'MY GUN IS QUICK'......AND I NEED ANGER MANAGEMENT......

 My Gun is Quick (1957)

         When it comes to films derived from the brutal pulp mysteries of Mickey Spillane, there's only one every buff remembers.....Robert Aldrich's 1955 'Kiss Me Deadly'. Who can forget that punch-em-up bodies galore noir, with its glowing box and finale nuclear meltdown. 

         So it's fitting that here at BQ, we unearthed a Spillane/Mike Hammer caper that nobody ever heard of......filled with similar raw energy but not much imagination. (No nuclear meltdowns...darn...)

        Here Mickey's take-no-prisoners P.I. Hammer is embodied by amiable, B-minus toiler Robert Bray. Bray's a big 'n tall galoot, similar in formidable build to James Arness and towers over everyone else in the cast. (You might remember him as the bus driver in the Marilyn Monroe "Bus Stop")

          But Bray's not so good at projecting threat and danger, so he overcompensates by erupting in angry rages while delivering most of his dialogue. (Years later, he settled into an easier, more suitable role as a friendly Forest Ranger in the long running 'Lassie' TV series.)

          Come to think of it, almost everybody in the film nurses a short fuse, but that's perfect for this rough tough little low budget pulper, filled with hubba-hubba dames and an escalating body count. 

          Hammer, through a late night coffee shop encounter with a pretty would-be actress, ends up on the trail of a priceless stash of stolen European jewels. His hunt leads him into the willing arms of a vivacious divorcee (a gorgeous Whitney Blake, later to settle into a career as a TV sitcom mom). But in addition to falling for the smokin' hot Whitney, Hammer's up against a reptilian aristocrat Col.Holloway (Donald Randolph), who's lusting after the jewels the same way Sydney Greenstreet coveted the Maltese Falcon.

         Our forever hot-tempered hero toughs it out though, punching and shooting his way through anyone unlucky enough to get feisty with him. (Considering the film's poverty-level budget, there's a fairly ambitious junkyard sequence where Hammer almost gets hammered by a ton of scrap metal dropped on him from a crane.....)

            We'll not reveal the movie's big twist reveal, which is no surprise at all even if you only have a passing familiarity with detective story noir. But for us, it didn't make this modest little popcorny slug-a-thon any less enjoyable. 

             For curators/collectors of B Movie double feature fodder, it's worth checking out.  3 stars (***).

           The next similar bunch of these we promise to check out - the iconic 'Kiss Me Deadly' and 1963's "The Girl Hunters". (That one features, we josh you not....wait for it....author Mickey Spillane himself as Mike Hammer (!!)   Stay tuned......