Deported gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) wants to sneak back into the US and figures the best way involves finding someone his size. So his minions hire down-on-his-luck gambler Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum) to travel to a Mexican vacation lodge. Milner wants to figure out what is going on as he interacts with a group of colorful characters including Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price)—a cheerful actor, Lenore Brent (Jane Russell)—a singer after Cardigan, Myron Winton (Jim Backus)—a nosy banker, and a group of sinister maybe-crooks.
This is the film you get when a group of talented actors start a film without a finished script and make it up as they go along, shot by one director (John Farrow) and then re-shot by another (Richard Fleischer), and with an executive producer (Howard Hughes) who liked to interfere. Much of it is good. Some isn’t. The pace speeds up and slows down without concern for the story, which is really a series of events tangled together. The tone shifts, as does the genre. Burr is in a sleazy gangster film. Mitchum is mostly in a Noir, though sometimes a very dark one and sometimes something more like The Big Sleep, depending on the scene. Price is in a comedy. Russell drifts from a romance to a romantic comedy. All-together it doesn’t make sense, but it isn’t boring.
Generally everyone is good, and that’s what makes it work. Russell, Backus, and the scads of miscellaneous bad guys deliver amusing or meaningful lines with the vigor of actors having a great time (or perhaps shocked that no one is in control). Scene after scene is engaging, one way or another, though those scenes don’t fit together. Mitchum is the only one miscast simply because he has to be in all the switching genres and can’t quite pull off the tone shifts.
By the time we reach the end, those tones have become incompatible and the darker gangster stuff would be unpleasant if it mattered. It drags, and I looked forward to each time the film would cut away to a character I cared about.
Which brings me to Vincent Price. He is magnificent, as is his playful film-actor character who just wants to live as a hero. He quotes Shakespeare, yells flamboyantly at villains and the police alike, and steals the picture. A re-cut that diminished Milner to a minor character and turned this into the heroic tale of Mark Cartigan would have been an action-comedy masterpiece. I’d have eaten up a six episode franchise.