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!
© James Travers 2023
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Next Robert Aldrich film:
Ten Seconds to Hell (1959)