The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer

The crown of Ray Danton’s experience as a television director is adherence to one basic rule, keep it moving. This is not only one way to stay ahead of tight production schedules, it enables you to turn on a dime for arbitrary commercial breaks, it gives you a satisfying directorial technique made up of all the little shots you combine into a flexible whole, and sometimes it builds up comprehensive analyses, as in the two-hundred-fifty-dollar gag here that has Mike Hammer in pursuit crossing a New York street and rolling over a passing car’s hood and windshield. Danton films this three ways, and puts them all together as one sweep of action.