The first film adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel, filmed in 3D and starring one of the all-time nobodies, Biff Elliot, as Mike Hammer. He looks like William Bendix's younger brother and acts like Lon Chaney, Jr. in "Of Mice and Men." The selling point of any movie based on a Spillane story, aside from the violence, should be the dialogue. That's true here, with lots of tough noir one-liners. Unfortunately, many of those are bellowed by Elliot, who barges into every scene like he's mad someone made him take this job. Seriously, watch this guy stomp around. Someone hired this moose to act and this is what they got. Even the film's famous final scene is tainted by his inability to deliver a line with emotion.On the plus side, the movie was photographed by John Alton. He makes the most of the cheap production values. Good use of the Bradbury Building, which is recognizable to fans of films like D.O.A. and Blade Runner. Nice score from Franz Waxman. The supporting cast includes many lesser known actors but there are a few old pros like Preston Foster, John Qualen, and Elisha Cook, Jr. How any of them kept a straight face while that sack of meat was barking at them is beyond me. Attractive Peggie Castle makes an unconvincing psychologist and is even less convincing as a woman attracted to Elliot.This movie has a lot that prevents it from being great. But all of the other issues combined don't equal the sheer ineptitude of casting Biff Elliot as Mike Hammer. This was his film debut and he never did anything this big again. He worked fairly steady for decades, mostly in television. I have no idea why he was cast. Worked cheap? Saved the producer's life? Knew where the bodies were buried? I don't know. All I do know is he stinks in this.

****SPOILERS*** Based on the Mickey Spillane character from his book of the same name "I the Jury" introduced to the movie going public in film Noir black and white and 3D no less the very first glimpse at the Neanderthal like tough as nails private eye Mike Hammer,Biff Elliot, who shoots and beats his opponents brains out first and never bother to ask them any questions later. Since most if not all of them are in no physical condition to be able to answer them anyway. It's just before Christmas that Mike finds out that his good friend and army buddy the one armed Jack Williams, Robert Swanger, was found murdered in his Manhattan apartment. William an insurance investigator has been checking out a number of claims for missing or stolen jewelry at the time of his murder. Despite being told to stay out of the case by police Captain Pat Chambers, Preston Foster, Hammer has his own plans to find and bring to justice his good friend Jack Williams killer. Even if he has to turn the entire city as well as state of New York upside down in order to do it!Hammer going on the contents of a collage yearbook given to him by Captain Chambers that was found in Williams apartment at the time of his murder gets the feeling that his killer was one of those students in the yearbook and tracks down everyone in it to find Williams killer. As for Williams fiancée Myrna Devlin, Frances Osborne, Hammer finds that she's holding something back in why Williams was murdered and the reasons behind it. And as it later turned out the collage yearbook did have the clue to who but also why and what were the reasons for Williams being knocked off. Hammer also tracks down psychoanalyst Doctor Charlotte Mannings, Peggie Castle, who was treating both Jack Williams and his fiancée Myrna Devlin for severe emotional problems in her clinic. It's Dr. Mannings who's also been secretly supplying Myrna a recovering drug addict with illegal drugs!***SPOILERS**** Mike Hammer we also find out is being used by Captain Chambers as a battering ram to brake the Jack Williams murder case wide open without Hammer, who's too busy tearing up the whole place, actually knowing about it. What Williams found out about a secret jewelry smuggling operation that covered two continent's turned out to be his own death sentence. Now his friend Mike Hammer is determined to be the both judge and jury, thus the title of the movie "I the Jury, as well as executioner in having those who murdered him pay with their lives for it. Check out Film Nior veteran Elisha Cook Jr as the drunken department store Santa Clause "BoBo" who clues Mike Hammer into what were the reasons behind Jack Williams murder and what the mysterious collage yearbook had to do with it.

I consider this film to be the best one about Mike Hammer, with Biff Elliott's performance the definitive Mike Hammer. Harry Essex's script is excellent and contains many improvements on Mickey Spillane's novel. His direction is strong and imaginative, and he makes fine use of light and shadow. The camera work by John Alton is top-notch, as is the score by Franz Waxman. The cast includes many veteran players, as well as Peggie Castle in her memorable performance as Charlotte Manning. All in all, this is one of the finest private eye films ever made. Biff Elliott and Haary Essex should have received more opportunities. I have always treasured this film.

In 1953, I, The Jury became the first of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series to hit the screen, but it takes its cues from movies of 1947, when the book hit the kiosks. The yuletide cards serving as scene dividers, the violence counterpointed to Christmas carols recall The Lady in the Lake, while the duplicitous female psychiatrist reprises Helen Walker's Dr. Lilith Ritter in Nightmare Alley (the final, fatal tryst comes from the even earlier Double Indemnity).These echoes may have been attempts to invest Hammer with some respectability, linking him to the more subtle and textured characters of the 1940s. It's clear something had to be done with him, because Spillane went for raw sensation in a way that caused a sensation of its own. His private eye is uncouth, short-fused and randy but misogynist, bowing to no authority save his own (hence the title). Spillane luckily or shrewdly had as readers of his punch-drunk prose men who had survived overseas combat and were making up for lost time in the footloose, post-war prosperity; he gave them not just sex and violence but sex-and-violence.So in one sense, Biff Elliott makes an ideal Hammer, closer to Spillane's lout than his (relatively) spruced-up successors Ralph Meeker and Robert Bray (plus Armand Assante, in the marginally better 1982 remake of this title). He comes across as a Dead End kid grown up with a license and a gun, slow-witted but fast with his fists and his trigger.When his best friend, an insurance investigator and combat amputee, gets himself coldly killed, Hammer scours New York to avenge him. The urban locales bring out the talents of director of photography John Alton, who here tried his hand at the 3-D process (thus I, The Jury, along with Man in the Dark, The Glass Web and Second Chance, becomes one of the few noirs so filmed).The shoot-from-the-hip action, however, rides roughshod over any intricacies of the plot. Characters Hammer encounters stay generic, with the exception of Peggie Castle as the shrink. The film's last scene is hers, not Elliott's, as she moves into a languorous striptease that comes to a quick finale. For better or worse, it's an emblematic image that showcases Spillane's coarsened sensibility, his fusion of brutality and eroticism, and spells an end to the more freighted ambiguity that was a hallmark of the noir cycle.