living relatives, no significant others, and no one who would miss him if he disappeared and recruiting him to serve as a model for Dr. Krafft to use to alter Ferraro’s face with plastic surgery. Then Ferraro would be able to return to the U.S. in the patsy’s identity while the patsy would be quietly murdered and his body dumped somewhere.

Milner learns all this from INS agent Bill Lusk (Tim Holt) just before Lusk is killed by Ferraro’s gang. In a scene Fenton, Leonard, and/or Felton seem to have ripped off from Casablanca, Milner comes to the aid of a young couple, Milton (Richard Bergren) and Jennie (Leslye Banning) Stone, who’ve been cheated at cards by investment broker Myron Winton (Jim Backus), by rigging the game until the Stones have made back their money. And where does Jane Russell fit into all this? She plays an adventuress named Lenore Brent who poses as a millionaire heiress even though she doesn’t have a dime to her name. She’s hoping to “marry up” to movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price) despite the inconvenient detail that Cardigan already has a wife, Helen (Marjorie Reynolds). Helen went to Reno to obtain a no-fault Nevada divorce, but then changed her mind and decided to stay married to Mark. Lenore and Milner meet when they’re the only passengers on a chartered plane that takes them to Morro’s resort in Mexico, and they hit it off immediately even though in real life Mitchum and Russell were never more than good friends. Most of the troubles with the film came from the final sequence, which Hughes kept expanding past all sense, either dramatic or financial. It takes place on Ferraro’s yacht, which is moored just off the Baja coast. Hughes kept adding so many scenes to this sequence that the yacht set had to rebuilt and vastly expanded; it had started out as a relatively simple set involving just the ship’s bridge, but as Hughes’s vision for the film grew so did the set until it was as big as a real yacht and took up most of the tank in RKO’s Stage 22. When Fleischer turned in a rough cut of the sequence, it lasted 80 minutes and Hughes said he loved every minute of it except for the scenes involving Nick Ferraro, whom he demanded be replaced. By the time Hughes finished fussing with His Kind of Woman, over a year had passed and the film lost $850,000, which as Fleischer inconveniently pointed out was exactly what Hughes had spent on the retakes.

I remember getting into an argument with my late friend Chris Schneider about His Kind of Woman because he absolutely loved the movie, especially the camp scenes involving Vincent Price’s character, whereas one of my all-time pet peeves is a film that tries to be both a serious genre piece and a spoof. All too often such a movie with a mixed mission tries to be both and achieves neither. Vincent Price flames out in his role with his camp amplifier turned up to, or even past, 11; it’s the sort of playing he’d used to liven up many of the awful horror movies he got shunted into after the success of House of Wax (1953) “typed” him as a horror actor, but it’s relentlessly out of place here, resulting in an audaciously stupid scene in which he sets out to confront the bad guys on a small rowboat, only it literally sinks under the weight of the crew Price’s character has recruited to sail with him. Shortly after His Kind of Woman, Howard Hughes assigned Mitchum and Russell to co-star in another thriller, Macao, which I haven’t seen since my husband Charles and I ran a VHS tape in the 1990’s to commemorate Portugal having finally relinquished their control of Macao and handed it back to China. I remember Macao as quite a bit better than His Kind of Woman, even though it was also a film in which Hughes fired the director. Josef von Sternberg started the movie and Nicholas Ray finished it, and unlike in a lot of such instances it’s really easy to tell who directed what. Sternberg tried to get Jane Russell to play the same sort of “woman of mystery” Marlene Dietrich had portrayed in their seven films together between 1930 and 1934, while Ray saw Russell – who was always surprisingly masculine despite those famously large breasts; when she and Marilyn Monroe co-starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953 they came off as a Lesbian couple, with Russell the butch and Monroe the femme – as “just one of the boys” and directed her accordingly.

With more sensitive writing – especially for Price’s character (he could have become a real figure of pathos as he realized his career as an actor had been mired in make-believe heroics and now he had the chance to show real guts) – and following the Hitchcock formula of letting the audience know from the get-go who the villains are and what they’re after instead of shrouding it all in mystery, His Kind of Woman could have been a much better movie than it is. But as it stands it’s just another movie that takes a serviceable noir plotline and drowns it in quirks. The one person involved with His Kind of Woman who actually got good reviews at the time was the cinematographer, Harry J. Wild, who’d shot RKO’s quintessential film noir Murder, My Sweet seven years earlier and brought the same chiaroscuro style to this much less convincing film. But I was quite struck by the line with which Eddie Muller closed his outro; after telling the weird stories about how Howard Hughes got directly involved in the production and the endless changes he dictated to his cast and crew, Muller said, “How does someone so erratic, incompetent, and delusional end up in charge?” In today’s political situation, it came off as a thinly veiled critique of Donald Trump – and with Trump’s good buddies Larry and David Ellison set to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner Classic Movies’ parent company, and CNN on top of Paramount and CBS, Eddie Muller might be in trouble over that remark!