Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre.

Kiss Me Deadly marked the film debuts of both actresses Cloris Leachman and Maxine Cooper.

Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a tough Los Angeles private eye who is just slightly less brutal and corrupt than the crooks he chases. One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina (Cloris Leachman), an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.

The twisting plot takes Hammer to the apartment of Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), a sexy, waif-like blond who is posing as the dead Christina's ex-room mate. Lily tells Hammer she has gone into hiding and asks Hammer to protect her. But she is duplicitous, and is after a mysterious box that, she believes, has contents worth a fortune.

"The great whatsit" (as Hammer's assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it) at the center of Hammer's quest is a small, mysterious valise that is hot to the touch and contains a dangerous, shining substance. It comes to represent the 1950's Cold War fear and nuclear paranoia about the atomic bomb that permeated American culture. It also suggests the mysterious glowing brief-case of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

Later, at a deserted beach house, Hammer finds Lily with her evil companion, Dr. Soberin. Velda is their hostage, tied up in a bedroom. Soberin and Lily are vying for the contents of the box. Lily shoots Soberin, believing that she can keep the mysterious contents for herself. As she slyly opens the case, it is ultimately revealed to be stolen radionuclide material, which in an apocalyptic final scene apparently reaches explosive criticality when the box ("Pandora's Box") is fully opened. Horrifying sounds are emitted from the nuclear material as Lily bursts into flames.

Alternate ending

The original American release of the film shows Hammer and Velda escaping from the burning house at the end, running into the ocean as the words "The End" come over them on the screen. Sometime after its first release, the ending was crudely altered on the film's original negative, removing over a minute's worth of shots where Hammer and Velda escape and superimposing the words "The End" over the burning house. This implied that Hammer and Velda perished in the atomic blaze, and was often interpreted to represent the End of the World. In 1997, the original conclusion was restored. The DVD release has the correct original ending, and offers the now-discredited (but influential) truncated ending as an extra. The movie is described as "the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time - at the close of the classic noir period."

Kiss Me Deadly is one of the most brutal of all films noir (a close thing with the same year’s The Big Combo), a diamond sharp looking paean to the colour black. It’s the sort of film that could only have existed in the fifties and perfectly encapsulates what it was to be a cult item in that most iconic of decades. This may have been the decade of James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, but it was also the age of a new phoney realism in the movies. Deadly may not be realistic, but it tantalises you into thinking that it could be.

In many ways the film shows signs of the prevalence of science fiction on the mentality of Cold War America. There’s a sense of paranoia seeping through every shot of this film, an unnameable force not only driving the plot along but lurking beneath the surface ready to explode. All the women Hammer encounters are mysterious and cannot be trusted and Hammer is happy to kiss them but leave it at that. This is no Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett detective, this is Mike Hammer. He is a very unpleasant fellow in too many respects. He enjoys dishing out pain, both physical and even psychological (just recall his ever ready fists, the sadistic glee on breaking Bonanova’s rare Caruso record or holding the admittedly slimy Helton’s fingers in a drawer) and does not flinch from receiving it to the point of near masochism. Even gangster Stewart is repulsed by his low morals, observing “what’s it worth to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter they crawled out of?“ For sure the villains he goes after are nasty people, but he is no less nasty. It is to Ralph Meeker’s great credit that he finely balances the character’s brutal exterior with a final realisation that he’s in over his head. Yet even then he goes in all fists blazing and gets himself shot for his troubles. He’s a bull in a china shop and he doesn’t care what gets smashed. No wonder Addy’s cop looks at him with such disdain. In comparison the rest of the cast seem like caricatures; Stewart and Dekker do slimy like they have many times before, the latter immortally showing only his black moccasins through most of the film; Rodgers acts and speaks as if completely stoned for the entire film in a truly bizarre performance, about as desirable and fresh as an ashtray. And as for Dennis’ Nick with more va-va-voom’s per sentence than Thierry Henry, he chews the scenery with a relish more akin to Tod Slaughter. However, in spite of this and the gorgeous jet-black lensing of Ernest Laszlo, the real stars are screenwriter Bezzerides, who recognised the inherent fascism of Hammer (a black shirt wannabe if ever there was one?), a true parallel to Genesis and classical myth and the hypocrisy of the private eye ideology. Mostly, though, it’s a testament to the vision of Aldrich, who shows just how treacherous a kiss – “a liar’s kiss, the kiss that says I love you” – can be when delivered by the poisoned lips of a treacherous Pandora or Eve.