User Reviews

The Mike Hammer adventure My Gun Is Quick survives against some pretty steep odds. First, it comes from the paw of Mickey Spillane, with the problems that implies; its cast and crew are (and were) unknowns; it's all but forgotten; and what little word of mouth circulates around it tends to be dismissive. But, like the curate's egg, it's not too bad, and parts of it are pretty good.

Hammer (Robert Bray), on stakeout for the last 52 hours, staggers into a diner for another cup of joe. He flirts with a young hooker, giving her bus fare back to Nebraska. When she's found dead the next morning, he takes it personally. A baroque ring she wore turns out to have come from an Italian treasure stolen during the war. Seeking to avenge her killing, Hammer, in the inflexible tradition of Los Angeles private eyes, works his way along the underbelly of the City of Angels to the missing loot and the murderers.

It's not quite the same town where earlier gumshoes Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart and Robert Montgomery plied their trade. As in the memorable Mike Hammer movie Kiss Me Deadly of two years earlier, it's the late-Eisenhower L.A. of freeways and oil derricks and strip clubs, a changing landscape where the Mexican presence can no longer be ignored. Even the wealthy live in cold, '50s-moderne showplaces of spindly blonde furniture and plate glass walls draped with sheers. But Hammer's quest is the old and familiar one of multiple murders, duplicity and femmes fatales of increasing lethality.

Wisely, the movie takes Hammer 'as is.' It doesn't pull back from his easy violence, his racism ('greaseball' is a favorite epithet), and his misogyny ('Off my back, chick – I'm tired!' he bellows at his secretary Velda). But it keeps its distance and doesn't glamorize him, either (though it does grant him his primitive 'code').

The movie (shot in black and white by Harry Neumann, with over 350 titles to his credit) has an almost retro look to it, and there's a jazzy, percussive score by Marlin Skiles, another unsung veteran of countless genre programmers. The acting stays serviceable and occasionally better, but the script keeps careless track of some of the plot strands (the man from Amsterdam gets misplaced entirely). My Gun Is Quick boasts one distinctive passage: Hammer looks in from an upstairs window down at a chaotic scene crowded with police, ambulance drivers and several of the characters, as a body is wheeled away. It's filmed entirely without dialogue, the only sounds being the wind, the surf and the muted music of bongo drums.

This film has been on my 'must see' list for years and I finally got to see it recently. It is probably one of the better low budget detective yarns of the late 50s and is improved by having a producer (Victor Saville) very familiar with his material having produced two earlier Spillane/Hammer films. Robert Bray is excellent as an unshaven worn out Mike Hammer and is well supported by the rest of the cast. The script and location photography are good and the music suitably sleazy and atmospheric. What lets it down is the predictable ending, often a problem with Spillane stories - it's nearly always 'the dame that dunnit'. My favourite Hammer film is the first version of 'I, The Jury' which benefits from some superb noir imagery. This film isn't quite that good but is a serviceable and very entertaining movie.

(Some Spoilers) Somewhat better then you would have expected Mike Hammer flick with Robert Bray in the leading role as the tough as nails private eye who gets involved in a slew of murders as well as a hunt for the missing one million dollars Venacci Jewel collection. All this because he took the time and effort to help a young girl named Red, Jan Chaney, from Nebraska get herself straightened out and go, with Mike handing her a twenty, back home to mama and the boy she left behind.

It's when Red is found dead, in a suspicious hit and run accident, with his name and address on her that Hammer goes into action in finding who's responsible for Red's untimely death; that he rightfully feels was a murder not an accident. It's when Hammer finds that this usual ring, with a V craved on it, that Red had on her was missing that he had his girl Friday, or secretary, Velda, Pamela Duncan, check it out for him.

Finding out, from an 10 year old Time Magazine cover, the ring belonged to the long lost Venacci jewelry collection it became obvious that was the reason for Red's murder. Hammer traces down two persons who can help him break the case of the murdered redhead who happened to work with her at the nightclub the "Blue Bell". As expected the two persons whom Hammer got in contact with dancer Maria Garcia, Genie Coree, and the deft mute janitor Jane, Terrance De Morney, ended up being murdered before they can help Hammer in finding Red's killer or killers.

The one clue that Hammer, with the help of his secretary Velda, came up with was what would lead him to find why and who was behind not only Red's but Jane and Marie's murders as well. It had to do with a rented apartment that was occupied by Col. Holloway, Donald Randolph, just after he was discharged from the military after the end of WWII. It was Col.Holloway, a US intelligence officer, who in fact stole the valuable Venacci Jewelry collection while he was serving with the US Army in Germany back in 1945! Having spent ten years behind bars Holloway was soon to be released from jail and it was certain to Hammer, with the jewels never being found, that the Venacci Jewels were somewhere hidden in that apartment that Holloway rented. What Hammer didn't know at the time is that not only Holloway was interested in finding the long lost, or hidden, Venacci Jewels but a gang of murderous jewels thieves lead by Frenchman LaRoche, Peter Mamakos, were also looking for them!

A bit below average, compared to the previous Mike Hammer movie "Kiss Me Deadly", "My Gun is Quick" is rescued by actor Robert Bray's interpretation of the ruthless and unprincipled Mike Hammer portrayed by Ralph Meeker in the aforementioned film. In that Bray's Hammer, in the film "My Gun is Quick", has a heart of gold and played strictly by the rules. That besides him being as convincing, if not more so, as Meeker was in showing how brutal and ruthless Mike Hammer can be when he wanted to get information as well as slug it out with the bad guys.

This in fact took away Hammer's both bad guy and anything to get results image and made you for once like him. Instead of making him, like Ralph Meeker, the best of a bad lot compared to those he fought which Mike Hammer comes across as in almost all of the films he's portrayed in.

"Additional music composer" for MY GUN IS QUICK was the first film job held by John Towner Williams, then 25 years old, and later of JAWS, STAR WARS, INDIANA JONES, SCHINDLER'S LIST, etc., etc. fame. Most of William's work between MGIQ and JAWS was for television (Gilligan's Island, and so forth), though he might have made a few feature film ripples with the Gidget series. However, I think most movie-goers may have first encountered this Max Steiner of his day with the score of the drive-in thriller, DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING (1969), to which Williams contributed. Personally, I found the score for MY GUN IS QUICK overbearing, on a par with the whole needlessly brazen sound design and Robert Bray's testosterone-laden crude caricature of a Sam Spade-type private eye. However, I suppose for some people the crass, cheap, brassy knock-off civilian investigator Mickey Spillane offered with his Mike Hammer character is preferable to the greater thought put into Dashiell Hammett's anti-hero earlier, or the compelling libertarian sentiments John D. McDonald set forth later with his Travis McGee character. So the crude MGIQ soundtrack serves as sort of a poor man's version of the far superior score for the Frank Sinatra vehicle, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, which opens with very similar percussion riffs.

The plot of MY GUN IS QUICK is mighty convoluted, perhaps to cover the fact that the characterizations are paper-thin, with few likely to care about those peopling the silver screen therein. If DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a 10 in the pantheon of film noir achievement, MGIQ would be lucky to garner a rating of 2 or 3. Nevertheless, John Williams is SO important to the movie world, this misfire merits a "6" just on its status as an historical curiosity.

Location footage in a movie is great, particularly one from an era like the 1950s, but unfortunately, what should be expected for a complex but fairly easy story to follow a convoluted mess. Robert Bray, an actor I had never heard of before, is private detective Mike Hammer, and he gets involved in the murder of a prostitute he attempted to defend in a greasy spoon diner.

The case becomes more than he bargained for as he becomes involved with a group of sleazy International criminals involved in a mysterious racket, with Hammer dealing with a missing piece of jewelry that was on the murdered woman. certainly, the vintage footage of various Los Angeles location is interesting, even though many of them have been utilized in other low-budget thrillers of the same time.

A very tense scene in a junkyard with one of the characters in danger of being crushed by falling chunks of metal ends up being a complete letdown. The cast of complete unknowns meanders around, going through his emotions to do as they are directed and to recite the lines that they have learned, but there are definite problems with the linear construction the flow of the story, and this sinks quickly into the port of Los Angeles where it finally concludes after long sequences of complete silence with nothing but the repetitive musical score to keep the audience from falling asleep.