Not forgotten by any means, but maybe you haven't seen it lately. Well, now's your chance, what with the release of this new Criterion Collection Blu-Ray edition. It looks great, as you'd expect, and it's just as outrageous and entertaining as ever, from the Cloris Leachman-naked-under-the- overcoat scene to the explosive conclusion. The movie follows the book's story fairly closely, and though the shift in location from New York to L. A. is a little bothersome to me, it works pretty well. Part of the film's original ending is included, too.
The commentators, on the other hand, leave me cold. They don't seem to have read Spillane, and their ignorance of him and his work is sadly depressing. Their opinions of Hammer run along the lines of those in the accompanying booklet, in which J. Hoberman says the film "tracks one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most brutal detectives in American movies." Hoberman also calls Hammer "a crass private-eye."
Luckily, Max Allan Collins' Spillane documentary (Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane) is included among the special features on the DVD to provide a little balance. This documentary (re-edited to about 40 minutes from the original) alone is a great reason to buy the DVD if you haven't seen it. Makes me wish for a Criterion Collection edition of The Girl Hunters.
The entire package is well worth your time and highly recommended in spite of the shortcomings I mentioned. Just don't listen to the commentary.
8 comments:
The film's writer and producer shared the same low opinion of hammer, in those Blacklist days of self-appointed "juries". A left-wing deconstruction of Hammer and the PI genre. A gun and snappy patter no longer enough in a meaner, more complicated world.SPOILER I GUESS -not only does Hammer not prevail, but he gets himself, and all the rest of us, killed in a nuclear chain reaction.
PBS should do an episode on Mickey Spillane for their AMERICAN MASTERS series.
Like that's going to happen......
Aldrich (the director) and Bezzerides (the writer) may have been bad-mouthing Spillane at the time because it was the politically correct thing to do in their Hollywood circles. Obviously it's hypocritical, and they were ticcing off the Spillane boxes, shall we say, as they moved through the narrative. Both of them, throughout their careers, claimed the book had been thrown away. But Bezzerides used much of the novel. Pretty much every famous scene appears in both. Even the reworked box (drugs in the novel, an atomic substance in the film) lends itself to similar fiery endings with the same femme fatale. The ending, by the way, does not imply that the world has been destroyed. Hammer and Velda are in the water, at the ocean's shore, watching the cottage explode. Today we would assume they would die of radiation poisoning, but that assumption in a 1955 noir melodrama would hardly have been made.
Hi Max! Aldrich had contempt for authority figures - it runs thru his work. He and his screenwriter sincerely felt what they said. The Hammer contempt is palpable. Aldrich did the same thing to Jos Wambaugh - with disastrous results. Aldrich would've liked I think to kill Hammer onscreen - obviously impossible. Tainting him with radiation, depicted as a literal force from Hell, was surely meant to be read as fatal. Otherwise, why burn him at all ? Similarly, I think he meant THE END to be read literally anApocolypse ironically paralleling Spillane's later religious conversion beliefs. I think.
I'm one book behind in my Spillane/Collins collection. Looking forward to your centenary celebration of him....
Personally, Not being a "learned" viewer, I hated the movie. Stick to the book.
Subtext aside, one of the greatest films of its decade. Influential on the French New Wave, as well as budding film nerds Spielberg and Tarantino.
I like the style of the movie, but that scene with the pliers (where all you can see are the woman’s feet) gave me nightmares the first time I saw it.
Loved the movie but never able to get thru a Spillane book.
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