The Girl Hunters (1963)

Right off Mickey Spillane is no actor. I didn't expect Bogart when I went into this and I didn't get it. But that's not to say he didn't do an admirable job.This film from beginning to end is very intriguing and has so many twists and turns it'll keep you watchin right until the end credits.I think from what I've been reading the most talked about parts are how did Mike Hammer figure out that "The Dragon" was a team...2 people. I myself didn't think of this in terms of teams but I did know not long after about the middle of the film that the girl was involved. The one scene that convinced me was where the supposed assassin, The Dragon, takes a pot shot and Mike and the girl at the poolside. First off, how does a guy miss anyone from 20 feet away? He's suppose to be this ultra slick/successful assassin and he can't hit anyone from 20ft. away? I knew then that she was involved. It was just a scare tactic.The biggest hole and issue in this film to me is the motivation. Why did this girl get involved in this commie spy ring? That's the whole problem in why I don't rate this film higher. I mean she was no more than 3 or 4 years old at the formation of this ring. How 20 years later did she get involved with it? Why did she get involved? They leave you without a clue. That was the answer I wanted...and didn't get it.Don't worry about Spillane's acting, it wasn't too bad. Give this a go and wait for the end. I's brutal. Even by today's standards. Not much blood but a lot of violence. This was definitely worth a watch. I wish they still made these PI films.

Few writers get the chance to play their fictional creation on screen as pulp novelist Mickey Spillane does with his brutal private eye Mike Hammer. The aptly named Hammer is more heavy lift than finesse and the square shouldered, squint eyed Spillane along with his clipped voice allows for a nearly adequate PI interpretation. It is his words however that fail the picture with insipid dialog and a convoluted plot whose main intent seems to be to unleash graphic violence with more than a dash of sadism.Private eye Mike Hammer is off the wagon and on the sidewalk when police pick him up for public intoxication. His gal Friday has gone AWOL and probably dead and he can't shake the pain. When he finds out in the tank she may be alive he dries out and the plot thickens up with assassins an FBI agent and a doll or two.The marketing is clear on this shameless turkey from the erroneous title to the gratuitous violence and dolls in bikinis that must have dominated the trailer and lobby cards. Hunters is not without it's flashes of suspense and dark humor but they are brief and sometimes unintentional.

"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.

Enjoyed everything that Mickey Spillane wrote and enjoyed this film, but Mickey just did not fit into the role as Mike Hammer, he should have stayed at home by the typewriter. Even Hy Gardner, a famous, NYC newspaper reporter and Radio personality added greatly to this film with his assistance to Mike Hammer. Lloyd Nolan,(Federal Agent Arthur Rickerby), "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" gave a nice supporting role, who was a great Classic Actor in his early career in Hollywood. The real hot sexy number in this picture was Shirley Eaton,(Laura Knapp),"Goldfinger", who did everything she could to tease and please Mike Hammer in hot bathing attire by the pool and in the bedroom. By the way, Shirley Eaton was the girl painted in Gold Paint during the filming of "Goldfinger". Great classic black and white film you will not want to miss.