His Kind of Woman, 3.5 stars

Had I not had any expectations of this movie going in, it's likely I would have found it a four-star film. However, the sleeve brags of a "film noir with periodic incursions from the Monty Python crew", which set me up to expect a crazier, much more haphazard film than the one that I actually saw.

The casting is perfect and enjoyable as Robert Mitchum, a gambler who has been offered five figures to lie low in a Mexican resort for reasons unknown to him, arrives at the resort and promptly encounters Jane Russell. Kids, if something is too good to be true it is never what it seems. Being paid 10,000 to lounge in the sun and oil up Jane Russell is not something that happens to your average Joe. It turns out the gangsters who offered Mitchum the money are planning to kill him and steal his identity so they can smuggle their boss into the country.

This is boilerplate stuff, you say. Where does Monty Python come in? Well, the closest thing to a Python comes in the form of Vincent Price, playing a gun-crazy vacationing American actor. It is impossible to tell how this character was written because Price's performance is so over-the-top; he cries at his own films and spouts Shakespeare as if it is appropriate everyday conversation. It is also impossible to pay attention to anyone or anything else (even Jane Russell's "things") when he is in the frame. He completely steals this movie from Mitchum, who always tends toward the laconic, and Russell, whose thespian abilities were never the whole reason she was given roles. While it's true that the film has a zanier sensibility than most films noirs, this is not a particularly high achievement. The serious, fatalistic tone of crime films of this era has been replaced by an airy Mexican setting (still with its share of venetian blinds through which light can fall) and witty banter without the deadly double entendres of an average film noir. Those attributes add a star to what is otherwise an average and predictable plot, but they aren't enough to raise it to a four-star, Monty Python-level rating.