I, the Actor

Mickey Spillane has always known what sort of fellow should play his hero, Mike Hammer, on the screen. The part calls for a real ball-peen brute with magnetal animism. There have been three Mickey Spillane movies. In I, the Jury, an actor called Biff Elliot tried his best. Then Ralph Meeker got his chance in Kiss Me Deadly. Then came a fellow named Robert Bray in My Gun Is Quick. But they were tack Hammers all. There was only one man to do it, Spillane concluded, and he has finally stepped into the role. The new Mike Hammer of the screen -- in The Girl Hunters, ready for release this month -- is Author Spillane himself.

At first, he doesn't seem right because he doesn't sound like an actor, since his voice is high and hoarse. He doesn't look much like one either. Under his porkpie hat is a wrinkly grin, a barbed Leni-Lenape nose, no neck, and shoulders too wide to go through most front doors. But that initial disturbing reaction is caused merely by the fact that the populace is not used to seeing the real thing on the screen. As Mike Hammer, Actor Spillane is tremendous.

Shock at Elstree. The plot is irrelevant. He is looking for his girl, or something. What really matters is the vignettes along the way. In a New York waterfront bar, a fierce-looking Caribbean type with abscessed fangs picks up an ice pick and tells Mickey to leave the premises. The poor hood doesn't know that Mickey has a rod in his pocket with a Navarone-sized barrel. Mickey takes out a single big s'ag and rolls it down the bar. "Eat it," he says. The thug eats it.

Spillane is great with his own dialogue. "I don't belt dames," Hammer says aristocratically. "I kick 'em." And he also executes with relish the grislier triumphs of his imagination. Since he has promised to turn over his enemy alive to the Feds, he beats the punk unconscious. Then, instead of tying him up, he drives a railroad spike through his hand and into the floor. The Girl Hunters was filmed at London's Elstree Studios, and the English just aren't accustomed to that sort of thing: the script girl got sick.

Psychic Fix. Mickey, in fact, did everything for real. Every Mike Hammer story has a blonde viking in it. The one in this picture is Britain's Shirley Eaton, a tall taffy goddess like the girl Hammer once shot in the navel. She wears onionskin bikinis. In the first take of a passionate scene, Mickey and Shirley were stretched out on a couch when something went wrong with the lighting. "Cut," said the director. Not Mickey. "We stayed there rehearsing for an hour while they changed the lights," he remembers. "That was Method acting, boy. The Spillane method."

Mickey is preparing to return as Mike Hammer in a sequel to The Girl Hunters called The Snake. Since he is the bestselling mystery writer of all time, he is clearly just doing it for a sort of psychic fix. "Ian Fleming?" he says. "I don't worry about him. He's a gourmet."

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