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

I Ain't Talkin' - Directed by Boris Sagal, written by Frank Kane. DOP was Jack MacKenzie. Music was by Frederick Herbert.

This is the first episode that is probably pushing close to 50% on location in New York City camera work. Thes rest is interiors or equally well done processed shots with NYC as the backdrop. It's quite reminiscent of Naked City (1948) it's Naked City eleven years later. A lot has changed and is changing. Whole swaths of the

Lower East Side and East Harlem are wrecking balled and dozed away. All the original Manhattan els have been scrapped by now. Could it be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Who knows.

The episode stars, besides McGavin as Mike, DeForest "Doc McCoy" Kelley (who was in Classic Noirs Fear in the Night (1947), Canon City (1948), House of Bamboo (1955), Illegal (1955)), then Westerns and TV Westerns, is Eddie Robbins.

Kelley played a lot of creepy, villains until his iconic Star Trek

role. Marianne Stewart (Time Table (1956), Back from the Dead (1957), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)) as Myra Robbins,  Robert Fuller (The Harder They Fall (1956), Strange Intruder (1956)) as Jimmy Nelson, Frank DeKova (The Mob (1951), Split Second (1953), Shack Out on 101 (1955), and as the unforgettable Chief Wild Eagle - F Troop TV Series (1965-1967) as Al Adams, Bart Burns as Captain Pat Chambers, hammer-tomically correct Joan Tabor as femme fatale Lita Andre, and the Lower East Side and the Mott-Haven rail yards by the Willis Avenue Bridge u[ in The Bronx.

The Lower East Side

A corner drug store is robbed. Al and Eddie pulling a stickup.  The druggist is killed in cold blood Eddie. Eddie is fucking crazy. The two hooligans scram out the door and run up the street. A hot dog man sees the whole thing from his cart, except their faces. Those, he tells the cops, they can get from Jimmy Robbins, they ran right by him before running down an alley.

Eddie (DeForest Kelly)

Chambers (Burns) and Myra (Stewart)

The cops grab Jimmy. Jimmy plays stupid, clams up, claims he didn't see nuthin'.

Myra Robbins: What did he do, Captain Chambers?
Police Captain Pat Chambers: He didn't do anything... he didn't see anything; he didn't hear anything, but we got a man on a slab in the morgue and we have a witness who says your brother saw the men who put him there!

His sister Myra Robbins, an old gal pal of Mike's, calls Mike to see if he can make him talk. Mike heads to police headquarters.

Jimmy (Fuller) and Myra

Jimmy won't talk. He goes home with Myra. Mike goes to the scene of the crime. He gets the same scoop from the hot dog guy. Mike goes back to Myra and Eddie's to talk with Jimmy again. Here we first see the the cold blooded killer is Eddie, Myra's husband. Now we know why Jimmy's clammed up. When Mike asks Eddie and Myra if he can talk to Jimmy alone, Eddie acts a bit nervous. Alone even Mikes threats won't get Jimmy to talk. He asks if he can have a picture of Jimmy.

Mike leaves the apartment, talks to a cop stationed outside to keep Jinny under house arrest, and then  decides to stake out the back of the tenement. Sure enough Jimmy comes down the fire escape and hops a fence. Mike follows him to another tenement. Mike takes off figuring he can check up on Jimmy tomorrow.

Some time later, in the tenement, Jimmy is peeping/eavesdropping outside a door. Al Adams coming up the stairway spots him and forces him into the apartment of Lita Andre. Lita and Eddie have been two timing his sister and playing hide the sausage. Jimmy runs towards the door and announces, very stupidly, that now he can go to the police and tell them what he saw. Eddie grabs him and throws him to the floor.

Lita (Tabor) and Jummy

Eddie and Al (DeKova)

Bye, bye, Jimmy

Eddie gets a twisted look on his face and asks for a towel. He wraps the revolver with it and blows Jimmy away. Nice guy.

Mike gets the call that Jimmy's body is found in an alley. He discusses the case with Pat.

Mike Hammer: No, no, no. He must have had some important reason for refusing to talk.
Police Captain Pat Chambers: Well, he's got an even more important reason now. He's dead.

It all goes Noirsville.

Mike Hammer: [V.O. narration] Jimmy Nelson made a mistake, but they made an even bigger mistake in murdering him. Alive, Jimmy constituted a threat; dead he was a death sentence and I didn't intent to rest until that sentence was carried out.

Noirsville

F.D.R. Drive

East River

Mott Haven Rail Yard

Mott Haven Rail Yard

Deforest Kelley is chilling as the twisted killer. He was really on a roll in the fifties, especially in Westerns, check out his Curley Burne in Warlock. The rest of the cast is good in support. The amount of NYC footage incorporated into this episode is a wonderful time capsule to 1959. 9/10