Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

A fine low-budget thriller with great noir visual style. If only professional critics would stop talking about nuclear metaphors
When Nat Cole's smooth, melancholy delivery sends "Rather Have the Blues Than What I've Got" out of Mike Hammer's car radio late one night, we know nothing good is going to happen. Hammer has just picked up a desperate young woman named Christina who had been running down an isolated California two-lane rode.

"The room is dark and gloomy, you don't know what you're doing to me
The way it has got me caught, I'd rather have the blues than what I've got."

The lyrics might not be good, but Cloris Leachman's frightened urgency as Christina sets the movie on the fast track. It's not long before Hammer's car is forced off the road, he's beaten senseless, and wakes up on a bed listening to shrieks of pain as Christina, hanging from her wrists, is tortured to death in a vain attempt by someone to learn a secret. In the short time we knew Christina we'd come to like her. She knew people were after her. She tells Hammer to let her out at a bus stop while he drives on. "That bus stop will be coming up pretty soon," Hammer says to her, "and I don't even know your name." "You forget. I'm a loony from the laughing house," she tells him. "All loonies are dangerous. Ever read poetry? No, of course you wouldn't. Christina Rossetti wrote love sonnets. I was named after her." "Christina?" Hammer says. "Yes, Mike. Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don't make that bus stop..." "We will," Hammer tells her confidently. "...if we don't," she continues, "remember me."

Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is a private eye who specializes in divorce work. He has a suggestive, live-in secretary named Velda. He and Velda often set up honey traps for the poor-sap husbands, and a little side action involving blackmail brings in extra cash. Hammer is a hard head, has no respect for the law but seems to love dishing out vigilante justice. Beating thugs to within an inch of their lives gives him satisfaction. From the time he decides to do justice to the memory of Christina to the conclusion of the movie, Mike Hammer meets one person after another who he beats, slaps, crushes their hands and breaks their phonograph records as he tracks down the mysterious Mr. Big, a man determined to posses a leather box which stays warm...a box that you open only if you want to die.

Kiss Me Deadly is a good movie for two reasons. It has great noir style and is one of the best photographed noirs, by Ernest Laszlo, I've ever seen. It also is directed by William Aldrich with supremely confident craftsmanship. Aldrich gives us efficient story-telling with no dawdling. He keeps the plot moving with a deft combination of tension, violence, menace and some fine, off-center characterizations from the secondary actors. The movie has narrative rhythm.

It also has the curse laid on it of tedious analysis by popular culture enthusiasts and film critics who should know better. Says one critic, "Kiss Me Deadly is the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time." Oh, come on. Kiss Me Deadly is a very well-crafted low budget pulp mystery thriller. Because that warm thing in a box happens to be nuclear, and because the movie ends with a bang, too many people, in my view, have read all sorts of pretentious allegories into the film. These people lay on the analysis of Kiss Me Deadly as heavily as makeup on a street walker. In 1999, for goodness sake, Kiss Me Deadly was even deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. I prefer the amusing viewpoint of A. I. Bezzerides, who wrote the screenplay. Bezzerides denied any intent to make the movie a metaphor for the potential horrors of the Cold War. "I was having fun with it," he has said. "I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting." That he did, including a clever clue using a phrase from Christina Rossetti's fine poem, "Remember." In fact, said Bezzerides of the script, "I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it. I tell you Spillane didn't like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn't like me".

Although the movie starts with some poor song lyrics, let's end with some good lyrics from Rossetti's Remember, written to her husband before she died. They are the key to Mike Hammer's puzzle...and the key was found in a beautiful corpse's stomach:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

The Region 2 DVD film transfer is in excellent shape. The only extra is the movie trailer. There is a Region 1 DVD that went out of print but which might still be tracked down. It has the planned ending where the implication is that everyone blows up, as well as the release ending where almost everything blows up but which leaves Hammer and Velda surviving. I think the release version is much more effective that the nuclear downer version would have been.

The Search for the "Great Whatsit"
Kiss Me Deadly, 1955 film

The film opens on a highway at night, a woman is running down the road looking for help. A sports car stops to pick her up, she is crying. A police patrol is looking for a woman who escaped from an asylum! Mike Hammer tells them the woman is his wife. Later a big black sedan cut them off and captured them. Christina is tortured to death, then she and Hammer are put in his car which is pushed off the cliff. When Hammer recovers he is questioned by the "I.C.C." about what happened. Hammer is a PI who specialized in divorce actions with his beautiful secretary Velda. Upon his return to his office we see a 1950s telephone answering machine. Then Hammer goes to meet a client. He learned the name and address of Christina's roommate. (We hear a trolley in the street.)

Someone sent a gift car for Hammer. He looks it in the mouth and removes the extra features. Hammer then learns about some new people, and finds out more. He visits a rich man who tells him to drop the investigation. But trouble is his business, and he continues to look for something. Christina's friend Lily is afraid, and asks Mike to hide her. Then Mike's friend Nick is murdered. Velda talks about how some people are always searching for the "great whatsit"! Mike visits a bar to drown his sorrows. A message told him that Velda was abducted. At the office Mike is abducted and taken for a ride. They give him sodium pentothal to get him to talk. But Mike escapes from this trap. Later Mike finds a key and figures out where it belongs, and finds a hot secret.

When Mike goes to visit Captain Pat Murphy he gets a big surprise. Another body had turned up. Mike goes to visit an art gallery after hours, and finds a connection to the leader of the pack. There is an exciting ending after Gabriella opens the forbidden box. [Did "Raiders of the Lost Ark" copy this ending?] The director used a number of odd camera angles for this film set in Los Angeles. It is a sort of low budget film whose violent action is played down and off-screen. [Does it remind you of some TV programs from the 1950s? The search for a missing object may remind you of "The Maltese Falcon", a better novel and film.]

The Search for the "Great Whatsit"
Kiss Me Deadly, 1955 film

The film opens on a highway at night, a woman is running down the road looking for help. A sports car stops to pick her up, she is crying. A police patrol is looking for a woman who escaped from an asylum! Mike Hammer tells them the woman is his wife. Later a big black sedan cut them off and captured them. Christina is tortured to death, then she and Hammer are put in his car which is pushed off the cliff. When Hammer recovers he is questioned by the "I.C.C." about what happened. Hammer is a PI who specialized in divorce actions with his beautiful secretary Velda. Upon his return to his office we see a 1950s telephone answering machine. Then Hammer goes to meet a client. He learned the name and address of Christina's roommate. (We hear a trolley in the street.)

Someone sent a gift car for Hammer. He looks it in the mouth and removes the extra features. Hammer then learns about some new people, and finds out more. He visits a rich man who tells him to drop the investigation. But trouble is his business, and he continues to look for something. Christina's friend Lily is afraid, and asks Mike to hide her. Then Mike's friend Nick is murdered. Velda talks about how some people are always searching for the "great whatsit"! Mike visits a bar to drown his sorrows. A message told him that Velda was abducted. At the office Mike is abducted and taken for a ride. They give him sodium pentothal to get him to talk. But Mike escapes from this trap. Later Mike finds a key and figures out where it belongs, and finds a hot secret.

When Mike goes to visit Captain Pat Murphy he gets a big surprise. Another body had turned up. Mike goes to visit an art gallery after hours, and finds a connection to the leader of the pack. There is an exciting ending after Gabriella opens the forbidden box. [Did "Raiders of the Lost Ark" copy this ending?] The director used a number of odd camera angles for this film set in Los Angeles. It is a sort of low budget film whose violent action is played down and off-screen. [Does it remind you of some TV programs from the 1950s? The search for a missing object may remind you of "The Maltese Falcon", a better novel and film.]