Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:         


MY GUN IS QUICK. United Artists, 1957. Robert Bray, Whitney Blake, Richard Garland. Screenplay: Richard Powell and Richard Collins, based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Directed by George White.

   You’re going to make a movie based on a book by the bestselling writer of the decade, so naturally you totally ignore the plot and instead do a poverty row rehash of The Maltese Falcon only with Mike Hammer instead of Sam Spade.

   Richard Powell, who wrote the screenplay with Richard Collins, obviously was no Spillane fan. A fine novelist (The Philadelphian) and top notch mystery writer (the Arab and Andy Blake series of screwball mysteries), he scrapped everything save the opening scene where Mike Hammer (Robert Bray) meets the prostitute Red in a late night diner, and sets out to avenge her death when she is brutally murdered.

   We’re in Los Angeles and Mike does have an office, a secretary named Velda, a cop pal named Pat Chambers, and he is a brutal lout, but from that point on you won’t recognize Spillane or Hammer, or the plot of My Gun is Quick the novel.

   Bray was a personable enough actor, most probably remembered as Lassie’s forest ranger owner in the color series, but as Hammer he is brutal, stupid, a slob, and can’t even wear the pork-pie right (neither could Kevin Dobson or Stacy Keach — the crown is not creased, which is why it’s called a pork-pie). Granted Spillane’s Hammer isn’t a barrel of laughs, but he is a snappy dresser, and however brutal and rude, he isn’t stupid.

   The falcon — I mean the Bianchi jewels — are the meaningless McGuffin, and the femme fatale is wholesome Whitney Blake, Mrs. B from Hazel, the television series based on Ted Post’s Saturday Evening Post cartoons about the impossible maid of the same name played by Shirley Booth. She’s about as seductive as coconut cream pie. (Well, okay, she’s nowhere near as seductive as coconut cream pie, but she is as wholesome.)

   The story and direction are all competent, but they are generic fifties private eye 101, which is the one thing Spillane’s Hammer never was. Love him or hate him, he was never just another private eye nor Spillane just another mystery writer. Hammer isn’t really a detective half as much as what Robert Sampson called a Justice figure, an avenger.

   It’s no accident that Spillane’s roots lie in Carrol John Daly’s Race Williams, Tarzan, Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, Captain America, and the Saint (inspiration for Morgan the Raider). Hammer is closer to d’Artagnan (he’s a huge Dumas fan as well, with The Erection Set and The Long Wait both as inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo as Hammett’s Red Harvest) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, Hawkeye, than Poe’s Dupin or Doyle’s Holmes.

   Urban hero that he may be, Hammer is last of Rousseau’s ‘noble savages,’ the natural man arriving full blown without history or family, a force of nature, white hot, and consumed by a overarching sense of justice — if not law. The crudity of Spillane’s early work (he became a very good writer as he learned) never-the-less shows a deep seated identification with the post-war psyche and a natural affinity for the written word. You don’t have to like Spillane to recognize his power as a writer.

   To ignore all that, to ignore Spillane for what he is and Hammer as himself, as this film does, negates the whole point of Mickey Spillane’s role in the world of fifties popular literature.

   Bray’s Hammer is just another private eye, with just another case, and just another femme fatale. The plot would have been perfectly suited t,o an episode of 77 Sunset Strip (which did one Spillane plot seven times) or any of its numerous off shoots. Bray’s Hammer is everyman private detective, but he isn’t Mike Hammer though he is the closest physically to Spillane’s concept of the actors who have played the role.

   I can’t say much more. The people you suspect are the ones who did it, the brutality mostly consists of grabbing one small owner of a diner by his shirt, Velda isn’t much of one thing or the other, only another faithful private eye secretary, and Pat Chambers is just another best buddy cop to warn the hero about crossing the lines the hero of these things can’t see anyway. There is no attempt to capture anything of the feel of Spillane and Hammer.

   There’s a half decently shot bit where Hammer watches a murder investigation through the skylight of Blake’s split level beach house, but if that’s the films highlight’, you can guess what the rest is like. The climax and Bray’s version of the ‘I have to turn you in because I’m a detective’ speech are just flat. No one gets gut shot, blown away with a shotgun, or blown up by a gas-filled basement, much less shot by a baby in his crib, and Blake at worst looks like she never really expected to seduce anyone in the first place.

   I won’t say skip it, it is Spillane and Hammer, but watch it on Netflix, don’t buy it, even for $5. It’s just not very good, nor bad enough to be fun. The posters for the film are nice though. And yes, it’s the kind of movie where you review the posters. Watch Kiss Me Deadly, The Girl Hunters, or the Keach or McGavin series, even that little one off made for television movie set in Miami is arguably more interesting than this.

   Skip this, save as a completist, or just to see Hazel’s Mrs B. as a seductress.