Word: hammering
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...most obvious failure was in casting Elliot as Hammer. A shortish guy with a strident, high-pitched voice, he's like a teenager playing Hammer in a school pageant, and he's dressed in a trenchcoat so oversize, it seems to be holding Chuck Bednarik's shoulder pads. Elliot is further undercut by the dialogue. "I like to stick my neck out," he tells Charlotte, "Makes me think I'm tough." (Mike can't have the pretense of toughness; he's got to exude it.) In one scene, Elliot's Mike is knocked out cold when bad-guy Paul Dubov...
...Long Night, with Anthony Quinn as a non-Hammer hero with amnesia, is a drab affair, and My Gun Is Quick buried its chance at B-minus competence with another unknown, inapt Hammer, Robert Bray. You might say that Spillane should always have played him, as he does in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. (Richard Wright, of Native Son fame, is the only other best-selling novelist I know who played his own major character in a movie. Anyone know others?) But that would be to overrate Spillane's hulking amateurism. He has fun in the movie, but maneuvers only...
...ultimate villain (who goes up in flames). But they changed the Mafia to an, I don't know, atomic-weapons gang. It's as if the Rosenbergs didn't give the Russians the plans for a bomb but the bomb itself. They also perverted the relationship of Hammer and his police buddy, Pat Chambers. Wesley Addy's Pat is so drawling and insinuating in his banter with Hammer, he might be making a gay play...
...Hammer personality got an overhaul too. This Mike isn't a lonely knight, or even a psycho with a hero complex. He's a sleazy guy in a slimy business - his specialty is divorce cases - who does mean things for fun. I still remember, from seeing the film 51 years ago, a scene where Hammer picks up a man's beloved old Caruso record and snaps it in two. (The same year I'd seen Blackboard Jungle, where the vicious high-school punks smash a teacher's Bix Beiderbecke records. So I knew Mike was a bad guy.) The music...
...chain you to the power of first-person narrative. Spillane puts you inside the thick, teeming skull of some modern-medieval creature - part Galahad, part dragon - and locks you there. You may want out, but you also want to stay, if only to see how similar Mike Hammer's atavistic codes and instincts are to yours, and how swiftly and deftly Spillane etches this urban underworld. (As novelist Mirian Ann Moore says, "Nobody ever hit a noun against a verb like Mickey Spillane...