Saturday Night Cinema: Kiss Me Deadly

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Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema feature is the film noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s “annihilating masterpiece, one of the decade’s key works.” “A shining example for the New Wave directors — Truffaut, Godard, et al.” Director Aldrich’s films include The Dirty Dozen and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

The title alone just sucks you in.

“A crucial influence on what would become the French new wave, an irresistibly seedy trip through the Los Angeles underworld, and a valuable artifact of the Cold War.”

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This film noir stars Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane’s anti-social private eye Mike Hammer. After he and a hitchhiker are kidnapped by thugs, the semiconscious Hammer helplessly watches as the girl is tortured to death. Seeking vengeance, Hammer searches for the secret behind the girl’s murder.

https://youtu.be/DuvfCwBftwc

Kiss Me Deadly

Robert Aldrich’s flamboyant and hectic 1955 film noir opens with a pre-credit sequence that announces its blend of sexual voracity, sadism, found poetry, sharp-edged performances, and visual invention. The story is adapted from a pulp novel by Mickey Spillane, and its detective, the brutish Mike Hammer (played by Ralph Meeker), has none of the suave command of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. He crashes blindly through his case—a forbidden quest for a mysterious object—leaving a trail of collateral damage, both human and cultural. Along the way, the film offers verse by Christina Rossetti, a recording of Caruso, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, souped-up cars and a man crushed under one, a woman on a meat hook, a whiff of narcotics, a primordial answering machine, bloody street fights, and nuclear catastrophe. The actors’ idiosyncratic voices, wrapped around such chrome-plated phrases as “the great whatsit” and “va-va-voom,” are as hauntingly musical as Aldrich’s images. In his vision of ambient terror, the apocalyptic nightmares of the Cold War ring in everyone’s heads, like an alarm that can’t be shut off.
— Richard Brody, New Yorker

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Tom Swift
Tom Swift
5 years ago

The film books set the classic Film Noir era between the 1941 version of “Maltese Falcon” and 1958’s “Touch of Evil”. But I mark the classic period as a few years either side of the pinnacle of “Kiss Me Deadly”. There’s nothing quite like it. The science sucks … but even though I have a degree in physics and so have some inkling of just how ridiculous the Whatsis is, I can ignore that because the film is such pure, distilled Noir – seedy settings, paranoia, treachery, double-crossing, mayhem, villains lined up three deep, slick pavements, dark nights, cars driven too fast (but not so fast that they themselves become the story) – in other words, pure Noir gold.

poetcomic1
poetcomic1
5 years ago

If you are a fan of L.A. Noir (c’est moi) you will enjoy ‘movie tourist’s’ guide to this film’s locations.

http://movie-tourist.blogspot.com/2012/09/kiss-me-deadly-1955.html

GeneP54
GeneP54
5 years ago

Is there a working link to this?
Thanks!

Joe Engineer
Joe Engineer
5 years ago

I had never seen this until a few years ago. Enjoyed it, especially got a kick out of Hammer’s answering machine.

puhiawa
puhiawa
5 years ago

Pam, for no reason at all, I recently gave thought to a film I saw on TNT a bit ago.
Light In The Piazza. comment image
The absolutely unusual story of a young woman who was brain damaged as a child in an accident and as a result appears naive and ditzy. Under the very protective care of her mother, she inadvertently attracts the attention of a very rich Italian while on a tour of Europe. A most compelling romance.

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Thanks for sharing!