Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Directed by Robert Aldrich

Film Review

If there is one film that can be said to have kicked the French New Wave into life in the late 1950s that film was surely Robert Aldrich's starkly nihilistic noir thriller Kiss Me Deadly -  a boldly subversive masterpiece that, with its taboo-shattering, genre-crossing, paranoia-stoking bravado, was to prove highly influential on both sides of the Atlantic for many decades.  For a film that was to have a lasting and far-reaching impact on cinema it was one that was very much of its time, providing not only a fitting indictment for a country in thrall to capitalist greed and reactionary rightwing politics, but also an extraordinary effective warning of the threat posed by the accelerating deployment of nuclear weapons.  With its powerful anti-nuclear message, Aldrich's film was both timely and revelatory, but its full significance was appreciated by only a handful of reviewers at the time of its first release - and of these the most impressed were the firebrand French film critics who would, a short while later, go on to become the pillars of Nouvelle Vague cinema in France.

Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette were all blown away when they saw the film for the first time.  To them, Kiss Me Deadly was a revelation, not only in a cinematic approach that was steeped in a stylish modernity but also in its high-impact relevance to contemporary society.  All were dazzled by the film's seductive design and trenchant realism, and Chabrol saw in it 'the thriller of the future'.  The film certainly broke new ground in its flagrant depiction of sexuality and physical violence - judged by some to be both nauseous and shocking - but its non-stop cynicism and lack of a sympathetic protagonist made it the noirest of noirs ever made up until this point - even surpassing Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), which achieved instant notoriety for its nihilistic tone and bursts of extreme violence (including a horrible disfigurement with scalding coffee).  This was the first time that noir thriller crossed the line into science-fiction fantasy, creating a whole new sub-genre of 'sci-fi noir' that would only come into its own in the 1980s with the advent of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

Staff writers on the prestigious Cahiers du cinéma, Truffaut et al. were fulsome in their praise of Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Aldrich became both a visionary and a lodestone to each of them as they embarked on their own filmmaking careers.  Godard's debut feature À bout de souffle (1960) and Truffaut's second film Tirez sur le pianiste (1961) were both noir-styled pieces that show the influence of 'le Gros Bob' quite markedly, although nowhere near as blatantly as Godard's later Alphaville (1965), a sci-fi noir spectacular with a shamelessly Aldrichian feel to it.  Truffaut's trademark use of elliptical cutting - a sudden transition from one scene to another that implies a part of the narrative has been kept from us - is likely to have been inspired by Aldrich's use of the same technique in his film.

Chabrol's early psychological thrillers À double tour (1959) and L'Oeil du malin (1962) owe more to Hitchcock, but the influence of Aldrich is very noticeable in some scenes. Rivette's debt to the American director is harder to divine in his work, although the Aldrichian imprint can be felt in some of his films, most notably Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), which has echoes of the eerie dreamlike composition of Kiss Me Deadly.  With its wild plot contortions and total negation of an objective viewpoint, Rivette's later thriller Sécret defence (1998) is mired in the moral ambiguity that best defines Aldrich's oeuvre.

From vigilante hero to sadistic thug

Kiss Me Deadly was not Robert Aldrich's first attempt at a film noir thriller.  The year before, he had made World for Ransom, a micro-budget B-movie thriller that is deservedly overlooked but it has some striking plot similarities with the noir masterpiece that came later, after Aldrich had notched up two massive box office hits with his westerns Apache (1954) and Vera Cruz (1954).  The runaway success of these two films gave Aldrich the wherewithal to set up his own film production company, but before embarking on his first independent production he accepted an invitation from another producer, Victor Saville, to direct an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel for his company, Parklane Productions.

Mickey Spillane was by far the most successful and best-known American writer of his time.  His brand of low-brow pulp fiction may seem hideously crude and morally objectionable today but his novels sold in the tens of millions and had a prominent place in American popular culture throughout the 1950s.  I, the Jury (1953) was the first film adaptation of a Spillane potboiler, followed by Ring of Fear (1954) with the author appearing as himself in the film.  The fact that neither of these films had had any success was what motivated Aldrich to make a drastic departure from Spillane's literary creation for his adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly - so drastic in fact that the similarity between the film and the novel is scarcely discernible.

Aldrich was no fan of Mickey Spillane.  He loathed his right-wing politics, the cheap populism of his novels and his manifest lack of talent as a writer.  By adapting Kiss Me Deadly, the director's intention was not to serve the interest of a hack writer he despised, but rather to deliver the most damning critique of his morally reprehensible philosophy, which was perfectly encapsulated in his fictional alter ego, Mike Hammer.  A forerunner of the maverick cops that proliferated on cinema and TV screens throughout the 1970s, Hammer was, as Spillane originally conceived him, a vigilante private investigator who saw himself as a moral crusader, dispensing rough justice (including violent death) to those he deemed a threat to society - a cross-between Dick Tracy and Dirty Harry, with overt Fascistic leanings.  In Aldrich's eyes, Hammer was not a hero but an extremely vicious amoral bully, a poster-boy for the ultra-conservatives who had reeked havoc in the US for over a decade, under the influence of the rabidly anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy.  Aldrich's objective was to fully deconstruct Mike Hammer and show just what a nasty piece of work he is - and by inference all those who subscribed to his idea of rough justice.

The birth of sci-fi noir

As he was tasked with both directing and producing the film, Aldich did not have the time to write the screenplay himself, so he engaged the services of another writer who shared his social conscience, A. I. Bezzerides.  The latter had an impressive track record in the noir crime-thriller stable, several of his novels having already been turned into exemplary films noirs, notably They Drive By Night (1940) and Thieves' Highway (1949).  Bezzerides shared Aldrich's contempt for Spillane and consequently churned out his screenplay as fast as he could, blithely correcting what he perceived were glaring weaknesses in the original plot.  Owing to censorship restrictions, the references to drugs trafficking (a central story strand in the original book) had to be ditched - hence the introduction of the most fantastic element of the resulting film, a terrifying doomsday device.  Small enough to fit into a modest suitcase but powerful enough to destroy the world, this was the ultimate McGuffin, and it became a stock plot device to be emulated ad nauseum from then on - most successfully by Alex Cox for his classic 1984 sci-fi oddity Repo Man.

Bezzerides and Aldrich introduced other significant changes to Spillane's novel, such as changing the location from New York City to the less salubrious districts of present day Los Angeles.  It was with the film's distinctly unheroic portrayal of Mike Hammer that it departed most noticeably from Spillane's novel.  In Aldrich's take on Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is transformed from a rough but likeable private dick into a twisted, sadistic brute who derives a sick pleasure from inflicting extreme pain on others.  He is as egotistical as he is cruel and stupid, flaunting his dubiously acquired wealth with his smart clothes and flashy motorcar.  His hyper-masculine bachelor apartment is fitted out with the latest in mod-cons, including a reel-to-reel telephone answering machine.  Women are drawn to him like moths to a flame, which is just as well as he discards them as casually as he throws away a cigarette butt once he has had his nicotine fix.

When it comes to dishing out pain and distress, the aptly named Mr Hammer just can't get enough.  He deals with a stalker by repeatedly bashing his head against a brick wall.  He shows his contempt for small-talk by smashing a priceless record in front of its owner.  He responds to an attempt at bribery by trapping an old man's fingers in a desk drawer and grins viciously as his victim screams in agony.  For his day job, Hammer works with a female accomplice to break up married couples so that he can win a handsome fee from both parties in the resulting divorce proceedings.  This is Mickey Spillane's famous creation as he truly is - a despicably vile psychopath driven not by moral conviction to protect society, but by a perverse craving for human suffering.  Needless-to-say, Spillane wasn't overly pleased with this portrayal.

Cause and effect

Before he became a film director, Robert Aldrich had worked a long apprenticeship as an assistant to some of the finest cineastes of his era - luminaries that include Jean Renoir (The Southerner), Charles Chaplin (Limelight) and Max Ophüls (Caught).  It was through his collaborations with Abraham Polonsky on Force of Evil (1948) and Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) that he acquired the technical and artistic know-how required to make a first-rate film noir.  Kiss Me Deadly is visually the most striking of Aldrich's films, using expressionistic, high-contrast lighting and exaggerated camera positionings (particularly low angle shots) to great effect to create a sustained mood of menace and ratchet up the tension at key moments.  Orson Welles may also have been a strong influence, his two noir offerings The Stranger (1946) and The Lady From Shanghai (1947) showing similar techniques (deep-focus photography, geometric set designs, effective use of mirrors) to those employed by Aldrich on this film and its immediate successor - The Big Knife (1955).  It is tempting to think that Welles later repaid the compliment by appropriating the apocalyptic ending to Kiss Me Deadly for his subsequent noir-style Kafka adaptation, The Trial (1962).

Although Aldrich and Bezzerides had made multiple concessions to the Hollywood censors at the script-writing stage, this was not enough to get past the still rigorously enforced production code, which necessitated further cuts to the final print.  Even with these cuts, Kiss Me Deadly met with a huge barrage of negative criticism when it was first released in America.  The film was widely condemned as being both gratuitously violent and morally corrupting.  The sequence near the start of the film where a naked Cloris Leachman is apparently tortured to death with pliers was particularly reviled.  Despite some harsh reviews, the film found praise in some quarters and failed to be an outright flop, although it fared much better in France, where it was released under the title En quatrième vitesse.  In the UK, it was met with an outright ban on account of its perceived excessive violence.

A class act

Kiss Me Deadly deserves its reputation as one of the greatest film noir thrillers of its era but it is not without its failings.  The plot is such a convoluted tangle that it takes at least two viewings for any of it to make any kind of sense - by which time it becomes abundantly clear to the spectator that for its first half the film is just treading water with very little in the way of meaningful exposition or narrative progression.  There is a superb opening and and even better ending - it's the flabby bit in between that is a tad problematic.  With the notable exception of the lead actor, the casting is generally a let down, the dearth of acting ability being so apparent that few (if any) of the secondary characters fail to be more than cartoonish stereotypes.  The film's two good guys, Nick Dennis's zany car mechanic (the one who can't stop saying Va-va-voom!) and Wesley Addy's semi-zombified Lieutenant Murphy (the one who can't stop doing funny things with his eyebrows), are as irritating as piles in a heatwave, whilst the baddies (an odd mix of rogue scientists and routine mobsters) are about as one-dimensional as they can get, falling way below the standard of your average comic book.  The criminal mastermind, Dr Soberin, has real Mabuse-like menace whilst he is just a disembodied voice or appears from the waist down.  The instant his face is revealed to us (in the film's final act) he becomes just another feeble moustache-twirling villain, all too easily dispatched by an even less convincing criminal.  Which leads us neatly to the film's most egregious flaw - Gaby Rodgers' unintentionally hilarious femme fatale Lily Carver.  Early in the script's development, the character was conceived as a narcotics-addicted lesbian, so Rodgers was obviously misinformed when she took on the role.  Whereas the other three women in the film are flagrant objects of masculine desire, casually lobbed into the narrative to give Hammer a break from beating the stuffing out of random members of his own sex, Lily (or rather Gabrielle, as she is in fact an impostor) is just plain weird - an unimaginably dire attempt at simulating a human being by an alien Body Snatcher whose only reference naterial is a poor VHS copy of a Judy Holliday film.

Such is the generally risible quality of the performances that Kiss Me Deadly would either be unbearably hammy or devastatingly funny if it were not for the utterly inspired casting of Ralph Meeker in the lead role.  With his steel toe-capped hard man persona, super-dominant physical presence and coldly Germanic good looks, Meeker was the perfect choice for Aldrich's conception of Mike Hammer and he elevates the film way above the mundane with an amazingly powerful and compelling performance.  There is nothing remotely likable about Meeker's character.  We are constantly appalled by his slippery handling of women and the ease with which he disposes of his adversaries.  He is every inch the archetypal Alpha Male Neanderthal, blundering his way through a muddled investigation without a clue or a care of what he is getting into.  Yet, despite all this, we stay on his side and have some sympathy for him when he takes a hit (such as the gruesome fate meted out to his possibly only friend, Nick - Va-va-Aaaaagh!).

At the time, Ralph Meeker was near the start of his prolific (but mostly undistinguished) screen career, which lasted until 1980.  He had already garnered considerable acclaim for his work on the American stage.  After his breakthrough role - replacing Marlon Brando in the original Broadway run of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire - Meeker triumphed in two subsequent Broadway productions - Mister Roberts (1948) and Picnic (1953) - whilst making a promising screen debut in the early 1950s in films such as The Naked Spur (1953) and Jeopardy (1953).  It is for his part in Kiss Me Deadly that Ralph Meeker is now best remembered, a precursor to other macho roles that invigorated his subsequent film and television career.  Aldrich later gave him a part in his box office hit The Dirty Dozen (1967) and he also had a notable role in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957).

Flash, bang, wallop, what a picture!

From its very first shot, Kiss Me Deadly goes out of its way to present itself as something different - not just a run-of-the-mill gangster film but a cinematic oddball far more likely to provoke thought and discussion.  The opening pre-title shot of an attractive young woman running down a stretch of road in the dead of night - wearing nothing but a raincoat - is a quintessential Aldrichian hook, grabbing our attention from the outset and paving the way for what promises to be a truly sordid melange of noir-flavoured sex and violence.  Our expectations are immediately knocked askew as the opening titles then start rolling down the screen, reading 'the wrong way' to confuse and disorientate us (just as the plot will do when it gets underway).  It's curious how none of the characters (except Hammer) seems to come into focus - they act so oddly and have so little substance that you could mistake them for mere puppets.  This, together with the circulatory feel to the narrative, the jagged scene changes and the sudden left-field dive into sci-fi bizarreness two-thirds into the film give it an unsettling dreamlike quality.  Throughout, the brutal realism appears to be jarringly at odds with the indefinable strangeness of the characters and the world they inhabit - a distinctly kafkaesque blending of hard-edged reality and absurdist fantasy.  It is in its spectacular final third that Kiss Me Deadly goes completely off the rails, ending with what is undoubtedly the strangest and most terrifying denouement to any film noir thriller - the destruction of the whole world by what one character casually refers to as 'The Big Whatsit'.

By the mid-1950s, the threat of nuclear Armageddon had become a grim fact of life, with the major world powers scrambling to build up nuclear arsenals as quickly as possible in an insane attempt to maintain global peace through a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD for short).  It was madness born of paranoid suspicion and fear over what 'the other side' were doing at the start of the Cold War.  The mushrooming public anxiety over The Bomb was reflected in - and possibly fuelled by - popular culture, in books and films offering frightening visions of the Apocalypse and its aftermath.  Kiss Me Deadly typifies the pessimism of its époque, what begins as a bog-standard crime thriller ending with the detonation of a Doomsday Weapon that makes everything we have just witnessed appear totally trivial by comparison.  Mike Hammer's homicidal brutality is laughably insignificant compared with the destructive power that a modern day Pandora unleashes when, tempted by curiosity and greed, she dares to open The Box.

In the only version of Kiss Me Deadly that was available for 42 years after its first release, the films ends abruptly with exterior shots of Dr Soberin's beach house being consumed by fire amid a demonic cacophony of terrifying sound effects - the implication being that Hammer and his female accomplice Velda are trapped inside and are killed in the raging inferno.  In 1997, the film's original ending was reinstated after the recovery of the missing footage, and in this version Hammer and Velda manage to make it out in time, reaching the sea just before the house is totally engulfed.  What happens next is left to our imagination - does the Doomsday Weapon burn itself out once it has gobbled up one building, or does it go on to blow up the whole world?  With chilling succinctness, Aldrich's bleakest, most cynical, most provocative film leaves us pondering the horrible reality that mankind faces in the 21st century, now that we have acquired the means to destroy our entire planet whilst lacking the ability to restrain our aggressive instincts.  All it takes is one flawed human being to 'open the box' and that's it - va-va-BOOM!

Film Synopsis

In the dead of night, a young woman clad only in a trench coat runs for her life along a deserted stretch of highway.  Suddenly, she sees a flashy sports car racing towards her and desperately signals to the driver to stop.  Her knight-in-shining-armour is Mike Hammer, a hard-bitten private detective from Los Angeles who specialises in divorce cases and hitting people.  As they drive off, the woman appears reluctant to confide in her rescuer, and all that Hammer is able to find out about her is her first name - Christina - and the fact that she has just escaped from a psychiatric hospital.  Not long after stopping at a gas station, where Christina has time to post a letter to Hammer, the couple are picked up by merciless thugs and beaten senseless.  To cover their tracks, the villains place the bodies in Hammer's car, which is then pushed over a precipice.

Miraculously, Mike survives this attempt on his life and regains consciousness in hospital to be met by his dependable assistant Velda Wakeman.  After being interviewed by the police, Hammer feels impelled to investigate Christina's death, but as he does so he soon learns that he is putting his own life on the line.  Through Ray Diker, a badly scarred and half-petrified science reporter, he learns that an important scientist has recently been found dead after being abducted.  Diker's information leads Hammer to Christina's former roommate, Lily Carver, who is also fearful for her life.  The detective then receives a threatening phone call from a stranger, who offers him a replacement car if he agrees to walk away from his investigation.  The car is duly delivered but it is packed with explosives which the ever-suspicious Hammer is quick to discover.

Realising that he is up against the gangster boss Carl Evello, Hammer decides to pay him a personal visit at his luxury L.A. abode.  After rejecting Evello's offer of a job, the detective roughs up one of his henchmen and heads back to his office to read the letter that Christina sent him before she died.  It contains two words: 'Remember me.'  Hammer scarcely has time to digest this information before he is set upon by armed thugs and hauled off to a remote beach house.  Here, he is met by Evello and another shady individual, Dr Soberin, who intend extracting some vital information from him with a truth serum.  After beating his captors into submission, the private investigator heads off to the mortuary where Christina's body is being kept.  Realising that her last words to him referenced a poem by Christina Rossetti, Hammer deduces that she must have ingested something of great importance before she died.

Confronting the surgeon who performed the post mortem on the dead woman, Hammer finds what he is looking for - the key to a sports club locker.  He is surprised by what he finds concealed in the locker - a suitcase containing a large box which, when opened very slightly, emits a sudden burst of heat and light - enough to badly scar one of his arms.  By now, Hammer realises that he is way out of his depth and so calls on an old friend, Police Lieutenant Murphy.  Murphy's advice is that Hammer should back off, as he seems to have become mixed up in a top secret government research project.  Giving up the case is the last thing on Mike's mind - especially now that Velda has gone missing, no doubt kidnapped by Soberin and his thuggish cohorts.

Hammer returns to Dr Soberin's beach house - only to discover that the case with the mysterious box has fallen into the hands of his enemies.  Soberin has just been shot dead by his co-conspirator Gabrielle, who has been masquerading as Lily Carver in an attempt to recover the box which, she believes, will make her fabulously wealthy.  After putting a bullet into Hammer, Gabrielle hungrily opens the box and is immediately engulfed by the blazing white light emanating from inside.  With Velda's help, Hammer is able to stagger out of the building and make it as far as the seashore before the entire beach house is consumed by a screaming fireball...