It has often been pointed out by various scholarly film critics that during the 1950s movie genres increasingly broke with tried and true criteria in an effort to win back theatre audiences who had begun to stay home to watch television instead. While no one can deny that various hybrids emerged throughout the decade, the reality is that most genres remained fairly close to the values and aesthetics that initially made them popular with fans. This is how this film critic chooses to regard Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955): a crime thriller that borrows both its title and central character from a novel by Mickey Spillane, but basically discards everything else about the book in favour of a totally original narrative penned by A.I. Besserides.
Spillane's Mike Hammer became a cultural phenomenon after WWII with Spillane himself playing the character in several movies based more closely on his own pulp fiction novels. In retrospect, the character's appeal is easy to understand amongst its male readership. Emotionally, physically and socially emasculated by those terrible years of war that preceded Hammer's emergence into pop culture, returning G.I.'s were hungry for a 'take charge' kind of guy who is not beholding to anyone but himself. Spillane's Mike Hammer is a brute, but one with a loveable penchant for womanizing the wrong kind of gal without ever allowing her to get under his skin.
Aldrich's Mike Hammer takes the character one step further to his inevitable evolution as a narcissistic lesser of two evils. Just what the 'other evil' is in the world of Mike Hammer will be explained in lurid detail by Aldrich and Besserides in short order. The screenplay opens with a girl, Christina Baily (cloris Leachman) running barefoot and wearing only a trench coat on a lonely stretch of open road late at night. She manages to hook a ride from L.A. private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker); a hard boiled self absorbed man about town with absolutely nothing to lose...except, perhaps his livelihood and a few friends.
After learning that Christina is an escapee from a mental hospital Hammer helps her elude police. He stops at a gas station where Christina asks the attendant to mail a letter for her. He does and she and Hammer are on their way. But their car is derailed off the side of the road by men who are in search of Christina. Hammer is beaten unconscious while Christina is tortured to death inside a seedy motel. Afterward, the thugs (whose faces we never see) place Hammer and Christina in Hammer's sporty Jaguar and push it off the side of a cliff where it meets with a fiery end.
To Hammer's amazement he has survived the ordeal and wakes up inside the local hospital with dutiful secretary and sometimes lover, Velda (Maxine Cooper) leaning over his bedside. Hammer quickly learns from his fair weather friend, Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) that he is part of a federal investigation. The task force ruthlessly grill Hammer but he keeps his cool without telling them anything. Pat warns Hammer to stay off Christina's case. But Hammer, sensing a nice fat retainer at the other end, decides instead to pursue an investigation on his own with his usual lack of tact.
Reunited in his apartment with Velda, Hammer encourages her to work an angle on their latest divorce case. It seems that Velda uses her feminine wiles to seduce wayward husbands whereupon Hammer employs his oily charm on the wives, thereby playing both against the middle to secure his fee. While Velda is off on her latest seduction, Hammer goes to see his friend, Nick (Nick Dennis) a garage mechanic who informs him that his Jaguar is totalled. Next, Hammer follows a lead to Christina's apartment where he meets waif-like sex kitten Lily Carver (Gaby Rogers) who is posing as Christina's ex roommate.
Lily tells Hammer that she moved from the apartment because she was afraid for her own life. But Hammer suspects something more sinister is afoot when he is attacked after leaving Lily's apartment. Christina's letter arrives at Hammer's fashionable apartment with the cryptic message 'remember me'. Hammer links this clue to a book of poems found in Christina's apartment and slowly begins to unravel the riddle behind what he and Velda have nicknamed 'the great whatsit.'
With Lily in tow, Hammer goes to the coroner's office, realizing that a pivotal passage in the poem makes reference to a key. The coroner, Doc Kennedy (Percy Helton) agrees but demands half of whatever the treasure might be in exchange for giving Hammer the key he's discovered on Christina' s person. Instead, Hammer breaks the man's fingers by closing them in a desk drawer, then takes the key with the initials H.A.C. to the Hollywood Athletic Club. Inside one of the lockers Hammer discovers a mysterious box containing a terrible force of nature. As he attempts to pry the box open he is severely scalded on his wrist.
Hammer tells the club's proprietor to keep the contents of the locker a secret but late the proprietor is found murdered at the club by Pat Murphy. The box has vanished. Meanwhile, Velda has been kidnapped in an attempt to silence Hammer once and for all. Determined to know how much of the mystery Hammer has already figured out Dr. G.E. Soberin (Albert Dekker), the criminal mastermind behind these baffling murders, has his thugs bring Hammer to a remote beach house. He is injected with sodium pentothal but manages to divulge nothing to his captors.
Lily is revealed to be Gabrielle, Dr. Soberin's nymphomaniac mistress. After Hammer escapes and realizes that Velda is being held captive at the beach house he returns to rescue her, only to discover that Lily/Gabrielle has murdered her lover out of greed for what's in the box. She wounds Hammer in the gut, then opens the box in front of him, inadvertently releasing the government's top secret H-bomb into the room. Hammer manages to crawl to Velda's room, save her and escape the beach house moments before it is consumed in a radioactive fireball.
Kiss Me Deadly is a bizarre film noir. At once it marks a revisionist beginning and sadly, an end to the movement that began nearly two decades earlier with The Maltese Falcon and I Wake Up Screaming. It dabbles in the then Cold War concern of nuclear annihilation but never quite explains how so many lowlifes and disreputable underworld characters have been able to get so close to a top secret technology that, at least in 1955, would have largely unknown except to a handful of U.S. government physicists and engineers.
If anything, director Aldrich's Mike Hammer is even less appealing and more of an egotist than Spillane's original incarnation, and it is saying much of Ralph Meeker's performance that despite his retention of those repugnant qualities that he manages to exude a strange and seductive appeal we can root for. It is a genuine pity that audiences of the day did not embrace this film as it so justly has been revered ever since. We might have seen more Aldrich/Meeker collaborations and more Mike Hammer movies as a result.
There really is no point debating discrepancies between the film and the novel. The two are irreconcilable. The book isn't the movie and vice versa. The film's release proved an uphill battle for Aldrich who had to fight like hell, first with the MPAA to secure a general rating and then with The Legion of Decency, who condemned the film's ultra-violence. However, like Hitchcock's Psycho all of the murders that occur in Kiss Me Deadly happen off camera.
The most shocking moments in the film are Hammer's brutalization of one of Dr. Soberin's thugs whom he sends flying down a steep flight of cement stairs, and Lily/Gabrielle's demise at the end of the film that is rather graphic with a torched wax body double. Otherwise, Aldrich and the film stay fairly close to the familiar noir detective/crime story we have come to know and expect. In the final analysis, Kiss Me Deadly is a fond farewell to noir. It's failure at the box office and the gradual decline in popularity of the B-movie ultimately put a period to dark thrillers like this one; a shame because Kiss Me Deadly is one of the best.
Criterion's Blu-ray leaves something to be desired. The disc's extensive linear notes do not detail whether this is a 2k, 4k or 6k transfers, although judging from the results 2k is probably more like it. The B&W image is often crisp but contrast levels occasionally appear slightly boosted. The central problem with the image is that many scenes are softly focused with a loss of fine details. Grain looks very natural in some scenes and too heavy and slightly digitized in others. I have my suspicions that Criterion struck this 1080p transfer from existing digital files rather than doing their own time consuming and more costly rescan from an original camera negative.
The audio is mono and acceptable for this presentation. I can't say I much care for the extras either. Alain Silver and James Ursini's commentary is the best among the lot. Alex Cox's reflections on the film begin and end abruptly and the image is riddled with edge enhancement effects. We get only excerpts from a 1998 and 2005 documentary instead of the whole documentary. The advertised 'controversial ending' is less than thirty seconds long and is not at all 'controversial'.
Bottom line: Kiss Me Deadly is deliciously subversive and perverse film noir. It's a must have blind purchase. Despite the aforementioned difficulties with this transfer, this is by far the best the film has ever looked on home video. Enjoy.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
4
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
3
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