MIKE HAMMER: THE COMPLETE SERIES (NBC Universal,1958-59) Creator: Mickey Spillane, w/ Darren McGavin, Bart Burns. Rating: NNN DVD package: none Rating: NNN
If you have a taste for hardboiled, lurid pulp, you could do worse than the first 14 or 15 episodes of Mike Hammer. They catch the spirit of the original novels and character, a cynical, rage-fuelled New York private eye whose approach to his job involves beating the men and browbeating the women.
The stories range from rich people’s murder plots complicated enough to fill a feature to simple cons that look baffling only because we only know what the detective knows and because at a half-hour per episode everything blasts by too fast to think about. Noir shadows, New York exteriors and occasional Ed Wood-worthy voice-overs create the sense of a dark, hustling city. There are women everywhere, all as sexually predatory as Hammer himself.
It was too raunchy for 50s TV. By episode 16, the visuals brighten up, the stories dumb down, the sex takes a back seat and Hammer stops committing cold-blooded murder. By season 2, he’s just another TV do-gooder.
Darren McGavin makes a credible Hammer, but he seems to be having the most fun in the rare comic episodes, where he unleashes his gift for clowning and banter.
This is a bare-bones edition. The audio is a bit scratchy on a few episodes.
EXTRAS B&W. English audio. No subtitles.
