THE GIRL HUNTERS (1963) ** Mickey Spillane is Mike Hammer. (no, in a deeper voice) Mickey Spillane IS Mike Hammer! (that's better) Not too many authors could do a credible performance as one of their heroes on screen. Ernest Hemingway probably could have, I bet that Kurt Vonnegut could, I can, Hunter S. Thompson is whether he's on screen or not, but it's an unusual combination of talents. Mickey Spillane is a very credible Mike Hammer. Hammer is, of course, the Chicago Überman: chauvinistic, alcoholic, monosyllabic; but somehow an urban variation of farmhouse charming despite it all. Don't laugh, it ain't easy, you try doing all that! So he drags himself out of the gutter and talks the Feds into bringing him a few cans of Pabst...the only unrealistic part is how many half-empty beers keep getting left around. That ain't what I remember about Chicago... The mounting pile of dead bodies I'm willing to believe, and it doesn't surprise me at all that those durn Russians are behind it all, in some particularly ill-defined way. There's not so much a plot as decorations, and Mickey, like Mike, is a man of few words: why bother introducing more than one suspect when there's just gonna be one guilty one anyway?
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