"Tuesday was one of those days when I could not find a damn thing wrong with living. Between a paycheck and a fat retainer, we finally had a deposit slip higher than our last utility bill. 'We' of course included Velda, she of the Tuesday dress that makes my eyes water. My Dow Jones was definitely looking up." - Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer in "Murder Me, Murder You"
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer: More Than Murder/Murder Me, Murder You Double Feature DVD Review
By Jude Clement
In 1947, Dutton published I, the Jury, a novel by Mickey Spillane featuring his most famous creation, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Over the next fifty years, Spillane would write twelve more novels featuring the character. Sales started slowly, but gained popularity thanks to the books' lurid, violent themes. Critics complained about the sex and violence, which undoubtedly helped to drive sales even further. Soon Hollywood came calling, and the two-fisted detective was portrayed on screen by a variety of actors over the years, including Armand Assante, Kevin Dobson, Rob Estes, Darren McGavin, and even Spillane himself (in 1963's The Girl Hunters). The most successful match of actor and role was Stacy Keach (Prison Break), who played Hammer in several TV movies and two TV series. A pair of those TV movies - Murder Me, Murder You and More Than Murder - are now available as a DVD double feature.
In Murder Me, Murder You, Hammer is reunited with Chris Jameson (Michelle Phillips). He had proposed to her nineteen years earlier, before shipping off to Vietnam. Hammer kept reenlisting, so Chris eventually decided not to wait for him. Now the widowed half owner of an all-female courier service, she hires Hammer to protect her while she testifies before a grand jury investigating the murder of one of her couriers. Chris dies under suspicious circumstances while testifying, but not before telling Hammer that they have a daughter, Michelle (Lisa Blount). Now Hammer must find the killer (or killers), his daughter, and a missing briefcase containing two million dollars. This film is exciting, crackerjack entertainment and features a twisty, twisted ending that is both shocking and organic.
In More Than Murder, Hammer comes to the rescue of his police force friend Pat Chambers (Don Stroud) when Captain Chambers is accused of murder, conspiracy, and drug dealing. More Than Murder isn't as suspenseful as its predecessor, but it still manages to be great fun.
As previously stated, Spillane's first novel featuring Mike Hammer was published in the late 1940s during the heyday of detective fiction and film noir. Rather than set the films (neither of which are based on a Spillane novel) in the 1940s, both Murder Me, Murder You and More Than Murder simply take the character of Mike Hammer and plop him down into the early '80s. He listens to music from the World War II era and wears a fedora, yet he drives a beat-up blue Mustang and smacks around punks (the Johnny Rotten kind) when they behave badly. The rat-a-tat-tat dialogue often sounds as if it could have been taken from a Robert Mitchum movie:
Michelle (upon seeing her father's apartment for the first time): Who does your cleaning?
Hammer: I do it myself. People wonder where I find the time.
Michelle: You look tired.
Hammer: Yeah, well fortunately I have a bed.
Michelle: Think you can find it?
Hammer: Shouldn't take long.
Even the music is a throwback. Composer Earle Hagen (who also wrote the theme to The Andy Griffith Show) uses his own classic 1939 composition "Harlem Nocturne" as the films' theme song and infuses the incidental music in both films with a jazzy, big band sound.
The women in Murder Me, Murder You and More Than Murder also seem to have gone through a time warp. In what surely caused a shortage in pushup bras for the general population, every female character onscreen walks around in tops slit down to here and with her breasts pushed up and out. More cleavage is on display in these two films than at any given moment in the Playboy Mansion. Even an actress who portrays a guide at the Statue of Liberty wears her Parks Service shirt two sizes too small and open to her navel. The women all swoon whenever Hammer enters the room, delighting in his leering stares. If only they knew that every woman Hammer becomes involved with ends up dead by the time the end credits roll.
It is hard to imagine anyone other than Stacy Keach playing Mike Hammer. His cock of the walk strut, beefy brawn, and blunt good looks make him seem born to play the part. CBS agreed, and after these two films proved to be successful in the ratings, the series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer premiered in January 1984. The series ran off and on through the 1986-87 season (Keach's arrest on drug charges in England and his subsequent six month jail sentence interrupted the show's production). Keach would return to the role ten years later in the syndicated series Mike Hammer: Private Eye.
Guest stars in Murder Me, Murder You include Tanya Roberts (That '70s Show), Delta Burke (Designing Women), Jonathan Banks (Wiseguy), Tom Atkins (The Rockford Files), and Michael A. Andrews. More Than Murder features Lindsay Bloom (Dallas), Tim McIntire (Rich Man, Poor Man), Lynn-Holly Johnson (Ice Castles), Kirk Cameron (Growing Pains), and Robyn Douglass (Galactica 1980).
The two movies are each given an individual disc. The discs are housed in two slim, clear plastic keepcases. The fronts of the cases are decorated with publicity stills of Keach. The backs of the cases include brief synopses as well as production stills from the movie. The interiors of the cases feature a stock photo of the Manhattan skyline as well as advertisements for other Sony TV on DVD releases. The keepcases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve. The outer sleeve misidentifies which film is which - the title Murder Me, Murder You accompanies the cast list and synopsis of More Than Murder and vice versa.
The DVD menus are simple. Viewers can watch the movie or choose a particular scene from the "Scene Selection" menu.
