Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

sol (There are Spoilers) Laying in the gutter dead drunk with a possible fractured skull Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane, is picked up by the police. Instead of being brought to the local hospital for emergency treatment he's brought to the hospice ward to talk to this dying man who's about to kick off. Small time hood Richie Cole, Murray Kash, will only talk to Hammer and no one else and with everyone out of his hospital room, where Cole is on life-support, he spurts out a few puzzling words before checking out for good. The only thing that the inebriated Mike Hammer can make out to Cole's babbling is Velda and the Dragon. It turns out that the reason for Hammer having this farewell chat with Cole is that the dying man was shot with the same gun that killed Senator Leon Knapp in a burglary of his wife's Laura, Shirley Eaton, jewelery in their upstate New York home.It was Cole's mention of Velda Mike Hammer's private secretary who's been missing for years, and the reason he became an alcoholic, that got him excited and willing to go all out to solve Cole's murder in that there's now evidence that she's alive not dead like everyone, including Mike Hammer, thought. Hammer is also contacted by Federal, or CIA, Agent Arthur Rickerby, Llyod Noland, who tells him the truth about the now departed Cole in that he was both CIA and undercover in Europe investigating this super-secret Commie spy ring called Butterfly Two.It just happened that Cole hooked up with Velda who's also CIA, which Hammer didn't know about, in trying to exposed the Commie spies but were found out about through a mole in the US government this lead to both Cole's and Senator Napp's murder. In fact, Hammer later learns, that Senator Knapp's death over a jewel robbery was only a red herring in order for the US State Department not to realize that he was killed because he came too close, like Cole & Velda, in finding out about this Butterfly Two spy ring.Feeling that Velda is still alive Hammer sobers up, even though he's constantly in bars and drinking mugs of beer all throughout the movie, and goes out to find who was responsible for Cole's and Senator Napp's murder. Hammer sensing that their killer is now out to get the missing and elusive Velda who's the only one who not only knows his identity but who he works for: Butterfly Two. Checking out the secret's of the Butterfly Two spy organization with his good friend news columnist Hy Gardner Hammer finds out that it existed in Europe will before the Commies took over Czarist Russia. The organization was infiltrated by the Commies after WWI and is now in the process of secretly overthrowing all the free world governments, from within. Making their demises look like popular revolutions without the leaders of the free world knowing that it's really the Commies who are doing it. It turns out that the very existence of freedom and democracy in the world now hinges on the broad shoulders of private dick Mike Hammer who goes out to put a stop to Butterfly Two but also to find and rescue his secretary and girlfriend Velda. Despite being an obvious Neanderthal, in his brutal and no holds bar dealings with the enemies of freedom and democracy, Hammer's unique caveman-like charm does in fact score points with the fairer sex. We see him get classy and refined Laura Knapp, the dead Senator Knapp's wife, to practically jump in the sack with him the first time she lays her eyes on the big gorilla. Laura even strips down to the most reveling of bikinis, that would be allowed to be shown on the screen back then in 1963, wherever Hammer shows up at Laura's place in his investigation of her husbands murder.Finding out from a number of close friends and informants that this mysterious Dragon is the Commies, or Butterfly Two, top assassin Hammer now knows that times running out on Velda and that she's sure to be knocked off if he doesn't stop him and stop him soon. With the help of his newsboy friend Duck-Duck, Clive Endersby, who left him in this secret letter inside a magazine the location where he can find Velda, dead or alive, Hammer tracks down the Dragon that leads to a knock down and drag out fight. The Dragon ends up getting the worst of it with him being impaled with a spike driving through his right hand in order to keep him from escaping justice; it looked like Hammer in his excitement to save Valda forgot to take his handcuff along.The movie ends without any Velda, which makes you wonder if there's a part II in the works, but with Mike Hammer discovering who the mole that's feeding Butterfly Two all this top secret information is. He turns out to be someone that anybody watching the movie would have guessed it is as soon as he, or her, appeared on the screen. Even though his acting in the movie was really nothing to write home about Mickey Spillane did very much look the part of his creation Mike Hammer, The mans got a face that looked as if it was used by the US Navy's 16 inch guns for target practice. Not really an actor, just playing himself, Mickey Spillane did show he can handle the part of the durable and brutal Mike Hammer especially when he gets, or gives in return, the hell beat out of him. What did surprise me about Spillane in how cool and confident he was with the ladies who, besides the gorgeous Laura Knapp, just couldn't resist the big lug no matter how crude and uncouth he acted towards them.

Ripshin Granted, the other posters have valid comments.......Spillane cannot really act. However, for some bizarre reason, his stilted, monotone delivery works for me.My major complaint, regarding acting, would have to concern Scott Peters, as Hammer's former partner. He screeches his way through every scene he's in, and he makes it completely unbelievable that his character could ever have been friends with Hammer.The soundtrack is indeed grating. The crashing score overpowers many of the scenes, derailing the film noirish approach to the material.Eaton is indeed great, although the usually wonderful Nolan comes across as a bit cartoonish.That all being said, I still recommend this film, if only for the experience of seeing Spillane play his own creation.One side note: WHAT happened to Velda????

jantoniou I was shocked to see a movie with a writer actually playing one of his characters, especially one as iconic--or, at least, notable--as Mike Hammer. I can only recall Stephen King playing in some of his scripts, but even then he did not tend to be a major, featured character. His stories have soared most with great actors, writing, and directing behind them ("The Green Mile," "Shawshank Redemption," "The Shining," "Misery," and many others).Mickey Spillane is woefully short of King's humility, though. The movie has an intriguing plot, but is convoluted beneath the weight of bad acting and mostly wretched delivery. The dialogue is actually pretty believable, all things considered, but you can feel the crowd assembled on the screen is mostly amateurs. The amateurish feel coupled with the somewhat on-target dialog sort of coupled to create a more "fun" movie than what is probably intended and it stays thin on the noir-ish elements, which often seem clichéd in most movies anyway.Spillane is generally horrible as a supposed slick lady's man--which Stacy Keach carried off much more believably with his charisma and acting chops, if not looks, on television. Spillane's pretty dry and one-note as Hammer, but at least he doesn't tend to ham it up. In fact, I'm not sure he is capable of ham.Shirley Eaton is excellent as the eye candy and Hammer's love interest, but Spillane just butchers some of his lines with her; for example, when she asks Hammer if he loves her, Spillane lowly rasps in the back of his throat, "I think I do, baby." It's really a pretty lame attempt at being emotional. And, kissing together? Just horrible face-mashing and a real waste of such an exquisite beauty as Eaton's. Spillane just has no idea how to be expressive and believable; his face is just a pancake throughout the movie. It gives a certain "naturalism" to the movie, but probably not in a good way for someone that needs to be as dynamic as Mike Hammer.Though it would have been very easy to have it, there is almost no dramatic tension in this movie, just a series of pasted-together scenes that Spillane meanders through. On a highly superficial level it works--the basic pieces ultimately fit--but there's no elegance to the design, probably due to lack of presentation on the part of most of the actors.The story is good enough to be re-made as a true noir-ish exploit, but the acting and stylistic elements need a real working through.