zardoz-13 Robert Aldrich's unsavory film noir adaptation of the Mickey Spillane thriller "Kiss Me Deadly" ranks as one of those seminal hard-boiled detective movies. Ironically, Aldrich's film, which is considered a classic now fared so poorly at the box office that the famous director sold his interest in it. Although he spent most of his career as a second-string character actor, this memorable United Artists' release qualifies as one of actor Ralph Seeker's quintessential epics. He gives new meaning to the adjective 'sleazy' in this role as an amoral Los Angeles private eye who specializes in divorce cases. He teams up with his bombshell secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) who typically seduces the wandering husband and the inevitable blackmail ensues. "Kiss Me Deadly" wasn't exactly the most politically correct thriller when it came out, and the witch-hunting Kefauver Commission criticized it as "designed to ruin young viewers." Interestingly, the Library of Congress decided to add "Kiss Me Deadly" to the United States National Film Registry in 1999 because the organization felt the film was "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." If you like your movies to start with a gripping scene, "Kiss Me Deadly" strikes the bull's-eye. This gritty, black & white mystery opens with our anti-heroic protagonist Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker of "The Anderson Tapes") racing along the highway at night in his convertible sports car when his headlights catch a woman garbed in only a trench coat in their glare. Hammer careens to a skidding halt and obliges this escapee from a woman's prison, Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman of "Young Frankenstein"), a ride. Unfortunately, the villains capture the two, and these dastardly sadists torture poor Christina to death. Aldrich's depiction of her death is gruesome by any standards, but the depiction didn't violate any code, except the heartless murder of a young woman. As hard as it is to believe, this was back when Cloris was a babe. Incidentally, "Kiss Me Deadly" marked Leachman's cinematic debut! The villains stick Hammer and the murdered girl in the same car and plunge it off a cliff. Miraculously, Hammer defies death and survives! Ultimately, Hammer and the heroine wind up searching for a satchel that contains a cryptic object that not only glows but is extremely incandescent. Quentin Tarantino probably had a baby when he saw "Kiss Me Deadly," and so with aficionados of "Pulp Fiction" when they see this stunning saga! Indeed, the glowing satchel epitomized the equivalent of director Alfred Hitchcock's MacGuffin, an object but serves as an excuse to bring together the heroes and villains in a search to recover it. The ending is something that you have to see to believe and foreshadowed the paranoia of the Cold War with the fearful belief that mankind would destroy itself with deadly weapons.

ragrost I can't believe I've waited this long to see this noir classic, but as it concluded, I scratched my head and wondered, Had I seen this film before? Yes. Yes I had. Several times, and under several different titles. And they all contain the same protagonist: James Bond.It's hard to believe producer/director Robert Aldrich or screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides hadn't sued United Artists for copyright infringement. From the opening shot to the last frame, every Bond film has borrowed heavily from Kiss Me Deadly. And credit cannot go to the original author of the pulp novel, Mickey Spillane. He has outright panned the film and claims it has little or nothing to do with his book.Let's start with the opening credits, which begin a few minutes into the film: a full-screen crawl, ala Star Wars, but backwards and moving so quickly that it is near impossible to catch all the names on the screen. This must have been one of the first American films to toy with the opening credits in such a bold way, and I can see where Bond took that technique to another level.The torture scenes that follow are unusually explicit for a film of its time. The screams carry on like those in a David Lynch film. Once our protagonist, Mike Hammer, begins his investigation into the events of that fateful night, the similarities to our British spy multiply. He seems to have little regard for women in general, and in a poolside scene littered with a bunch of gangster heavies and their molls, Hammer is greeted by one of the swimsuit-clad ladies and within minutes they are locking lips. Hammer also appears to take pleasure in inflicting pain as evidenced by the scene where he crushes a man's hand in a desk drawer. It reminded me of the fight scene in the elevator with Sean Connery.The use of a jazz score, although not the first to do so, is very reminiscent of the early Bond films, and the scene with the nightclub singer probably inspired the Bond opening title sequence. Probably the most obvious similarity must be in the way the final scenes played out. At the 3/4 point in the film, Hammer's right hand gal, Velda, gets kidnapped by the henchmen, like all Bond girls do, and is held captive at a secret lair. Hammer tracks her down, breaks in, is held at gunpoint and witnesses the villain's unveiling of the coveted McGuffin, in this instance, a case with a supernatural glow and ominous sounds emanating from within. The villain ultimately gets what's coming to her, the place begins to explode, Bond, I mean Hammer, goes in search of his partner, whisks her away from the inferno and they both watch as the structure burns to the ground. At that point I was half expecting a parachute to drop out of the sky with a phone attached and M on the other line.

dormantbae Movies like "Kiss Me Deadly" are reassuring that there's more to each genre than meets the eye. "Kiss Me Deadly" is part hard-boiled detective story & part apocalyptic sci-fi horror film. The movie suspects its own plots and its conventions are ludicrous. The result is a highly inventive film with a ridiculous but highly enjoyable storyline and comically fascinating characters.The basic plot, loosely adapted from Mickey Spillane's bestselling novel,is: after private-eye Mike Hammer picks up a hitchhiker who is later murdered, he becomes determined to learn the truth about her death. Although the plot becomes more and more insane, it's highly interesting. There are no empty twists, as each one leads to something larger and more confounding.I've never had more fun with a film noir character than the aptly named character of Mike Hammer. He isn't intimidated by any man and denies the world's hottest women. If he holds the upper hand in a situation, he seems virtually impenetrable. This characteristic leads to the ever-prevalent theme in film noirs of men vs. women and their places in relationships and society.The film is a masterpiece of cinematography, exhibited in the disorienting camera angles and unique and unconventional compositions of Ernest Laszlo. In fact, Ernesto Laszlo's cinematography is so apt with the film's randomness that it made me giddy.One of the most distinctive aspects of Kiss Me Deadly is the outrageousness of its final few seconds: the movie doesn't conclude, it detonates. In the hands of the director Robert Aldrich, the film becomes a starting point for a delirious expression of 1950s anxiety and paranoia, starting with opening credits that run backwards and ending with an atomic explosion.

xisca-pap What makes this film really special is the direction and the characters. The plot itself is not that interesting per se. I have not read the novel but the story in the film is not very coherent and the involvement of the various characters in the plot is not clear at all. Curiously, though, the director does not seem to be interested in clarifying it. Instead, he builds on the ambiguity to create a universe that revolves around something that everyone thinks so important as to sacrifice their life or that of those around them for it, but no one understands what it is.In terms of the superb direction, I think it is worth pointing out that a few ideas and styles in this film seem to have been of great influence to the work of David Lynch. On the superficial side the opening credits immediately bring to my mind the Lost Highway. The mix of noir and such high levels of ambiguity, often with allusions to the supernatural, characterises the best of Lynch's work. I even found the amalgam of Cristina and Lily/Gabriel to be a prototype to Dorothy Vallens.