Location footage in a movie is great, particularly one from an era like the 1950s, but unfortunately, what should be expected for a complex but fairly easy story to follow a convoluted mess. Robert Bray, an actor I had never heard of before, is private detective Mike Hammer, and he gets involved in the murder of a prostitute he attempted to defend in a greasy spoon diner.

The case becomes more than he bargained for as he becomes involved with a group of sleazy International criminals involved in a mysterious racket, with Hammer dealing with a missing piece of jewelry that was on the murdered woman. certainly, the vintage footage of various Los Angeles location is interesting, even though many of them have been utilized in other low-budget thrillers of the same time.

A very tense scene in a junkyard with one of the characters in danger of being crushed by falling chunks of metal ends up being a complete letdown. The cast of complete unknowns meanders around, going through his emotions to do as they are directed and to recite the lines that they have learned, but there are definite problems with the linear construction the flow of the story, and this sinks quickly into the port of Los Angeles where it finally concludes after long sequences of complete silence with nothing but the repetitive musical score to keep the audience from falling asleep.

A private detective (Robert Blay) helps a prostitute being assaulted, and notices that she is wearing a unique ring. She is later found murdered and there is no trace of the ring, which turns out to be part of a cache of jewelry stolen by the Nazis during World War II.

This is apparently what a B-movie film noir looks like. No actors whose names mean anything to me (including star Robert Blay). Made by United Artists, and then acquired by MGM. Now probably sort of in limbo from the financial mess of MGM...

But you know what? Low budget or not, lack of star power or not, this is a pretty good story with a cool detective, some ladies of the night, shady characters...

The Mike Hammer adventure My Gun Is Quick survives against some pretty steep odds. First, it comes from the paw of Mickey Spillane, with the problems that implies; its cast and crew are (and were) unknowns; it's all but forgotten; and what little word of mouth circulates around it tends to be dismissive. But, like the curate's egg, it's not too bad, and parts of it are pretty good.

Hammer (Robert Bray),on stakeout for the last 52 hours, staggers into a diner for another cup of joe. He flirts with a young hooker, giving her bus fare back to Nebraska. When she's found dead the next morning, he takes it personally. A baroque ring she wore turns out to have come from an Italian treasure stolen during the war. Seeking to avenge her killing, Hammer, in the inflexible tradition of Los Angeles private eyes, works his way along the underbelly of the City of Angels to the missing loot and the murderers.

It's not quite the same town where earlier gumshoes Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart and Robert Montgomery plied their trade. As in the memorable Mike Hammer movie Kiss Me Deadly of two years earlier, it's the late-Eisenhower L.A. of freeways and oil derricks and strip clubs, a changing landscape where the Mexican presence can no longer be ignored. Even the wealthy live in cold, '50s-moderne showplaces of spindly blonde furniture and plate glass walls draped with sheers. But Hammer's quest is the old and familiar one of multiple murders, duplicity and femmes fatales of increasing lethality.

Wisely, the movie takes Hammer 'as is.' It doesn't pull back from his easy violence, his racism ('greaseball' is a favorite epithet),and his misogyny ('Off my back, chick – I'm tired!' he bellows at his secretary Velda). But it keeps its distance and doesn't glamorize him, either (though it does grant him his primitive 'code').

The movie (shot in black and white by Harry Neumann, with over 350 titles to his credit) has an almost retro look to it, and there's a jazzy, percussive score by Marlin Skiles, another unsung veteran of countless genre programmers. The acting stays serviceable and occasionally better, but the script keeps careless track of some of the plot strands (the man from Amsterdam gets misplaced entirely). My Gun Is Quick boasts one distinctive passage: Hammer looks in from an upstairs window down at a chaotic scene crowded with police, ambulance drivers and several of the characters, as a body is wheeled away. It's filmed entirely without dialogue, the only sounds being the wind, the surf and the muted music of bongo drums.