Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

lucyrf Fabulous atmosphere, deep shadows, Venetian blinds, femmes fatale, a picaresque plot that leads from weirdo to weirdo. Everyone in Film Noir lived in a tiny flat that was just one room with a bed and a cooker. And a window for the rain to beat against. 50s fashion was supposed to be terribly ladylike (read "frumpy"), but what the girls wore was soooooo sexy. Tight sweaters, tight skirts, high heels. Anyone would think that psychoanalysts were just running a racket to fleece or blackmail their clients, like fortune tellers. "I'm no swami with a crystal ball." Why, whatever gave you that idea? I must put you under deep hypnosis. (I like the guy who has been at college for 20 years - moving from one seat of learning to another. He must be very educated by now. I suppose he was really selling dope, but this is not made very clear.)

thestarkfist My wife and I have been binge watching the old Charlie Chan films from the '30s and '40s. They are charmingly corny and seem to have laid the groundwork for every Scooby Doo story line that they ever did. There's been a murder in the Wax Museum and we're going to have to creep around in there at night searching for clues!! Scaaaarrryyy! As you might imagine a steady diet of this sort of film starts to leave you hungering for something a little more gritty and down-to-earth. At least that was the case with me. So I decided to watch "I, The Jury", just for kicks, baby. Now I have been aware of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer for some time, although I have never read a single novel nor watched a Mike Hammer flick before, so I was a little curious to see what a Mike Hammer movie was like. I did a little research on the film before I downloaded it and read that it was the first attempt to bring the two-fisted Hammer to the silver screen. Great, I thought. Usually Hollywood's first attempts are always closest to the source material. I was somewhat familiar with who the character was supposed to be; a hard-boiled loner who'd been around the track more than a couple of times and seen plenty. I was picturing him as being portrayed by a middle-aged actor with a few lines in his face, maybe a scar on his cheek, y'know, having a face that would speak of tough choices and brutal encounters. The IMDb write up listed the actor who plays Mike in this flick as being one Biff Elliot. Never heard of him and who would take a Batman sound effect as his stage name anyway? When the movie started I couldn't have been more surprised. Biff looks like a baby, all smooth faced and cherubic. He looked like he should have been appearing next to Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in some wacky high school musical! I'll give Biff credit; he tries with all his might to fill the character's shoes but, in the end, he is this movie's biggest flaw. And what a character Mike Hammer is! He's a slightly psychotic rogue with a hair-triggered temper. We're made aware of this fact in the opening scene where a reporter makes a flip remark to Mike as he's leaving the scene of the crime and he smashes him into the china cabinet. Here's the setup: it's Christmas time in the Big Apple and Mike's best friend catches a couple of slugs from a 45 as he's making out his Christmas cards. Mike shows up a short while later, having been summoned by the cops, and has a melt-down over the murder. The victim was a one-armed, former policeman who served with Hammer in WWII. He took the bayonet that was meant for Mike in the arm, which is why he only had one left. Anyway, Mike is furious and announces to the head detective that he's going to find his buddy's killer and put a 45 round in his rotten stinkin guts! Gee, Mike, maybe announcing to the police that you intend to commit murder isn't the best way to start a case! Knee jerk violence isn't Hammer's only character trait. Seems the dames can't resist him. Every babe in this flick, and there a plenty, wants Mike like your dog wants that Slim Jim that's slipped behind the couch pillows. There's Mike's smokin' hot secretary. There's a twisted couple of blonde twins who throw themselves at Mike whenever he shows up to ask them a few questions. And then there's the lady psychiatrist, who seems to have been treating every one of the suspects, as well as Mike's pal, for various complaints that are never elaborated on. She's the most smokin' and sultry of them all. Naturally Mike falls for her in a big way! As the movie rolls along Hammer gets to suck plenty of face but they never seem to take it any farther. This is 1957, after all, and there's not so much as a smidgen of bared flesh to be seen. There's a scene where Hammer is awoken from his bed by urgent knocking at his apartment door. He rises still wearing a shirt and tie! Whatta classy guy! As the story unfolds we are treated to quite a lurid tale indeed. The numbers racket, drug addiction and prostitution all figure prominently in the scheme of things. Mike gets to beat some guys up and takes a couple of beatings himself. (The next day there's nary a scratch on his baby face, natch!) In the end Hammer pumps that slug into the gut of the rotten stinkin' murderer, just like he said he would. The movie ends with Mike calling the police to report his act of murder while you run to the shower to wash this movie off of you! Charlie Chan and Mike Hammer inhabit two separate universes. In Charlie's world most people are basically honest and decent while Charlie himself is a tower of virtue. In Charlie's world criminals are and aberration. In Hammer's world most people are treacherous scoundrels and Hammer is none too clean and pure himself. In Hammer's world good guys, like his murdered buddy, who spent his days trying to help others, get gunned down in cold blood by the scum that they're forced to share the planet with. Both universes are laughable cartoons of reality, but that's where the fun comes from.

bmacv In 1953, I, The Jury became the first of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series to hit the screen, but it takes its cues from movies of 1947, when the book hit the kiosks. The yuletide cards serving as scene dividers, the violence counterpointed to Christmas carols recall The Lady in the Lake, while the duplicitous female psychiatrist reprises Helen Walker's Dr. Lilith Ritter in Nightmare Alley (the final, fatal tryst comes from the even earlier Double Indemnity).These echoes may have been attempts to invest Hammer with some respectability, linking him to the more subtle and textured characters of the 1940s. It's clear something had to be done with him, because Spillane went for raw sensation in a way that caused a sensation of its own. His private eye is uncouth, short-fused and randy but misogynist, bowing to no authority save his own (hence the title). Spillane luckily or shrewdly had as readers of his punch-drunk prose men who had survived overseas combat and were making up for lost time in the footloose, post-war prosperity; he gave them not just sex and violence but sex-and-violence.So in one sense, Biff Elliott makes an ideal Hammer, closer to Spillane's lout than his (relatively) spruced-up successors Ralph Meeker and Robert Bray (plus Armand Assante, in the marginally better 1982 remake of this title). He comes across as a Dead End kid grown up with a license and a gun, slow-witted but fast with his fists and his trigger.When his best friend, an insurance investigator and combat amputee, gets himself coldly killed, Hammer scours New York to avenge him. The urban locales bring out the talents of director of photography John Alton, who here tried his hand at the 3-D process (thus I, The Jury, along with Man in the Dark, The Glass Web and Second Chance, becomes one of the few noirs so filmed).The shoot-from-the-hip action, however, rides roughshod over any intricacies of the plot. Characters Hammer encounters stay generic, with the exception of Peggie Castle as the shrink. The film's last scene is hers, not Elliott's, as she moves into a languorous striptease that comes to a quick finale. For better or worse, it's an emblematic image that showcases Spillane's coarsened sensibility, his fusion of brutality and eroticism, and spells an end to the more freighted ambiguity that was a hallmark of the noir cycle.

jim riecken (youroldpaljim) This 1953 film is the first screen depiction of Mickey Spillanes famous detective character Mike Hammer and the only "film noir" I know of that was filmed in 3D. Other than that and the films memorable closing and opening scenes, this film isn't much. Most the cast is good, but the problem lies with the totally mis-cast Biff Elliot as Mike Hammer. He is to young and boyish looking. Ideally, Mike Hammer should be played by someone in their mid thirties or forties; old enough to have grown jaded and world weary, but still young enough to woo the babes and take the punches. Biff Elliot looks and acts like he just got out of detective school. Parklane productions blew it by casting Elliot, who not only wasn't the right type but an actor who never had any screen presence. No wonder he mostly never got more than bit parts after this. Being the first actor to play Mike Hammer is about the only role anyone recalls when his name comes up. Parklane did right in the next Mike Hammer film by casting Ralph Meeker. Even Robert Bray (MY GUN IS QUICK) made a more convincing Mike Hammer. In fact, even Armand Asante was better.