[REVIEW-CAST #8] I, THE JURY (1982)

WAIT, WHEN DID MIKE HAMMER BECOME A TV-STYLE BUDDY COP? The opening credits scream two things: 1. a TV-cop show aesthetic and 2. a comedic tone that will not end up serving the film—which is otherwise "gritty," "berserk," and hyper-sexual—well.

[NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. This is also the second in a cluster of Mickey Spillane-related posts (see previous post for details). As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRE]: Hard-Boiled Detective, Neo & Noir, Action [>exploitation]
[VERSION WATCHED]: 20th Century Fox "Cinema Archives" MOD DVD release



[SETTING THE TERMS]
If nothing else, I owe Max Allan Collins’ commentary on the recent, fab Blu-ray of Mickey Spillane’s THE GIRL HUNTERS for giving me some particular “points of interest” on the map of Mike Hammer. It gave me the legend (in both senses of the word) needed to navigate the novels, and a bit of context to understand (and know what to expect) when it came to Spillane’s thematic preoccupations. I started by reading a few of the books: Spillane’s debut, I, THE JURY; then skipping right ahead to the GH’s source; also the MAC / Mickey Spillane posthumous collaboration THE CONSUMMATA (ultimately a disappointing exercise, despite one compelling thematic element threaded through the story from start to last).
 
I also, along the way, decided to order a book co-authored by Collins, MICKEY SPILLANE ON FILM (online and elsewhere he spends a fair amount of time complaining about its weak sales—“less than 100 copies”—which seem wholly attributable to its fairly ridiculous price tag). I ordered because he claimed it as the “definitive” last word on every screen and TV version of Spillane’s work. As I felt so *switched on* while watching GH, I couldn’t imagine not tracking down every adaptation possible (even the really awful misfires on TV). 

And it *is* a useful guide in the sense that it clearly describes the progression of both the films and the weirdly disjointed, self-repeating path taken by their TV cousins (chief among them the telefilms and series starring Stacy Keach). What becomes apparent pretty quickly, though, is that the book is more synopsis- and anecdote-heavy than anything. The anecdotal comments are, presumably, culled from Collins’ longtime affiliation with Spillane and include an opening biographical chapter that could fit just as easily as an intro to a new Spillane paperback edition. The book as a whole though, for my tastes, comes up a little light on analysis, real insight, concerning the films themselves. (And, when there is analysis, I often simply don’t buy the arguments being made.)

Which is weird, because if any writer should have insight into the life and work of Mickey Spillane, it’s Collins, what with his decades of unfettered access to the man himself (so much access that he’s created a small industry out of “co-authoring” and publishing Spillane’s unfinished manuscripts). It also feels redundant as a text: Take a drink every time he mentions Spillane’s “popular Miller Lite beer commercials” and you’ll be plastered before you get to the final page.
 
(Also: I’ve never understood this over-reliance on synopsis in film books—if you’ve seen the films being discussed, then dry, utilitarian synopses feel like a waste of time; if you haven’t, they’re mostly to be avoided because of the spoilers. The question becomes, then: What audience are they intended to serve? What are they doing except padding out word counts?)

Regardless (and in the spirit of the site), I’m going to use what I learned from the book as springboard, as points of departure from which discuss the Spillane I’m plowing through (esp. to emphasize what I continue to find, even in his most unsuccessful examples, so compelling). 

In this post I’ll cover the infamous, kink version of JURY from 1982. And then, in a follow-up post, I’ll tackle the first TV movie starring Keach, 1983’s MURDER ME, MURDER YOU.

LESS IS MORE, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING: For a film full of sweaty, softcore nudity, this scene—Velda giving Mike a shave in his office—is easily the most erotic in the film. Also, Laurene Landon, even in limited screen time, is one of the sterling strengths of the film. She and Alan King almost offset the aimless, self-canceling shifts in tone that otherwise dominate the movie. It's also a moment that reminds me very much of the scene in THE MALTESE FALCON when Lee Patrick is attending to Humphrey Bogart (likewise leaned back in his office chair), right before the ship's captain comes in and drops "the stuff that dreams are made of" into their lap.

[HAPPY COINCIDENCES & THE LARRY COHEN FACTOR]
Listening to Collins’ commentary, it became imperative that I find a way to see this 80s adaptation of I, THE JURY. Asap. As I wrote previously, Collins has said that there are two or three phases of the Mike Hammer character. In the early phase (pre-GIRL HUNTERS; the first six books), he says Mickey Spillane writes Hammer as "almost psychotic," as indeed "kill crazy," with the books remaining to this day truly extreme in their willingness to depict hyper-violence, stomach-churning gore, and "perverse" sex. Hammer is a "disturbed war veteran" who is both making the world he encounters just as violent as the war state he's still living in, *and* finding that that war state is already alive and writhing beneath the seams of the "civilian" world. 

According to Collins, this 1982 adaptation of the first Hammer novel was the only screen version to adequately capture a level of sex and violence "true to the books". Problem was, at the time of his recording, there apparently hadn’t been a home video release of the film (or, at least, not one that hadn’t long ago gone OOP). So I bided my time while trying to find a copy I could import ... except then I didn't have to: 

In March, Sony's MOD arm released the film on DVD-R. Despite the dearth of extras (or the benefit of a proper pressed disc), it seemed too much of a happy coincidence to pass up.
 
And then more coincidences:

Anybody who’s read my reviews in the past couple years has seen me express an unreserved devotion to the ero-guro-grit-work of Larry Cohen. The truly horrifying, truly envelope-pushing aesthetic that even his worst films carry as proof; as their badge. 

Whether the existential-religious dread of GOD TOLD ME TO. Or his gutter-vulgar VERTIGO riff SPECIAL EFFECTS. Or the truly narratively perfect MANIAC COP 2 (yes, the sequel is head and shoulders better than the original, and plays like a Val Lewton film stripped of censorship and imposed “good taste”)—I’m (to borrow a tired phrase from a tired old man who spends his life stupidly mugging to today’s corporate geek camera through endless [endlessly annoying] cameos) a “true believer”.

So it seemed too good to be true when I learned that, with JURY, Cohen had tried to put his stamp on the work of this author I’d just been discovering these past few months. First as the director, then—after being “fired by the money men” for going over budget—relegated to screenwriting status.

THE COHEN FACTOR: One of Cohen's additions to the story is the character of a CIA-programmed sex-killer, which allows the story to feel very topical, very updated: The real villains in the story are the military-industrial complex, and their almost-occult level of invisible control over the country's daily events; in the original story, it's a group of high-society-posing syndicate bosses who are running an insidious, impossibly far-reaching prostitution ring that destroys lives left and right.

THE TEXT BEHIND THE TEXT: If you're at all familiar with the conspiracy theories—and the supposed use of "trigger texts" like THE WIZARD OF OZ and ALICE IN WONDERLAND to program CIA assassins (and it's clear Larry Cohen was)—then you'll understand the unspoken significance of finding one of the sex-killer’s victims being gazed upon by this Alice in Wonderland sculpture. If you know the context, it adds a certain spook factor to this too-brief section of the film—and if you've read the source material, you can only lament how carefully constructed (deliberately pieced together) this murder scenario is in the book. And what short shrift it's given in the film.

[COLLINS & CONTEXT]
Collins and co-author argue that Assante’s apparent miscasting (at the time, he was apparently most famous for playing “Goldie Hawn’s French boyfriend in PRIVATE BENJAMIN”) is actually a casting coup, providing the film with a portrayal that “is on the shortlist of great movie Mike Hammer’s” (it has to be said that this maybe has more to do with how short that list is to begin with). Collins argues that Assante brings “a psychotic edge” to his Hammer portrayal—Hammer as an “ex-soldier” who “simply doesn’t give a damn”—a film full of “Mike Hammer’s berserk glory”.

And this is true … in spurts. But it’s not those spurts (or any kind of berserk tour de force) I find myself thinking of when the end credits roll, TV-style again, with a close-up on Assante’s puckered face right beside. It’s instead the sense of having just watched a tonal train wreck—an ill-advised gumbo (that’s more likely to cause indigestion than any kind of cinematic nourishment). It’s a “sum of its parts” problem, whose execution adds up to “distraction” more than “solution”.
 
(And hey: A film being tonally inconsistent isn’t any kind of automatic, formal deal-breaker—doesn’t disqualify the film from working successfully *as a film*. But the question becomes: Why the inconsistencies? Are they serving a narrative or thematic purpose? Are they borne out of an actor’s particular Method—do they exist to support characterization, experimentation, some innovative new-old form? Or, are they simply the end result of a troubled and rushed production?)

For me, Assante comes across like a poor-man’s Mickey Rourke, whose performance has been infected by an almost comedic level of schizophrenia. He’s scattershot, all over the place, from zero to sixty and back again all in the same scene. One second he’s talking in the mumbling drawl of his professional bedroom voice—the next, screaming at his best friend’s widow to “Get fucked!”—then making wince-inducing jokes about Velda and his dead gold fish. 

(Re: the scene with his best friend’s widow: tbh, it’s one of his [and the movie’s] most authentic, fleshed-out scenes. It suggests, in its economy of screen time and dialogue, a toxic sexual-friendship—a complicated, impossible-to-sustain triangle—between Assante, his dead friend [whose death is the ostensible engine of the plot], and that friend’s widow. The fact that she doesn’t appear in another scene in the film, her importance and “through line” in the book wholly stripped out after this, is a good indicator of just how “off” so many of the choices made in adapting and cutting the work turn out to be.)

It would be great to be able to argue this schizophrenic, stuttering, all-over-the-place-ness is a narrative manifestation of one of the themes introduced by Larry Cohen’s script: that aforementioned schizophrenic sex killer who is being programmed by the CIA to, Manchurian Candidate-like, carry out missions that destabilize rival interests in society. 

Or to say that the frenetic threading of one chunk of genre plot to the next is residual (and effective) thumbprint that points to Cohen’s signature mix of pulp grit, beyond-good-taste transgression, and a Lewton-like feel for genre pacing; genre shuffling; deployment of competing (yet somehow gelling) genre chunks.

But, as much as I want to give that kind of credit to the movie’s cumulative effect, these inconsistencies undercut the film's aesthetic, suggesting one minute you’re supposed to be viewing it as a consequence-be-damned, full-tilt, grit-action-spectacle. Then as a nihilistic, self-destructive, unsolvable detective story. Except then it’s a pratfall comedy skit.

I.e., this fragmentation of Hammer that occurs in his updating doesn’t read as genre-effective experiment, compelling because of the new-old ground it breaks. Instead you can’t help but suspect it’s more a result of the troubled production, problems in funding, the firing and hiring of directors—an overall rushed, underwritten watermark on things. Little about Assante’s performance feels fleshed out or deliberate—rarely does it work in concert to support (or, more importantly, propel) the story’s dramatic weight. To phase it into our cinematic minds enough for it to seem present, “real”—to really “take”. To be taken seriously. 

A few cases in point: 

The movie opens with Hammer scamming one of his clients—a traveling businessman who suspects his wife’s been playing away—by agreeing to take the case, only so *he* can sleep with the wife while the man’s out of town. Which—after the painfully dated TV-cop show credits (capped up top)—cuts to Hammer being informed that one of his best friends has been gut-shot and left to bleed to death by an unknown assailant. Hammer insists on seeing the body. He kneels on the floor beside it and appears to shed tears. This guy who, like two minutes earlier, was showing us his hairy posterior (and complete lack of moral compass) while banging his client's wife.

In the book, his friend's death opens the story and cements the sense that the book is about a detective willing to take drastic action on his righteously angry quest to avenge that death. Opening the film with what amounts to a dirty joke (at one point, while in flagrante with the wife, he tells her husband on the phone how he's "busting [his] balls" on the case) is at best tonally unconvincing. And, at worst, eye-rolling and laughable. 

It encourages us to see Assante’s Hammer as nothing but an oily, unlikable, and—above all else—*selfish* character. One we can't believe would shed tears while unzipping the body bag of his dead friend. It's an opening sequence that does the adaptation no favors, and sets the viewer up for the stream of unsatisfying, mutually-exclusive passages to come. 

WHERE DID ALL THE BOOK'S FRIENDSHIPS GO? Not only is it hard to buy that this version of Hammer cares enough about his dead friend to risk his life in solving the murder, the movie feels like it simply loses grip on other key characters in the story (not to mention the larger Hammer canon). The most egregious is this film's version of Hammer’s best friend and professional “beard” Detective Pat Chambers. Chambers' relationship with Hammer—and his own part in another self-destructive love triangle (Mike, Velda, Pat)—feels enormously important to the books. Even when their friendship turns toxic, with the baddest blood coming between them in GIRL HUNTERS, it feels misguided to try to understand the shape of Hammer's universe sans Pat. Here he's not only given little to do, he really is miscast: Amiable, easygoing, far-too-rotund Paul Sorvino. In limited screen time he swerves from generic camaraderie to histrionic outrage over Hammer’s antics. What little he has is writ broad, and to no effect.)

Or take the fish-tank joke the filmmakers seem so enamored with: In at least three separate scenes we get a lame-but-running gag about how the fish Hammer keeps in his office keep dying. Assante overplays this scenario each time it comes up—it becomes broad comedy, that I guess was supposed to be black comedy, but that instead feels juvenile and without any idea what purpose it’s serving in the film. 

In one scene—the aforementioned opening that reveals him to be nothing more than a horndog snake—Hammer hands a dead fish to his client as he ogles a picture of the man’s wife. In another he hurls obscenities at the tank while complaining to Velda about the water temperature and why the fuck won't they stop dying. 

Collins sees this as a comment on “the dark nature of the detective’s world,” an echo of the Hammer truism that anyone and everyone around him ends up dying (if they didn’t, many of the original novels wouldn’t have plots). But the execution is the thing, and it feels like it's borrowed from comedy-action TV of the day: Think THE A-TEAM’s need to drug B.A. Baracus into a coma every time they have to take a plane somewhere (because Mr. T pities the fool who’s gonna try to make him get over his fear of flying! … also, this movie suggests we take seriously the notion that trained CIA assassins assassinate people with rifles that shoot not bullets, but … wait for it … knives!?!?)

Enough already with the fish jokes!

In the context of this film, it’s a narrative strategy that just encourages me (almost *requires* me) to take nothing in the run time seriously. It cheapens the genuine (and genuinely disturbing) pathos that exists in other sections of the movie—undercuts whatever fascist-righteous revenge-anger themes driving the Hammer of the books—drains the mucked-up moral swampland that Spillane’s character finds himself trudging ever through. Instead of a somber and brutal rumination on the death of his longtime friend, we get scenes of Hammer flushing fish down a toilet. I mean, really?

THE CIA-PROGRAMMED SEX KILLER IN QUESTION: And it's not like the film doesn't exhibit atmosphere. Or genuinely affecting style. Here it's on display during the sex maniac's (Judson Scott's) murder of "the twins" (more on them, and the film's use of doubling, below).

[AND THEN THERE’S THE ACTION]
Another baffling assertion from Collins and co-author: 

“… I, THE JURY is among the stronger action films of the period. With better distribution, the film might have made of Armand Assante an action star of the magnitude of Charles Bronson or Sylvester Stallone.” 

I mean, this statement betrays either a complete lack of familiarity with the action-movie zeitgeist of the 70s and 80s, or a complete misunderstanding of them. To suggest that I, THE JURY’s action set-pieces come anywhere near—in frequency, intensity, technical skill—to those you’d find in COBRA or THE MECHANIC or TELEFON or FIRST BLOOD is, on its face, so far from being true that it almost doesn’t require comment. 

More than anything, the action set-pieces feel like outtakes from the TV “action” show I mentioned above: THE A-TEAM. In their limited-budget-showing-through-at-the-seams execution. In their insistence on TV-style hijinks. 

I’m thinking esp. of a chase sequence that finds Hammer starting a non-running Jeep with bottles of liquor and being chased by CIA assassins. At one point, Hammer and co. veer off into a campground while trying to throw off their pursuers. We watch as the careening Jeep interrupts a volleyball game—interrupts lovers naked in their sleeping bag—interrupts a camper's lazy afternoon rest as the legs of his deck are literally knocked out from under him. All it's missing is a few comedy-music cues.

"Why I oughta ... !"

(Again, low budgets don’t disqualify anything per se—you can’t love Italian genre films as much as I do without also loving what can be done, the effects that can be achieved, with nonexistent budgets. But here the limitation really does feel like it’s limiting. I.e., the filmmakers don’t manage interesting solutions to make the most of what they have to work with. Everything about the execution feels too familiar, and too small.)

That’s not to say there aren’t a couple truly gonzo stunts in the film. And it’s in these too-rare instances that I find myself agreeing with Collins. The best is a sequence that finds Hammer being tortured, guerrilla-style, by the men running the sex-killer program. This footage alternates with the sex killer himself accosting and preparing to murder Hammer’s partner Velda. Mike affects his escape (maybe a little too conveniently), and manages to “bust down the door” of the sex-killer’s lair just before Velda meets her end. 

This leads to the two men leaping through upper-story windows, and a frantic chase through congested NYC streets. Hammer hops on the back of a moving RV so he can jump off an overpass and into the mattress-filled bed of the truck the sex killer has commandeered. Once in the back of the truck he doesn’t hesitate—doesn’t try to climb into the cab and subdue the killer at the wheel: He takes aim, blasting the man through the back as he drives the truck. He doesn’t care that killing him could cause his own death in the ensuing wreck. He truly is (and convincingly) giving us Hammer's berserker best. 

Which does feel like a faithful translation of Spillane’s aesthetic onscreen—it works from an action set-piece p.o.v., sufficiently supports its dramatic (and exploitation) weight. And says more (in less screen time) about Spillane’s true conception of Hammer as a character than almost anything else in the movie:

In fact, the film's lopsided, wildly-inconsistent tone kept reminding me of the similar problem in the 1962 Krimi THE PUZZLE OF THE RED ORCHID, where we get images of machine gun-riddled gangland murder victims alternating with pratfall episodes starring one of Eddi Arent's most egregious versions of his oft-employed "comedy butler".

[BUT EVEN WHEN WE GET TO THE END, WE NEVER QUITE “GET THERE”]
It’s a film I was rooting for, from the start (from even before—the anticipation leading up to the DVD only made me want it to be a Mike Hammer holy grail all the more). Having watched it three times, though, I can’t shake the feeling that it never quite “gets there” as a film. And, for me, the greatest example of it “not getting there” is the end. 

Much is made, in Collins’ assessment, of the ending being the first that is “remarkably faithful” to infamous source. And it is, in the sense that we get a truncated version of Dr. Charlotte Manning’s sexual atom bomb that ends that book. There she strips—her strip described in detail that feels surprisingly explicit for 1947—until she stands before Hammer completely nude. He delivers a monologue (meant both for her and the reader) that finally pieces together the entire mystery, and finally reveals the true identity of the mastermind killer: 

This woman who's been his love interest (not just his love interest; they talked marriage) for most of the novel—Charlotte herself. And she's banking on her strip (and the deep emotional attachment between the two) to be enough to distract Hammer as she furtively reaches for a gun.

The problem here, as with most of the film, is in the execution: What feels carefully paced, deliberately unspooled in the book (it occupies an entire chapter) is here truncated into about 2.5 minutes of screen time. It's true we get the iconic last line that is such a gut-punch in the original, and a comparable level of the sexualized violence Spillane conjured there (Barbara Carrera as Charlotte does a partial strip), but it all feels a little too much like the Cliff's Notes version.

"How could you?"

"It was easy."

Just to give you an idea, I've transcribed a small fraction of this scene from the book (I've elided much, focusing on just three of the paragraphs that describe Charlotte's strip + the last three lines of the book; keep in mind that the scene from start to finish occupies nearly 11 pages). In the text, Hammer's monologue alternates on the page with parenthetical italicized interior text that painstakingly charts Charlotte's strip.

And, important for our comparison, the last line is such a gut-punch in the book for two reasons: 

1. because of the mastery that Spillane shows in building to this sudden exclamation point of violence, and 

2. because of the way he's spent the book developing the genuine emotional attachment between Charlotte and Mike. Another casualty of the adaptation. 

In the movie, you could never picture, not even for a second, a genuine connection between the two. At no point is it remotely possible that they would discuss and plan marriage (as they do in the book). Immediately after their extended softcore scene in the movie, Mike is already sneering at Charlotte’s virtue; add that her role as villain is revealed in the first third of the film—instead of the final pages of the book—and the film’s ending feels all the more more “lesser” than (also unfaithful to) the book's:

"(She was standing in front of me now. I felt a hot glow go over me as I saw what she was about to do. Her hands came up along her sides pressing her clothes tightly against her skin, then slowly ran under her breasts, cupping them. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons of the blouse, but not for long. They came open—one by one.)

...

(Now there were no more buttons. Slowly, ever so slowly, she pulled the blouse out of her skirt. It rustled faintly as silk does against wool. Then the cuff snaps—and she shrugged the blouse from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She wore no bra. Lovely shoulders. Soft curves of hidden muscles running across her body. Little ripples of excitement traversing the beautiful line of her neck. Breasts that were firm and inviting. Soft, yet so strong. She was so pretty. Young and delicious and exciting. She shook her head until her hair swirled in blonde shimmering waves down her back.)

...

(Her thumbs hooked in the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming form a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstretched she walked toward me. Lightly, her tongue ran over her lips, making them glisten with passion. The smell of her was like an exhilarating perfume. Slowly, a sigh escaped her, making the hemispheres of her breasts quiver. She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck.)

...

'How c-could you?' she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

'It was easy,' I said."

“It was easy.” Unfortunately, being convinced by this film's version of Mike Hammer just isn't.

Leonard Jacobs 

May, 2015