On Screen:
DWORKIN, MARTIN S.
On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin The Vicarious Jungle Of Mickey Spillane IN THE NEW Ring of Fear, Mickey Spillane makes his acting debut playing himself playing a private eye in the manner of his...
...The maniac is discovered after some fairly obvious deductions by Spillane, who has been called in to privately eye the causes of the repeated "accidents" plaguing the circus...
...Are you the Mickey Spillane...
...Even without the outright advertising of Spillane's books, the film seems to boil down to a loud pitch for his pulp-paper outlook on life...
...There is a curious feeling or implication here, as if we are being told that the world is really like a Spillane novel...
...It adds nothing to old conventional forms of crime films...
...It isn't Spillane playing Mike Hammer in a movie that is disconcerting, but Spillane being himself and his dream at the same time...
...A finale has a somewhat aimless chase through the circus grounds, and a savage tiger on the loose, released by the maniac as a last malevolence...
...He communicates his thoughts to men by slugging them, and is grimly unsurprised by the immediate adulation of women--all luscious, nubile, and as willing as they are fraught with trouble...
...in fact, Spillane must have gone to crime movies as much as he read pulp fiction before creating his own style and content...
...Much of his acting consists of picking his teeth with knowing muscularity, and a lot of the rest of his performance amounts to acknowledging the awe of the rest of the cast at meeting the famous author in the flesh...
...At one point, a hapless hot-dog vendor complains to Spillane that he has become addicted to the latter's books as to a drug, neglecting his business, health, wife-all for a handful of paper-backs...
...The Long Wait is the second Spillane book to come to the screen, after I, the Jury--that title so revealing of the Spillane ethos...
...Spillane doesn't commiserate with him, but further aggravates his addiction by giving him a copy of his latest book...
...Aside from book blurbs, the film has a story about a homicidal maniac who escapes from an asylum and returns to employment with a circus in order to wreak vengeance on its owner and star, animal trainer Clyde Beatty--also playing himself...
...Any other accomplishments are irrelevant and are easily supplied...
...He talks in tough grunts...
...Needless to say, the tiger kills the maniac, while everyone stands around enjoying his screams...
...He also commits numerous mischiefs, including a few murders, punctuating the many scenes of the film which simply record some fairly diverting circus acts--of which Beatty's own domination of some satisfactorily nasty lions is not the least...
...Everyone takes him quite as seriously as he takes himself, seemingly acting out "in real life" an adventure of his fictive protagonist...
...The audience never doubts that he can--and ought to--rough up anyone in his way, or that he can have any woman he likes, without asking...
...Note here that Spillane has often exclaimed that he is leading a movement of the public away from unrealistic, "plotless" writing...
...S. J. Perelman, in his "Somewhere a Roscoe," which appeared in 1940, laid down the definitive spoof of all Mike Hammers, past, present and future...
...Spillane obviously takes his imagination seriously...
...The fictional film and the real fictionalist interpenetrate...
...As Spillane's detective-henchman says, "It couldn't happen to a nicer guy...
...Although Johnny McBride is not a detective, he has all the other attributes of a Spillane hero...
...On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin The Vicarious Jungle Of Mickey Spillane IN THE NEW Ring of Fear, Mickey Spillane makes his acting debut playing himself playing a private eye in the manner of his own fictional hero, Mike Hammer...
...But a look at Spillane playing himself in Ring of Fear dispels the laugh...
...The Spillane hero doesn't start from scratch, it seems, but springs full-grown out of the compensatory dreams of unappreciated boyhood...
...He makes wordy passes at an erstwhile flame, now happily married to the other half of her aerial act...
...The story is a Spillane rarity, without Mike Hammer as hero, involving the return of an amnesiac to a town where he is supposed to have committed a murder and his efforts to clear himself--once he finds out who that self is...
...We can whimsically suspect, in fact, that his Dan Turner, "the apotheosis of all private detectives," slugging his way past corpses and gorgeous females while bullets spatter around him, the "lead pills" occasionally "creasing" his "think-tank," has been taken seriously in the Spillane genre...
...If we like, we can laugh at the self-conscious formality of it all, or the monosyllabic fluency, or the studied overstatement of oversimplified motives and events...
...for Spillane, coherence is usually a sign of villainy and any evidence of education is suspicious...
...Watching these films, we may wonder at the secret wishes whose fulfilments gutter in the screen's flickering violences--these stylized forms of new cave paintings, fetishes against the caliginous evils of our shiny jungles, our electrically illuminated unknowns...
...As if to provide a convenient specimen of a real Spillane plot made into a film, The Long Wait, from the book of the same name, is also current...
...He rarely smiles, as if a sense of humor is somehow unmanly...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 40
