A year ago The MacMahonian pledged to revisit the filmography of John Farrow in due course. Course is now due and felicitously it brings to the fore another MacMahonian favourite – Richard Fleischer.
His Kind of Woman was the 37th feature film directed by John Farrow, of whom the more I see the more I like. The film's producer Howard Hughes, not seeing eye to eye with me on this, recruited Richard Fleischer to partially re-shoot and re-edit the film, the end result being perhaps less Farrowian but not for that that much more Fleisherian, although still a feast for, mostly, the ears. Weren't Fleischer uncredited this would have been his 12th feature in a career that spanned 5 decades (1943-1989), graduating from taut noirs in the 40s to fantasy adventures and Disney extravaganzas in the 50s without loss of touch. I don’t recall seeing a Fleischer film not worth seeing but my favourite remains perhaps The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) (for the record, Fleischer was the son of early animation grandee Max Fleischer, creator of, inter alia, Betty Boop).
From about 10 minutes on I lost track or interest of what story His Kind of Woman supposedly tells, involving professional gambler Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum), club singer and Dan love interest Lenore Brent (Jane Russel) plus an assortment of gangsters and otherwise freelance seedy characters, invaluably including Vincent Price, most if not all with hidden or inscrutable agendas, maneuvering in a summer resort in Baja California for no other apparent purposes than our evening's entertainment, culminating in baddies most impractically trying to kill Dan by injecting him with a lethal poison and clumsily failing long enough for rescue, in the guise of the Mexican police, to come.
All involved play their effortlessly cool selves, delivering several of the best one-liners in memory (sample: Lenore to Dan, after Dan disposed of a particularly noxious baddie: “how did it feel?”; Dan to Lenore: “he didn’t say”) while enacting Poverty Row serial antics, which not only were by then at least 20 years outdated but also never deserved any credence in the first place.
Some hold that all style and no substance do not for superior art make. Perhaps. But no style, no substance and a lot of fun, that The MacMahonian take its metaphorical hat off to.