My Gun Is Quick (Parklane Pictures, United Artists, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 11) I wanted to watch a film on Turner Classic Movies: My Gun Is Quick (1957), third in producer Victor Saville’s cycle of films based on Mickey Spillane’s granite-boiled detective Mike Hammer. My husband Charles came home from work in the middle of it, and it’s still a mystery to me why a filmmaker best known for his marvelous series of musicals starring British dance star Jessie Matthews – The Good Companions (1932), Evergreen (1934), First a Girl (1935, a remake of a German film from 1933 that ultimately became the basis for the 1982 movie Victor/Victoria), and It’s Love Again (1936) – wanted to take on so hard-boiled a character in a genre so different from the Matthews musicals as film noir. Saville set up an independent company called “Parklane Pictures” to make the Hammer films and cut a distribution and release deal with United Artists. He also used different actors to play Mike Hammer in each film: Biff Elliott in I, the Jury (1953); Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly (1955); and Robert Bray, who got an “Introducing” credit even though he’d made 32 films already, here. And Saville co-directed My Gun Is Quick himself (under the name “Phil Victor”) with George A. White, a long-time film editor whose only directorial credit is this one. The film opens in a cheap diner where Hammer hangs out and has a love-hate relationship with the owner, Shorty (Phil Arnold). Then again, Mike Hammer seems to have a love-hate relationship with everybody, including his long-suffering secretary Velda (Pamela Duncan), whom he keeps working well into the night without so much as giving her a lunch break. He finally throws her a chopped-egg sandwich he got her at that diner while he was rendezvousing with Red (a nicely drawn performance by Jan Chaney), a good-looking girl who came to L.A. with dreams of Hollywood stardom in her eyes whose attempts either at a movie career or any other respectable job went nowhere. We get the impression she’s turning tricks to survive and an unpleasant man named Louis (Richard Garland) is her pimp, though screenwriters Richard Powell and Richard Collins had to keep this veiled to get it past the Production Code.

Hammer takes pity on her and gives her a large bankroll, telling her to use it to buy herself new clothes and buy a ticket back home to Nebraska. He also notices that she’s wearing an unusual ring, a large one with a V-shaped figure surrounded by crossbars. Later that night, Hammer hears from his friend/enemy on the official Los Angeles Police Department, Captain Pat Chambers (Booth Coleman), that Red was found dead that night, the apparent victim of an automobile accident. Hammer immediately becomes convinced that Red was murdered, especially since when her body was found it was missing that ring. He’s able to trace her to the strip club where she worked, run by a hard-bitten woman boss played by Claire Coleman, where he meets her former roommate Maria (billed as Gina Core but really Gina Maria Hidalgo, and definitely portrayed as a person of color, though at first I “read” her as a light-skinned Black woman instead of a Latina). Hammer learns that all the criminals are after a cache of Nazi-looted jewels of which Red’s ring was one, and later he finds the body of a mute Frenchman who couldn’t speak because of the tortures the Nazis inflicted on him during World War II. The jewels were stolen by Herrmann Goering’s men and in turn were re-stolen by an American officer, Col. Holloway (Donald Randolph), who served a 10-year prison sentence for the theft but never revealed to anyone where the jewels were. Hammer also runs into a mystery woman named Nancy Williams (Whitney Blake) who lives alone in a lavish beachfront home, She was once Col. Holloway’s lover and also had an affair with a married man (she doesn’t specify whether Col. Holloway was the married man or not) whose wife committed suicide when she found out about his extra-relational activities. Hammer is also repeatedly beaten up by a gang of three Frenchmen who are looking for the stolen jewels, and in one chilling scene they try to put Hammer out of their way once and for all by cornering him in a junkyard and trying to dump a large amount of scrap metal on his head. (He ducks and moves out of the way just in time, of course.)

Like I, the Jury – the only Spillane novel either Charles or I have actually read – My Gun Is Quick rips off a lot from Dashiell Hammett in general and The Maltese Falcon in particular. The confrontation scene between Hammer and Col. Holloway is so much like the one between Sam Spade and Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon it’s a wonder Hammett didn’t sue (unless he was too drunk to care by then), and like both The Maltese Falcon and I, the Jury, it ends with the detective realizing that his girlfriend is the killer he’s after. The final confrontation between Hammer and Nancy Williams on her speedboat, in which she tries to get him to take her out of the country and flee with her to Mexico, while he insists that he’s going to drive her back to the mainland and turn her in, is very much patterned on the one between Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. (At least he doesn’t kill her himself the way he did in I, the Jury, which after I read it I described as, “A testosterone-fueled high-school boy trying to write his own version of The Maltese Falcon.”) The only Mike Hammer movie I’d seen before this was Kiss Me Deadly, which has acquired a cult reputation because Robert Aldrich was the director and a number of future stars got their starts in it (notably Cloris Leachman, who plays the damsel in distress Hammer takes an interest in who gets knocked off almost immediately in the first reel, the same sort of character Jan Chaney plays here but with a lot more nuance and richness), and My Gun Is Quick (a silly title) is O.K. sleazy fun, but there’s a difference between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler on one hand and Mickey Spillane on the other. Hammett’s and Chandler’s detectives got played by reputable actors: Humphrey Bogart, Ricardo Cortez, Warren William, William Powell, Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum (alas, about 30 years too late, but that’s another story).

The actors who played Mike Hammer were Biff Elliott, Ralph Meeker, Robert Bray, Darren McGavin (on a TV series that ran for two years in the late 1950’s and which I caught on reruns in the late 1960’s), and on one occasion, in 1963’s British-made The Girl Hunters, Mickey Spillane himself. It was only in later decades that Chandler’s Philip Marlowe got stuck with outrageously miscast actors like George Montgomery, James Garner, and Elliott Gould, while Mike Hammer got a new lease on life with a premium-cable TV show with Stacy Keach. One quite good aspect of My Gun Is Quick is the musical score by Martin Skiles, who was obviously tuned in to the 1950’s jazz scene in L.A. He not only wrote an exciting main theme full of jazz bits, he clearly got some of the top West Coast jazz musicians to play in the strip club scenes – and only a drummer who aggressively beats on his tom-toms to make the band sound more like “strip music” lets us know we’re not supposed to be focusing on the playing as such. Skiles also co-wrote a song with Stanley Styne called “Blue Bells” (though for some reason I keep thinking the title should be “Blue Balls”) which becomes the theme song for Dione (Patricia Donahue), the stripper who’s in league with the baddies and whose job in the plot is to offer Hammer her keys (if there were ever a straight male character who’s led around by his dick, it’s Mike Hammer) so he shows up at her apartment expecting a night of hot sex – and instead he’s confronted by Col. Holloway for their Maltese Falcon-style confrontation even though Donald Randolph’s Holloway is considerably slenderer than Sydney Greenstreet’s Casper Gutman.