The Best Movie Critic   +  review

By the Book: I, the Jury

Justin here with the first in a new series of articles of indefinite length and frequency called By the Book, where I will look at a movie that was adapted from a book I’ve read and examine the adaptation. First up is the 1953 adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer book, I, The Jury .

I am a huge fan of detective and crime fiction. I spent the better part of last year chewing through the books of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. One of the prerequisites to get into Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon this year was to watch the excellent Mike Hammer movie, Kiss Me Deadly. I didn’t get into BNAT, but getting introduced to the world of Mike Hammer was a helluva consolation prize.

I, The Jury was originally published in 1947. Frankly, the subject matter that the book covers is shocking even by today's standards. The book opens with hard-boiled P.I. Mike Hammer finding one of his best friends, Jack, murdered. Jack literally gave his right arm to save Mike during WWII, so Mike is understandably very upset. He swears to the cops and newspapers that he will find Jack’s murderer and kill him himself before some slick lawyer can get him off the hook. What follows is a fairly typical detective mystery story with the typical kinds of suspects you expect to see in one of these. What sets I, The Jury apart from its peers though are two things: the incredibly lurid details and Spillane’s pitch-perfect tough guy voice. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

…I don’t underrate cops. But cops can’t break a guy’s arm to make him talk, and they can’t shove his teeth in with a .45 to remind him that you aren’t fooling. I do my own leg work and there are a lot of guys who will tell me what I want to know because they know what I’ll do to them if they don’t. My staff is very ex officio, but very practical .

Any filmmaker wanting to tackle a Mike Hammer book has one big hurdle to overcome – how to capture the voice of Spillane and Hammer while keeping voice-overs to a minimum. In the case of the 1953 adaptation, writer/director Harry Essex chose a mixed approach and got mixed results. Biff Elliot, the actor portraying Hammer, delivers a fair number of voice-overs. However, much of the internal narration in the book comes out in standard dialogue as Mike talks to people. This makes for some odd moments, because in the book, Hammer keeps a lot of his musings to himself and when he talks to other characters, it almost feels like he’s dumbing himself down so that he can be underestimated. Hammer doesn’t try to be a genius crime solver, but he’s smart enough. You get the sense that he’d rather beat information out of someone than find a clue, but that he’s intelligent enough to figure things out on his own when there’s no one around to beat.

As far as Hammers on screen go, I’m only familiar with Ralph Meeker from Kiss Me Deadly and Biff Elliot from I, The Jury. Both actors give very different performances. Whereas Meeker exudes an effortless detached cool, Biff seems a little too emotional for the role – I can see how he could read Mike in the book as having this tone, but it feels a little off.

An issue that anyone adapting a mystery book to a movie has to overcome is how to simplify the plot down to somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours while keeping in the important beats and all the twists that make reading the book fun. In the case of the 1953 version of I, The Jury, the production had another enemy working against them, The Hays Code. The book revels in it’s pulpiness. Major plot points deal with the corruption and trafficking of young women - turning them from college students into prostitutes - and other unsavory topics like heroin addiction, nymphomania, race relations, and homosexuality (a bigger controversy in the 40’s and 50’s). All of these are big no-no’s in the Hays code and have to be hinted at with innuendo and substitutions. So for instance, when Mike has to visit a brothel to question a prostitute in the book, in the movie he goes to a place for private dance lessons. One character’s heroin addiction is referred to as her “sickness.” All the sexuality is basically dropped, and inexplicably all the black characters were cast as white or Latino.

If I hadn’t read I, the Jury , I would have had no idea at all what was going on or why it was a big deal. But the most grievous omission was something that wasn’t even particularly scandalous – the love subplot. I mean it’s in the movie a little, but not to the extent that it really deserves. It’s pretty important to the book for reasons that I won’t spoil here. Because the book is really good, and I highly recommend it for people who like detective stories.

There are some other interesting things about this movie though. For one, it was shot in 3D. It’s kind of weird to think about black and white movies in 3D, or even non-science fiction movies from the 1950’s that were in 3D. There are a couple of good fight scenes here that might have benefited. Come to think of it, that does explain why those fight scenes contain several shots of Mike maniacally punching directly at the camera.

While the 1953 version of I, The Jury was remarkably tame by necessity, there was a remake in 1982 that was anything but restrained. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down a copy of this version yet. It stars Armand Assante as Mike Hammer, and from what I’ve read, the 1982 version ups the level of T & A and violence from the book while adding in an inexplicable government conspiracy on top of the already convoluted story. I'll let you know when I track it down. I think it’s really interesting that both versions, whether by choice or necessity swung so hard in opposite directions leaving the book firmly in the middle with regard to good taste.