Khun Kru Mark
This movie has a reasonable approval rating among the reviews submitted so far, but I found it to be rather heavy handed and silly. I'm generally pretty forgiving with 'noirs' because I love them all but this one is mostly annoying from start to finish. Robert Bray would have made a pretty good Mike Hammer but is held back by an appalling script and implausible story. He's 'over the top' angry and 'over the top' gritty and his blind quest for justice for a dead hooker he met briefly in a cafe is not a reasonable or appropriate reaction.The private dick and his cop friend at odds across a table is pure comedy theater and ends up diminishing the on-screen relationship for the viewers rather than nourishing it.Some things to watch, though... loads of 1950s Los Angeles scenery (both indoors and outside) to soak in. The girls are pretty, too and Donald Randolph makes the most of his lines with a maniacal rendering of the Colonel Holloway role. But that aside - there's really nothing here to see. The story is long and drawn out with several scenes extended for periods of time with no dialog and seemingly no purpose. Watch it if you must... but don't say I didn't warn you!
MartinHafer
This is a very gritty low-budget Mickey Spillane film. Yet, despite having a no-name cast and every reason to believe it would stink, the film was very good and deserves to be seen. Robert Bray (who?!) plays Hammer--and plays him directly--without being handsome or bigger than life. This Mike Hammer was very human and very believable.The film begins with an exhausted Mike coming into a greasy spoon for a bite. There he meets a young lady who had dreams of making it big in Hollywood but who is forced to survive through prostitution. Despite this hard life, Mike feels sorry for her and after a brief talk, gives her money to take a train back home to her family in the Midwest. Later, he learns that she's dead--the supposed victim of a hit and run. Hammer knows better--and spends the rest of the film tracking down her killers. Oddly, this case turns out to be related to an old jewel robbery. How can they be connected and how can Mike avoid getting his brains beaten out....yet again.As I said above, this film is pretty good despite the budget. The story is excellent and the entire production works well because it seems pretty realistic and tough. A very good but relatively forgotten example of film noir that's worth seeing.
sol
(Some Spoilers) Somewhat better then you would have expected Mike Hammer flick with Robert Bray in the leading role as the tough as nails private eye who gets involved in a slew of murders as well as a hunt for the missing one million dollars Venacci Jewel collection. All this because he took the time and effort to help a young girl named Red, Jan Chaney, from Nebraska get herself straightened out and go, with Mike handing her a twenty, back home to mama and the boy she left behind.It's when Red is found dead, in a suspicious hit and run accident, with his name and address on her that Hammer goes into action in finding who's responsible for Red's untimely death; that he rightfully feels was a murder not an accident. It's when Hammer finds that this usual ring, with a V craved on it, that Red had on her was missing that he had his girl Friday, or secretary, Velda, Pamela Duncan, check it out for him.Finding out, from an 10 year old Time Magazine cover, the ring belonged to the long lost Venacci jewelry collection it became obvious that was the reason for Red's murder. Hammer traces down two persons who can help him break the case of the murdered redhead who happened to work with her at the nightclub the "Blue Bell". As expected the two persons whom Hammer got in contact with dancer Maria Garcia, Genie Coree, and the deft mute janitor Jane, Terrance De Morney, ended up being murdered before they can help Hammer in finding Red's killer or killers.The one clue that Hammer, with the help of his secretary Velda, came up with was what would lead him to find why and who was behind not only Red's but Jane and Marie's murders as well. It had to do with a rented apartment that was occupied by Col. Holloway, Donald Randolph, just after he was discharged from the military after the end of WWII. It was Col.Holloway, a US intelligence officer, who in fact stole the valuable Venacci Jewelry collection while he was serving with the US Army in Germany back in 1945! Having spent ten years behind bars Holloway was soon to be released from jail and it was certain to Hammer, with the jewels never being found, that the Venacci Jewels were somewhere hidden in that apartment that Holloway rented. What Hammer didn't know at the time is that not only Holloway was interested in finding the long lost, or hidden, Venacci Jewels but a gang of murderous jewels thieves lead by Frenchman LaRoche, Peter Mamakos, were also looking for them!A bit below average, compared to the previous Mike Hammer movie "Kiss Me Deadly", "My Gun is Quick" is rescued by actor Robert Bray's interpretation of the ruthless and unprincipled Mike Hammer portrayed by Ralph Meeker in the aforementioned film. In that Bray's Hammer, in the film "My Gun is Quick", has a heart of gold and played strictly by the rules. That besides him being as convincing, if not more so, as Meeker was in showing how brutal and ruthless Mike Hammer can be when he wanted to get information as well as slug it out with the bad guys.This in fact took away Hammer's both bad guy and anything to get results image and made you for once like him. Instead of making him, like Ralph Meeker, the best of a bad lot compared to those he fought which Mike Hammer comes across as in almost all of the films he's portrayed in.
jim riecken (youroldpaljim)
I have never read any of the Mike Hammer novels so I cannot comment on how faithful the film adaptations are but I have seen all the films.This film has a plot similar to the previous Mike Hammer film KISS ME DEADLY. As in the latter film Mike Hammer helps a girl escape from a gang of thugs, but the girl later turns up dead. Mike meets a women whom he thinks is trying to help him solve the girls murder, but like Gabrielle in KISS ME DEADLY, she is really working for the bad guys. The bad guys are lead by a retired English army officer who is trying to recover stolen Nazi loot he smuggled out of Europe after the war. Robert Bray is adequate as Mike Hammer, but he is no Ralph Meeker. But his Mike Hammer performance is light years ahead of Biff Elliot's or Armand Assante's.
