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').