Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled private “detective” Mike Hammer first appeared in the writer’s debut novel I, The Jury in 1947. Spillane filled the Hammer stories with scandalous – for the time period – violence and sex. Critics frowned on the hundreds of millions in book sales that followed but readers continue to make the many Mike Hammer novels a success to this very day.
The Mike Hammer movies, on the other hand, have always been a very mixed bunch of projects. The expression “from the ridiculous to the sublime” has never been more fitting than it is for those films, from the 1950s onward, from the U.S. to Japan. Here are some standouts, in no particular order.
MICKEY SPILLANE’S MIKE HAMMER (1954) – This was a failed pilot for what would have been the first Mike Hammer television series. Brian Keith starred as the title dick (as it were) while Blake Edwards wrote and directed, years before his Peter Gunn series.
In my opinion, trying to do Mike Hammer on television was as bad an idea as Spillane’s own novels which set the P.I. in any decade later than the 1950s. This 1954 effort is an exception to my tv rule because it was deemed TOO VIOLENT FOR TELEVISION and was never aired!
Now that’s more like it! The raw violence and lurid sex of Spillane’s novels were what made Mike Hammer stand out. Anything less than Quentin Tarantino levels of sex and violence has been what doomed most Hammer productions on the big screen, let alone the small.
Spillane didn’t exactly concoct ground-breaking mysteries, so the adult elements were what fueled sales of his novels. Stripped of those elements, any story is just a pale imitation of Mike Hammer. As much as I like Darren McGavin, his 1958-1960 Mike Hammer series is way too tame and plays like any other bland detective series of the era.
Brian Keith is great as the title character in this pilot and I’d love to see how he’d have done in a cinematic depiction of Spillane’s hero. Robert Bice is adequate in the thankless role of police captain Pat Chambers, but the absence of Hammer’s secretary Velda is a serious blow to the production.
Typical of so many Mike Hammer stories, there’s no client. The misanthrope is filled with personal rage and decides to take down a gangster when he sees the man’s gunsels kill a paper boy as collateral damage when they mow down a potential mob witness.
THE MOST TERRIBLE TIME IN MY LIFE (1993 in Japan, 1994 in the U.S.) – Masatoshi Nagase IS Maiku Hama, the Japanese rendering of the name Mike Hammer. This unusual film, directed and co-written by Kaizo Hayashi, is in black & white for all but the final 20 minutes.
The Most Terrible Time in My Life starts out so slavishly derivative of Mickey Spillane, Film Noir and Seijun Suzuki that a viewer finds themselves wondering if this is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. Hama comes to the aid of a Taiwanese waiter living in Yokohama, Japan. The waiter wants Maiku to find his missing brother, which investigation leads Hama to over the top violence, the Yakuza, gangster warfare and a secret vendetta between the Taiwanese brothers.
Our title detective gets a finger cut off and reattached at one point in the midst of the routine severe beatings that Mike Hammer usually suffers. Some of the beatings come from his old, revered detective sensei, Jo Shishido, the “cheeky” Japanese star of gritty crime cinema. (He’s sort of the Eddie Constantine of Japan, so his appearance as Hama’s mentor is an iconic moment.) Continue reading
Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog takes another look at some of the ongoing scandals, failures and disasters under the Joe Biden Regime. And remember – BIDEN STILL HAS MORE “KIDS IN CAGES” THAN EITHER TRUMP OR OBAMA DID. Gee, how come Biden supporters don’t still hold their protests about kids being in cages? Oh, yeah, because they never really cared about those kids in the first place, they just used them as a political stick. 
FINAL FOUR: FIRST BERTH – The 4 seeds – the CROWN COLLEGE PURPLE STORM – went up against the 5th seeded ARLINGTON BAPTIST UNIVERSITY PATRIOTS. 
FINAL FOUR: SECOND BERTH – Up next the top seeded GREAT LAKES CHRISTIAN COLLEGE CRUSADERS played the 8 seeds – the EMMAUS BIBLE COLLEGE EAGLES. 
CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON Vol 1 #180 (December 1974) 
FIRST SEMIFINAL – The top seeded PAUL QUINN COLLEGE TIGERS (should be the Purple Tigers) took the court against the 4 seeds – the BRYANT & STRATTON COLLEGE AT ALBANY BOBCATS. 
Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’ve never made any secret of my fondness for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. I’m even a huge fan of the 2017 continuation of the series. Well, for the most part. I could have done without the introduction of time traveling into the series and the notion of Laura Palmer being some sort of Chosen One figure. 
Here at Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog I’ve long pointed out that one of the many things that drove so many like me away from the Democrats is the way that financially comfortable Democrats are every bit as callous and uncaring toward the working class and the poor as the richest snobs ever were. 
DAY ONE: GAME ONE – The 3rd seeded BRYANT & STRATTON COLLEGE AT BUFFALO BOBCATS took on the 6 seeds – the NEWPORT NEWS APPRENTICE SCHOOL BUILDERS (as in Shipbuilders). 
GEORGES (1843) – Published just one year before The Three Musketeers, this novel is not only a rollicking adventure full of action, romance and double-crosses but it deals with racial issues in such a way that you would have thought it would have been adapted for film four or five decades ago. The title character uses his sword to fight slavery! 
Balladeer's Blog 