Robert J. Maxwell It's a coherent narrative, I guess, and it's not insulting to anyone's intelligence or basic sense of morality. It's just an assault on one's aesthetic apparatus. My eyeballs felt coagulated after half watching this junk and half snoozing through it.Mickey Spillane plays Mike Hammer, a character he created in some pulp fiction novels of the early 50s. They achieved a certain notoriety at the time. When Private Eye Mike Hammer plugs a beautiful babe in the belly at the end of "I, The Jury," she gasps, "Mike, how could you do this?" And Mike snarls, "It was easy." Well, you don't have to be a literary giant to write hard-boiled pulp fiction. It has a long, if mostly undistinguished, history. Dashiell Hammett gave us a couple of good stories, most notably "The Maltese Falcon." Sam Spade went down in history. Hammett had a fascinating detective story to tell and lots of local San Francisco color. You can still order the Sam Spade Special at Jack's Restaurant, and there is a bronze plaque on the street corner where Miles Archer was killed.Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe brought a touch of street poetry with him in his anfractuous adventures in Los Angeles. "Her hair was the color of gold in old painting." And, "She gave me a look that I could feel in my hip pocket." I could never follow Chandler's stories and neither could Chandler but what the hell.Mickey Spillane was different from these earlier stars. He didn't have an interesting story to tell and he'd have to look up "poetry" in the dictionary. The novels were just forgettable junk, like most of the stories in the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, with titles like, "Somewhere a Roscoe" and "The Dead Blond." The movie is about as good as his novel -- or it would be if author Mickey Spillane did not play his own hero, Mike Hammer. The guy is bulky and squinty eyed and shapeless. He has the voice of a really bad teacher of algebra. Not even the glossy Shirley Eaton can compensate for his presence or for the absence of an involving narrative. It has something to do with his finding his secretary, Velda or Velma. The story begins with Hammer as an abject drunk picked up and beaten by the cops, but it's impossible to tell the difference between Hammer as drunk and Hammer as reinvigorated private eye.The sound is scratchy, the photography wretched, and the musical score infinitely repetitive -- a bluesy trumpet with four notes in its repertoire. The director seems to know what a loser he's got here because he makes no attempt to dress up this dreck. Hammer enters a seedy saloon on his quest and you can tell it's seedy because somebody is playing a honky tonk piano in the background as if this were Dodge City.The good part is I awoke refreshed and alert after that brief nap.

falconcitypaul "The Girl Hunters" opened in San Francisco the same week in 1963 as "Dr. No". Mickey Spillane's film got all the major publicity. However, the first outing of Sean Connery as James Bond altered action film history. Thereafter Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking proles got muscled aside for dinner-jacketed U-speakers who knew that red wine didn't go with fish.I saw "The Girl Hunters" three times that summer. I admit that I love it dearly. I have whistled the propulsive soundtrack themes for 45 years, conjuring up the film's attitude as I set my shoulders determinedly and prowl the urban landscape with a warily appraising squint.I read the book twice that year. The second time I imagined Spillane's own curbstone-edged voice doing the first-person narration. It fit. My God, it fit. As an actor he didn't have the line-reading skills of a pro, but he had authenticity and a distinctive charm.Robert Aldrich's Spillane adaptation "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955) has stature as a late-noir post-modernist metafictional commentary on the detective genre. Prophetically, Aldrich filmed it before most of those adjectives had meaning. However, only "The Girl Hunters" accurately conveys the feel of Mickey Spillane's fiction.Aldrich and actor Ralph Meeker present a private eye opportunist seen from the outside--brutal, energetic, eyes on the main chance, cunning rather than bright. He's too large for his suit, a hustler busting out of his own clothes and the place he has in the world. A sly comment on slick, 1950's grassroots capitalist greed."The Girl Hunters" and star Spillane give you Mike Hammer the way he sees himself--reasonable, but dedicated; taking care of business the way he needs to in an uneasy environment. A solid citizen, good to friends, but "someone terrible", a civic benefactor with a .45 under his coat and the will to use it.The only major difference I recall between book and screenplay comes when Hammer enters the tough waterfront bar where he's not welcome. The novel has a routine fight at the door. The movie shows Mike out-menace the ice pick- wielding bouncer while displaying his trademark homicidal grin, "the one with all the teeth." Interestingly, Lloyd Nolan, the white-haired Fed in the film, portrayed Brett Halliday's detective Mike Shayne in seven movies for 20th Century-Fox in the 1940's. You might check out the DVD package. Its features discuss Halliday's books, solid mass market hardboiled mysteries.Spillane took this type of urban adventurer and invigorated him with the Old Testament rigidity of Stonewall Jackson, Jack Dempsey's love of hands-on violence, and the populist wrath of a John Brown. His far more gutsy, hugely selling novels wove working class attitudes into fiercely climaxing revenge fantasies. The on-screen fight in "The Girl Hunters" between Hammer and the Dragon had no equal for pitiless savagery in 1963.In 1923 Carroll John Daly put the first hardboiled wise-cracking private detective into pulp magazine print. He represents a different stream from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Daly's action tales have roots in rough-and-ready American culture. The big-talking river raftsmen in HUCKLEBERRY FINN and the folk yarns of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill display the same out-sized swagger as Daly's private eye Race Williams.Williams admitted that he could walk into a room filled with clues and not find a single one. His style of detecting was to fling open the door and start shooting, then sort things out as they flew. Spillane read and admired Daly, writing him a revealing fan letter after achieving success.Spillane gave the Race Williams bumptious folk hero contemporary visceral impact. He described his work as "the chewing gum of American literature". However, his books do more than exercise eye muscles.America's classic paranoid rant remains the same for rich and poor, Left and Right: Somewhere, somehow, someone is doing me dirt and I won't stand for it any longer! From 1947 to 1952 Mike Hammer shot men and women, kicked the guilty as well as the innocent, and broke teeth other than his own exorcising that rage. He came back after a decade in THE GIRL HUNTERS novel, which focuses our smoldering abstract anger on a world-girdling spy ring at the service of the international Communist conspiracy.Thank God it can be thrown into disarray by a lone American woman loose in the Soviet Union. (To learn what happens to Velda, the invisible Maguffin, read the book's direct sequel THE SNAKE.) Thank Him again that we have a howitzer-packing rogue private eye who can shrug off seven years of drunken debilitation (and repeated merciless beatings from a former best friend) to get ugly with foreign assassins nestled in our midst.Philosopher Ayn Rand named Spillane in her Objectivist newsletter as her favorite author. Why? His stories did not deal in moral grey areas. Bad was black, good was white. She liked that. Yet the truth of Spillane's fiction has more twists.Mike Hammer himself knows that he's a kill-crazy psycho. If you read nothing else of Mickey Spillane's, you might take time for the first chapter of ONE LONELY NIGHT. Hammer spends the rest of that book brooding over why a woman he has just saved from a gunman jumps to her death in an icy river after taking one searching look at the expression on his face.He comes to the soul-soothing epiphany that he's a killer designed by nature to kill killers. That's his destiny. He's a walking American revenge machine, a wish-fulfillment figure from the unquiet depths of our national psyche."The Girl Hunters" presents this raw-hewn character straight, without any intermediary meddling. However you may like the approaches taken by Ralph Meeker or Armando Assante or Stacey Keach, the movie's credits have it right--Mickey Spillane is Mike Hammer. The Hammer on the page is a foot taller than Spillane on screen; otherwise they're identical.

RanchoTuVu Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane) is found drunk and passed out by a police cruiser in an alley; he's taken to excessive drinking since the abduction of his girlfriend and secretary Velma, and is no good to himself or anyone else. Given a second chance and a new license to carry his cannon like .45 by new-found friend and FBI agent Rickerby (Lloyd Nolan) he sets out to find Velma and in the process meets the beautiful Laura Knapp (Shirley Eaton) who he first sees in her bikini as she's getting a suntan on an inflated raft in her pool. She makes a good femme fatale and has a neat seduction scene with him in her dark living room one night. Rickerby puts Hammer on the trail of "The Dragon" (Larry Taylor) a Soviet killer who might be connected to Velma's disappearance as well. The plot is difficult to follow, names are tossed out, and the viewer's job is to try and connect the dots. The pace is all right, directed by veteran Roy Rowland, and Spillane, though he isn't Olivier, grows on you as the film heads into a surprisingly violent ending.

Steve Tarter It isn't that Mickey Spillaine can't act that makes this movie so awful. It's everything--from the amateurish directing and Neanderthal script to the annoying trumpet blasts that rise out of the soundtrack.There's absolutely nothing about this film that works. Everybody fawns over Mike hammer the whole time--with the exception of the mean cop who used to be his friend. There's your plot line.Here's a long shot but it could be that the producers of Goldfinger saw this bomb and stole a couple of items from it (no one would know since about 16 people ever saw this film on its release). First Shirley Eaton--the only woman in this thing --went on to stardom as the golden girl. And there's a scene before the big fight where the bad guy fires his hat Oddjob-style at our hero.What is about guys that can't act (and know it)? They seem to want to bring along others with the same deficiency. So Spillaine has several scenes with a real-life newspaper columnist that rank up there as some of the worst in the movie and, therefore, of all time.If you want something to do while watching this turkey, count the number of times Hammer pulls on and off his trenchcoat. London Fog had to be involved in the production.As for Mike Hammer movies, stay away from "Girl Hunters" and stick with Ralph Meeker and "Kiss me Deadly."