For me, this film is a bit of a mess. The exposition is clear enough - gangster Raymond Burr needs to get back to the US in disguise, decides to trade places with someone similar in physique - namely Robert Mitchum (yeah? I don't think so.) Mitchum is enlisted and then we spend an interminable time in an admittedly exotic Mexican hotel set in which everyone is forever ordering drinks than leaving them (you're in one set so Farrow wants to move the actors around it. He - and Harry Wild - do a great tracking shot at one point of Mitchum coming in to the bar.) Shades of Casablanca - there's even the same set up with Mitchum rescuing a woman whose husband is in debt, by cheating at cards - from Jim Backus, a character who doesn't really need to be there at all.
Anyway about an hour in things pick up with strong arm gangsters (Tony Caruso and Charles McGraw) and the arrival of the crook, and a sort of double act emerges between Mitch and movie star / hunter Vincent Price. Whilst Mitchum is being really nastily beaten up and threatened with death on board ship, the Price side of the film descends into slapstick - particularly when a boat load of militia sets sail and immediately sinks - a funny scene, but feels like it belongs to another film altogether. And in the cross-cutting between the Price- Mitchum sequences, the film seems to labour when it should be at full steam. One example of this is when Mitch is finally free on board and stops to load his gun - and he seems very slowly to put in one cartridge, then another.. for Wilder's sake, why couldn't he just have a loaded gun?? Which all contributes to its almost two hour running time - unusually long for this sort of material.
Anyway I don't want to be too hard because overall it's enjoyable, and in quoting his delicious dialogue, Price is in a way foreshadowing his later career as an eloquent horror star, and the action is fast and violent, not just in the editing but in-camera too (some of it hand held, I read).
It was made for RKO when Hughes was in charge.
Let's see what Mitchum biographer Lee Server can tell us. "It was a strange sort of script [written by Out of the Past's Frank Fenton]... To Farrow's credit, he never tried to resolve the script's tonal inconsistencies [why to his credit?] but ran with them all the way." Then Hughes decided to redo the ending, with Richard Fleischer directing new material from Earl Felton, including the big fight on the ship and the comedy boat sinking. And - much to Mitchum's displeasure, the scene where they try to inject him - with his drugs bust he did not want the shot of a needle going into his arm at all. The ensuing cut with all this new stuff was three hours.
But that's not the end of it. Hughes then decided he wanted a new bad guy and all the Burr scenes had to be reshot - this is a year after they started - and fed up, Mitch started secretly drinking vodka on set, and on the last day of filming, exploding. "The film would have registered a nice profit but for the nearly one million dollars Hughes had spent on five months of retakes, added scenes, and cast changes."
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