[REVIEW-CAST #5] THE GIRL HUNTERS (1963) & INNOCENT BYSTANDERS (1973)

I've only been exposed to Spillane via two film adaptations, KISS ME DEADLY (1955) and now 1963's THE GIRL HUNTERS. I suspect I'd find his fiction less compelling than these two films, but I have to admit that the cover above (including that dreamy, mystically foreboding title) makes me come close to trying a couple of his novels anyway.

[NOTE: This is the fifth in a new series of capsule reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRE]: Espionage / Spy Thriller, Hard-Boiled Detective, Noir [>exploitation]
[VERSION WATCHED]: Scorpion Releasing Blu-ray (for GIRL HUNTERS); Olive Films Blu-ray (for INNOCENT BYSTANDERS)

Friday nights are the nights I most miss having somebody regular to watch movies with (something I did a lot in my teens, as everybody I knew back then lived within minutes of my house). As there seems to be no fixing this lack of people to hang out and enjoy movies with, I've decided to start dedicating all my non-work Friday nights to Double Bills (henceforth to be tagged "My Friday Night Double"). And to write as much constructive about them as I can.

This first one took shape quite by accident: I'd been meaning to sit down and watch Scorpion Releasing's Blu-ray of Mickey Spillane's THE GIRL HUNTERS for a while. After I did, I was so energized by the experience (so genuinely, pleasantly surprised that the film had managed to hit so many of my specific pleasure centers), that I wanted to watch something else before crashing for the night. Something just as surprisingly sleazy, surprisingly violent, with just as many moments where the film's "hyper-" aesthetic broke through the walls of the genre built otherwise around it.

I.e., something that did the same, skewed job of taking a genre's conventions and scrambling them. I remember reading a book called MAKING SHAPELY FICTION for a college class years ago (complete with tacky armless Aphrodite cartoon on its cover). Learning the conventions of fiction (esp. across genres) was fascinating at the time (and something I've rediscovered in the past couple years, by 1. starting to read the original Fleming Bond novels and 2. diving unapologetically into the German Krimi). But the older I get, the more I'm interested in narratives (movies, books, songs) that deform those shapes we expect. Setting up conventions in order to subvert them (I read in some stuffy theory book at some point in the distant past; in fact the only thing I remember reading in it). But stuffy or not, the movies that matter most to me seem to all do this to a greater or lesser extent.

So my mind eventually wandered to Peter Collinson's 1972 dirty-spy-anti-epic INNOCENT BYSTANDERS. Featuring a mullet-wearing, gut-humping Stanley Baker in a past-his-prime spy role. Perhaps it was the fact that the Blu-ray release reproduces a movie cover that looks an awful lot like the cover of a classic pulp novel. Or that the exceedingly mean spirit of both just makes them a natural pair. It was a Friday Night Double that didn't disappoint.

For both films, I feel like I lack some of the context I should have to discuss them (haven't seen enough spy movies, haven't seen enough Noir, haven't read any Spillane), but I'm going to discuss them anyway, as anything I can do to spread the word on how satisfyingly they deform / transform genre seems like time well spent to me.

[THE GIRL HUNTERS (1963)]
Listening to the commentary by Spillane's friend and official "historian" Max Allan Collins helps to fill in some of the context I'm missing. Most interesting is his description of the way that the story straddles two genres. One is the hard-boiled detective genre that Spillane helped propagate (though, Collins is careful to differentiate Spillane's overtly "melodramatic," deliberately "superhero-inspired" style from the more "toned-down" aesthetic of Chandler and Hammett; he emphasizes this esp. when discussing the eye-popping violence that cratered its way along the pages of the early novels, and informing us that Spillane started out as a comic book writer, and Hammer a comic book character).

The other is the emerging spy genre a la Ian Fleming / James Bond. The fact that GOLDFINGER's Shirley Eaton plays the always-bikini-clad female lead in GIRL HUNTERS makes the connection almost too wrapped-up a package to bear, but the international espionage elements of the plot are undeniable. Even Hammer's secretary-cum-partner Velda turns out to have been trained as a spy during WWII (which finally explains to Hammer how she was so proficient in helping carry out his jobs). And this espionage past apparently played a role in her disappearance during that routine job seven years ago, a job that was supposed to be nothing more than guarding the jewel collection of a hoity-toity high-society lady.

The other most interesting thing about the movie is the way that Velda is simultaneously the catalyst for all the action—Hammer gets drug out of the gutter because a dying informant will only speak to him, and has something secret about Velda to say; Velda's disappearance is both the reason for Hammer's sever-year-long dissolution and for his cop friend's descent into sadistic bastard-dom—and yet? 

She never appears in the film. 

The film ends without Hammer actually finding her, laying hands on her, confirming whether or not she's really alive. The film ends, without ever reasonably explaining what the heck she's been doing during her seven-year-long disappearance, or how, even with her spy training, she's survived and stayed hidden for so long. (Or why, for instance, she's never made the least attempt to contact Hammer, the man she loved.)

Further, her only "appearance" in the movie is as a photograph in an album in a dead man's apartment. Her head has been torn off, and we only see her body, scrawled across with her signature. In this way it reminds me of the onscreen withholding of Smiley's wife, Ann, in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. At times, she's only present in dialogue: "That was a time Ann and I were having trouble." Or when Colin Firth's character says—when explaining to Smiley why he started an affair with Ann—something along the lines of "Karla knew Ann would be your blind spot. That she would keep you from being able to properly see me."

When Firth delivered this line, I realized that Ann is not only Smiley's blind spot, but a literal blind spot in the movie. I.e., do we ever see her face? Do we ever see anything other than the back of her head (when, e.g., she's sitting with Smiley at the Christmas party), or her obscured body in long shot (like when she's cavorting with Firth outside the party in some bushes)? Even when Smiley arrives home unexpectedly, it's Firth he finds sitting at his dining room table, furtively trying to fit his shoes back on under the table, offering up some paltry excuse to try to distract from the fact that he was just upstairs making love to Ann. Firth says something like, "Ann will be down any minute." But … she never does come down.
 
(I don't know if writing her as an absence is part of the original novel, but it certainly reinforces the idea that this is a film full of dysfunctional, delusional, grasping men.)

The way her character's identity (and fate), then, is perpetually suspended by the narrative she's in feels very alike to what the narrative's doing here with Velda. The titular GIRL being hunted by everyone is never found. At the end of the movie, Hammer realizes he's had the information about where she's hiding from the start of the film, only he hasn't been smart enough to use it. And yet ... the film ends without him doing that. Velda remains a blank, a postponed destination, an emotional and spiritual void whose seven years still aren't up. Utterly fascinating stuff ... 

...

Back to the spy angle, it's also given its head in the film's main villain, a mysterious globe-trotting killer codenamed The Dragon. He flings bowler hats at Hammer like some proto-Odd Job—karate-chops rotary phones into oblivion just to show how pissed off he is—and, for the bulk of the film, never materializes as anything but a menacing name in the mouths of those who fear him. Collins compares his climactic fight with Hammer—its duration, its viciousness, its physicality—to the incredibly physical fight between Bond and Red Grant on the train in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. 

During the fight here, Hammer has his face "scrubbed" along a rough wood beam (which leaves the skin on one whole side of it ragged and bleeding) and ends the fight by nailing The Dragon's hand into the floor of a barn to make sure he won't escape.

This pervasive hyper-violence (that apparently characterizes the early novels) is, according to Collins, a key factor in the evolution of Spillane's style, and in the real-world events that mirror the GIRL HUNTERS' plot (and that makes all this so damn interesting in its collision). Collins describes how Spillane's decade-long hiatus from writing the Mike Hammer character became a real-world analog for what happens to Hammer in the novel: 

He explains that, before GIRL HUNTERS, Spillane had taken leave of the Hammer character because of a religious conversion. His new-found moral code apparently tied his hands when it came to writing the Hammer style, drenched as it was in nonstop, over-the-top sex and violence. He was conflicted when it came to how he could / would proceed with the character and so, according to Collins, simply didn't.

Until THE GIRL HUNTERS. And Collins argues that Spillane's attitude had shifted so that now he wrote with the notion that the vulgarity of the violence and sex should exist as "punctuation marks" in the story, as opposed to its sentence-by-sentence DNA. Though that's not to say that the film version isn't violent. Mean and vicious. And with not a narrative apology in sight. 

In one scene, Hammer graphically warns Shirley Eaton's character (she of the perpetual bikini) that the double-barreled shotgun she keeps for protection will kill her if she doesn't stop storing it barrel-first in a potted plant next to the pool. He tells her to shut up when she protests, and describes what would happen to her head if she fired it with the barrels blocked by dirt:

"You'd have the medical examiner picking pieces of your skull out of the woodwork with needle-nose pliers!"

And this disgusting, unflinching description (describing to the woman he's now sleeping with, and apparently loves) how she wouldn't have anything "left above the neck" serves, Chekhov-like, to telegraph us the end. When Hammer learns that Eaton's character has been, all along, The Dragon's silent partner, he tells her just enough to convince her that she has to shoot him with the gun. While she's in her poolside shower, listening to Hammer explain everything that's happened so far (and how The Dragon is finally dead), he spends his time grinding the barrel of the shotgun in the dirt (a gesture that is itself rife with "sexual connotations" as Collins makes sure to note).

He turns his back on her, leaves the poolside bungalow in order to give Eaton's character ample opportunity to hang herself with the rope unspooled in his story. As expected, she levels the gun at him ... and leaves the film with nothing above that neck of hers.

When he first gave the speech about the gun backfiring, Eaton's character, horrified, had begged him to stop. To the film's credit, despite the standards of the 1963 censors, it never really does.

The punctuating violence, the postponed woman, the never-solved mystery, the mashing together of two distinct genres—all of it contributes to making this movie the UFO that it is. (And I didn't even broach the subject of Mickey Spillane the author of Mike Hammer playing his creation here. One more level of the head trip.)

[INNOCENT BYSTANDERS (1973)]
For the moment I have considerably less to say about INNOCENT BYSTANDERS, as I seem to have expended all my critical energies on GIRL:  

It feels like the complete antithesis of what was happening in the Bond films around this time, the jokey, adolescent, stupidly wish-fulfilling romps of ol' Action Grandpa himself, Roger Moore. INNOCENT BYSTANDERS is an espionage film that trades in torture, brutality, cynicism, and a general world-weariness—hopelessness—about whatever honor or trust or humanity is meant to exist between men and women doing despicable things for "God and country." It feels more like THE IPCRESS FILE side of the spy street than anything concerned with flashy gadgets and endlessly bed-able women.

Case in point is Stanley Baker's character, who starts off as a kind of schlub: overweight, unattractive, hopelessly no good anymore at his job ... until he's revealed to be in this state because his last mission damaged him so deeply, an extended period of torture that has conditioned his body to believe he's being tortured even when he's not (watch the scene when Dana Andrews exploits this; it's unnerving and effective). 

As he's no longer Her Majesty's "best man," his British masters don't hesitate in lying to him, manipulating him into an illegal mission that will, most likely, lead to his death. Here his British master is played by a socially awkward, disturbingly detached Donald Pleasence, playing a character called Loomis pre-Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. This strength of the cast also shows up in Baker's fellow spies, played by THE PRISONER's Derren Nesbitt and IPCRESS's Sue Lloyd (no matter how old she is, or what she's playing, I find her always attractive in a cold, controlled, I-will-ruin-you sort of way). They are tasked with shadowing Baker's progress, stealing his leads, and reporting back to Loomis. 

Instead, they are content to torture him and his traveling companion because it means they won't have to exert any energy actually spying (a recurrent theme in the film, most often spying = torture). It's bleak. Bleak and effective.

And deforms the genre it invokes by repeatedly undercutting the dramatic and narrative beats we've come to expect. I can see how some people find this disappointing. Or off-putting. I find it, instead, to be the whole (and wholly pleasurable) point.


[PARTING THOUGHTS]

1. Watching GIRL HUNTERS has nearly tipped me into another sub-project for the site that I've been considering for a while now, NEO AND NOIR. Wherein I'd post extensive, screencap-filled reviews of Noir and Neonoir films that are important to me. Perhaps soon ...
2. For a review of the Scorpion Blu, head over to the ever-reliable MONDO DIGITAL.
3. The pulp paperback cover up top reminds me of my first pulp-cover love interest, the Bantam reprints of Lester Dent's (nee Kenneth Robeson's) DOC SAVAGE series. See the art for one of the iconic covers below.
4. The next Friday Night Double? I'm leaning toward THE SQUEEZE (1977), which stars TV's Mike Hammer, Stacy Keach, as another down-on-his-luck, alcoholic ex-cop in (maybe) the same Mickey vein. And pairing that (also maybe) with the underseen UFO of a spy / hitman movie, THE DISAPPEARANCE, also from 1977. 

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015