Kiss Me Deadly

What better way to spend Valentine's night than to watch one of the more hard-boiled noir films ever made, Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich and adapted from the novel by Mickey Spillane.

Noir is a term that has come to encompass many types of films, but in a strict sense only covers those films made from roughly the late thirties until the mid-fifties, with this one (from 1955), being from the latter stages of the period. There are still many films made in the noir style, but true Noir is like a true Impressionist or Abstract Expressionist--you can paint a picture in that style, but that doesn't mean you're one of them.

It begins with a woman, barefoot and only wearing a trench coat, running along a highway at night. She stops a sports car, which turns out to be driven by private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker). He gives her a lift, and even helps her elude authorities, as it turns out she's escaped from an asylum. But eventually they are forced off the road by hoodlums, who are only shown from the waist down. They torture the woman (played by Cloris Leachman) to death, and then pile her body and Hammer's into his car, which they push off a cliff.

Hammer survives (without a scratch, amazingly) and decides to investigate. He's a sleazy gumshoe, who mostly takes divorce cases. Along with his dutiful secretary, Velda (Maxine Cooper), whom he also sleeps with, he digs into the case. He's warned away by a detective (Wesley Addy, in a marvelously taciturn performance) but manages to figure out that Leachman had something that those crooks wanted. He gets tips from a science reporter that lead him to a variety of locations--a boxing gym, a washed-up opera singer, and the mansion of a gangster, all of which lead to an item that everyone is looking for. Velda calls it "the whatzit," and it ends up being a box that that contains something very bright (Quentin Tarantino used this in Pulp Fiction).

Perhaps because it was at the end of Noir's golden era, Kiss Me Deadly at times seems to be a parody of itself. The slanted credits roll up instead of down. The stark black-and-white photography is almost chilly, and the angles are sharp, with most characters seen from high above or way below. Women are depicted in their usual categories: the nurturing Velda, or the manipulative femme fatale, played here in a weird performance by Gaby Rodgers, her hair cut in a blonde pixie do, her line-readings stilted and false.

Hammer, as written by Spillane, is a walking pile of testosterone. He is catnip to women, as one introduces herself by kissing him romantically. He also takes delight in inflicting injury. He knocks out several people in this film, sending one down a flight of stairs, and if bribing someone for information doesn't work, he slaps them around, even if they're old men. Hammer was Spillane's idea of a real man.

I don't want to give away what's in the box, but suffice it to say it fits the atomic, cold-war age in which it was made. When it is opened it recalls the scene of the ark being opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film has an interesting relationship with technology--Hammer has what must have been one of the first answering machines, with reel-to-reel tape.

I found Kiss Me Deadly to be interesting stylistically and historically but weak in story. I was lost almost immediately, and it suffered from a contrivance of having one character, the science reporter, doling out information piecemeal, keeping the plot going. I did like, though, that even if it had roots from the kind of pulp novel bought in a bus station, it had references to the poems of Christina Rosetti and the operas sung by Enrico Caruso. The ending, which suggests a cataclysm of apocalyptic proportions, contains references to Pandora, Cerberus, and Medusa.