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The Girl Hunters
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by Image Entertainment
Sales Rank: 97266
Price: $24.99
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It's outrageous good fun! Writer Mickey Spillane stars as his hard-boiled private detective Mike Hammer in this action-packed murder mystery. After seven years on a drunken binge over the disappearance of Velda, his former secretary, Hammer is picked up out of the gutter by the police and dropped smack-dab in the middle of a political bombshell where every lead seems to end in murder. After being told his beloved Velda is still alive, but being held by the Dragon, an infamous international assassin and leader of a spy ring, Hammer sets out to find her. With only guts and attitude to get him by, Hammer gets deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that surrounds him on all sides, threatening his and Velda's lives.
Viewer Reviews
Mike Hammer's ex-partner, still a cop, has a squad unit drag him out of a booze washed gutter so that Hammer can hear a fatally wounded man's last word. The man will speak only to him, and, to Hammer's surprise, the dying man leads him to believe that Hammer's old flame - Velda - whose disappearance and presumed death lead to a lost weekend that stretched into months - may still be alive. Velda's fate is tied up with a prominent politician's `accidental' death, a 50-year-old ultra secret European group that dreams of spearheading a worldwide dictatorship, and the mysterious red - as in commie - assassin known as The Dragon.
Okay, he ain't Ralph Meeker or Stacy Keach or any other Hollywood pretty boy who jams a fedora on his bulb and plays tough for the camera. Mickey Spillane plays the fictional Mike Hammer, the ex-cop he created and rode to worldwide fame starting shortly after the Second World War with the runaway best-seller, I, the Jury. Spillane's Hammer is a big man, a wide cinderblock in a trenchcoat with a nose broken once for effect and once again for the fun of it. Unfortunately, Spillane is possessed of a cinderblock's charisma and animal magnetism, as well. Fortunately, THE GIRL HUNTERS keeps the obligatory love scene short and, if not sweet, at least dialogue-free. Anyway, whatever they were doing was over quick and when Mike Hammer ain't doing that - and (thankfully) he ain't doing that much in this one - he's talking tough, and like his literary creation, Spillane can talk tough with the best of them.
There are a couple of notable actors in THE GIRL HUNTERS. In 1964, the year after THE GIRL HUNTERS was made, Shirley Eaton played the gold-painted corpse in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. In THE GIRL HUNTERS she plays the widow of a murdered politician and spends most of her time running around in skimpy bikinis that wouldn't seem overly modest forty years later. Veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan plays federal agent Arthur Rickerby, who has a personal and `unofficial' interest in Hammer's investigation, which amounts to a score to settle with whoever it was who killed the same man that told Hammer that Velda may still be alive. Beyond pushing the plot forward, Nolan is around to add some professional ballast to the movie and give Hammer a chance to make ha-ha by mangling his last name over and over and over again. Nolan was a good actor and he adds value to this one, even though his character is peripheral to the main story and only pops in and out of the movie now and then for short scenes with the star.
I liked THE GIRL HUNTERS. The transfer print of the 35mm original was in very good shape, and it's presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This black-and-white film (original distributed in the USA by Colorama Features, no less) had good scale tone, or whatever it is the techies call it when the blacks are deep and rich and the whites shimmer. I thought the author Spillane would make a terrible actor, but he was a convincing Mike Hammer and more or less carries the story. For the first 85-minutes or so the violence is there but relatively tame - the last ten minutes or so contain a couple of discreetly edited gruesome sequences. High recommendation for this one, if you can find it.
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