His Kind of Woman
Directed by John FarrowDan Milner (Robert Mitchum) is a small-time gambler who has been losing steadily and living on borrowed time. When an anonymous offer arrives – good money for a simple trip to a Mexican resort and no questions asked – Milner takes it. At Morro's Lodge in Baja California, he finds a collection of idle rich, a crooked operator named Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr), and Lenore Brent (Jane Russell), a nightclub singer angling for a wealthy future with the vain, self-dramatizing actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price).
What Milner does not yet understand is that he has been brought south as a body double – a stand-in whose face and fingerprints will be transferred to deported crime boss Nick Ferraro so that Ferraro can re-enter the United States under a new identity. Federal agent Bill Lusk (Tim Holt) is closing in from one direction while Ferraro's enforcers tighten the perimeter from another. Milner's growing attachment to Lenore complicates his calculation of odds, and Cardigan, for all his theatrical posturing, proves unexpectedly willing to act when the situation demands it.
His Kind of Woman occupies an unusual position in the noir cycle: a film in which the mood of dread is genuine but the tone keeps slipping toward self-parody, most conspicuously through Price's performance as a man who believes he is the hero of his own adventure story. The film's resort setting removes the urban texture that defines most classic noir, replacing city shadows with tropical isolation – a geography that renders its protagonist no less trapped.
