Noirsville Bonus - Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer Noir TV (Season Two)

Accentuate the Negative -  Directed by Earl Bellamy (The Lineup TV Series (1954–1960), I Spy, TV Series (1965–1968)). Written by Frank Kane. DOP was Jack MacKenzie.

A Times Square modeling agency photographer (Cosmo Sardo) is at the end of a photo session with a model. As she leaves to change, a big bulk of a man Frank Otto (Chuck Ross) approaches the photographer. He wants the $200 dollars his sister Mary Otto (Patricia Huston) spent for a photo portfolio and for the modeling school/agency. She was hoping to get a job and all she got was a runaround. She's been waiting six months without a call. Frank demands the money and threatens to beat up on the photographer.

Times  Square - Tail Fins

The photo session

Frank (Ross) and Photographer (Sardo)

The photographer tells him he'll call the police. Frank tells him he better call an ambulance. Frank beats up the man. He leaves but is seen by a woman Mrs. Webber (Louise Lewis ) who then runs into the office.

Photographer: Be smart, Mister. Get out of here or I'll call the cops!
Frank Otto: Better make it an ambulance. It'll do you more good.

A few days later Franks hammer-tomically correct sister Mary (Patricia Huston (Experiment In Terror (1962), House of Women (1962)) comes to Mike's office, and tells Mike that her brother said that the photographer was still alive when he left the agency. Mary wants to hire Mike to get him off, Mike agrees on the condition that Frank gives himself up to the police. Which he does. Mike studying the facts discovered that the file cabinet at the agency was also riffled through.

Mike Hammer: Well, whatever you're sellin', honey, we're buyin'. Come on in!

hammer-tomically correct

Mike heads to Times Square to the model agency to check out their side of the story.

Mike Hammer: [narrating] Traditionally, 42nd and Broadway is the gateway to the world of glamour. Actually, it's a street living in the past. Its once famous theaters which housed the Ziegfeld Follies and George White's Scandals had been transformed into second run houses; its restaurants into frankfurter and orange juice stands; it's cabarets into penny arcades. But to the glamour-struck youngster, it wasn't a tired old street with little to remind it of past glory; it was still a street touched with stardust.

Of course the place is filled with hammer-tomically correct babes.

Times Square - Tail Fins

Mike meets the head of the model agency Dora Church (played, in one of her first roles by Barbara Bain - Mission: Impossible TV Series (1966–1973)). Mike asks her about Mary Otto.

Dora Church: Oh, yes yes, I remember her, yes. We never should have taken her, she didn't have the qualifications.
Mike Hammer: Yeah, you were right the first time, honey. You should never have taken her 200 clams.

Dora tells him that they completed her contract and sent all of Marys photos to the various talent agents and completed their part of the bargain. When he asks her what was missing from the file cabinet she refuses to say.

Mike Hammer: The newspapers said your files had been ransacked. Do you have any idea what's missing?
Dora Church: Only Mr. Poley could tell you that... and he's dead.
Mike Hammer: Yeah, that's right. Well, if he isn't, he's going to have a real yuck coming, because they're going to bury him in the morning.

When Mike gets back to his office he gets a call from a Mrs. Webber, she says she knows Frank didn't kill the photographer because he was still alive when she entered the office just after Frank left.

Mrs. Webber (Louise Lewis) 

"I'll personally make sure the women get the negatives back"

She tells Mike that she was being blackmailed by the photographer over cheesecake modeling studies (nudes) she posed for years ago. She shows Mike an envelope of "nudie" negatives telling him that she stole them out of the office. As Mike is looking interestedly through them he tells her that "none of these are of you." Mrs. Webber says that she already destroyed her negatives, and that these are negatives of the agency's other blackmail victims. Mike nonchalantly tells Mrs. Webber that he'll personally make sure the women get the negatives back, wink, wink.

Mike next goes to the police and tells them the new information that he got out of Mrs. Webber, telling them about the blackmail racket and how it opens up a lot more potential suspects. He asks for a police woman to assist him in infiltrating the agency. Sergeant Maureen Hurley (Bek Nelson) another hammer-tomically correct babe.

Sergeant Maureen Hurley (Bek Nelson)

Mike lets the agency know he's recovered their "nudie" negatives. Putting pressure on the agency gets things breaking Mikes way.

Its a pretty much straight crime episode, with minimal New York City establishing shots, but the cast and dialog is quite entertaining. 8/10