Watch My Gun Is Quick For Free

So much average

hyped garbage

Best movie of this year hands down!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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!

"Additional music composer" for MY GUN IS QUICK was the first film job held by John Towner Williams, then 25 years old, and later of JAWS, STAR WARS, INDIANA JONES, SCHINDLER'S LIST, etc., etc. fame. Most of William's work between MGIQ and JAWS was for television (Gilligan's Island, and so forth), though he might have made a few feature film ripples with the Gidget series. However, I think most movie-goers may have first encountered this Max Steiner of his day with the score of the drive-in thriller, DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING (1969), to which Williams contributed. Personally, I found the score for MY GUN IS QUICK overbearing, on a par with the whole needlessly brazen sound design and Robert Bray's testosterone-laden crude caricature of a Sam Spade-type private eye. However, I suppose for some people the crass, cheap, brassy knock-off civilian investigator Mickey Spillane offered with his Mike Hammer character is preferable to the greater thought put into Dashiell Hammett's anti-hero earlier, or the compelling libertarian sentiments John D. McDonald set forth later with his Travis McGee character. So the crude MGIQ soundtrack serves as sort of a poor man's version of the far superior score for the Frank Sinatra vehicle, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, which opens with very similar percussion riffs.The plot of MY GUN IS QUICK is mighty convoluted, perhaps to cover the fact that the characterizations are paper-thin, with few likely to care about those peopling the silver screen therein. If DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a 10 in the pantheon of film noir achievement, MGIQ would be lucky to garner a rating of 2 or 3. Nevertheless, John Williams is SO important to the movie world, this misfire merits a "6" just on its status as an historical curiosity.

This film has been on my 'must see' list for years and I finally got to see it recently. It is probably one of the better low budget detective yarns of the late 50s and is improved by having a producer (Victor Saville) very familiar with his material having produced two earlier Spillane/Hammer films. Robert Bray is excellent as an unshaven worn out Mike Hammer and is well supported by the rest of the cast. The script and location photography are good and the music suitably sleazy and atmospheric. What lets it down is the predictable ending, often a problem with Spillane stories - it's nearly always 'the dame that dunnit'. My favourite Hammer film is the first version of 'I, The Jury' which benefits from some superb noir imagery. This film isn't quite that good but is a serviceable and very entertaining movie.

The quintessential Mike Hammer (Robert Bray), haggard, menacing, but essentially a decent guy in a dirty world inhabited by ruthless killers, gets involved in the murder of a young aspiring actress, who only the night before he had met at a lonely downtown diner, and had helped out with bus fare back to her native Nebraska. Her death was related to a piece of jewelry she was carrying, part of a cache of stolen war time jewels. Forced to get to the bottom of the murder, not for money but because of his connection to the girl, he unravels the mystery in the typical Hammer fashion of payoffs and beatings. Released two years after Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, MGiQ is the poorer man's version, though it has its own charms, mostly in the way of the LA settings and Bray's portrayal, tired and unshaven, but with the determination of a pit bull.