My Gun is Quick

 

Director: Victor Saville
Year:  1957
Rating:  6.5


Mike Hammer is back in My Gun is Quick based on Mickey Spillane's second book (I, the Jury being the first) with the same title and he hasn't mellowed out. It is again produced by the low budget production house Parkland that made lots of crime/noir films in the 1950's - the vast majority that you likely never heard of. Same could be said of the cast of this film - I don't know any of them. But the great thing about noir which this comfortably falls into is that you don't need much of a budget to put a decent film together as long as you have dames, guns, shadows and Hammer. This has plenty of all of that.



The film begins like the book does for about five minutes and then takes a swerve into an entirely different plot like it is a lost teenage runaway. Not sure why unless the original plot was still considered too risqué in 1957 which is hard to imagine. Hammer finds himself late at night in a greasy spoon where you have to wait for the cockroaches to let you sit down. He is beat from a long day of smacking people around when Red, a lady of the evening, flirts with him - but even Hammer is too tired to pick up on that. But he does beat up a guy who bothers her and treats her to soup and money for a bus out of town. The lug is Sir Galahad in disguise. When she turns up dead the next day he doesn't believe it is an accident and begins to snoop around.



In the book he finds a large powerful prostitution ring has killed her to shut her up - but in this one it is some stolen jewels. Everyone in town seems to be after them and one of them killed Red. He will make them pay like he always does - in blood. A bunch of women are in the film and they all make googly eyes with an offering of much more at Hammer - from a rich dame who keeps knockout drops next to her booze like a Cosby to a stripper to an itchy Velda. He is wearing protective armor though and swats aside their come-ons like bomb diving flies.



It is 90 minutes which would have been 80 if they had cut out a scene in which Hammer follows a car on the highway and follows and follows and follows. The film suffers from trying to hit that magic 90-minute feature mark - but is still pretty good with dialogue so hard boiled you expect it to crack and though Robert Bray who plays Hammer feels awkward in his patter he has the right look with the broad shoulders that fill a room and a face that goes well with bruises. He was to star in Lassie for years in the 1960's. I can't say I am a huge fan of Spillane's writing or his character Hammer who often is just a shade to the right of being a psycho but I have read the first two now because his books were so popular and had some influence on all the tough guys who came after him.



There were two TV series with Hammer - the Darren McGavin series in the late 50's where they subtract much of his meanness but they are tight well scripted shows and then the Stacy Keach show that ran for four seasons in the 80's where Hammer is completely defanged and the shows very generic PI stuff. This film and the I, the Jury (1953) are much closer to the mark.