Deadly by design - a film noir masterpiece

Deadly by design - a film noir masterpiece

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Deadly by design - a film noir masterpiece

There are very few good people in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and those who do appear are on the screen for only a few minutes, usually terrified and trembling at the doom that they know awaits them. The world is never a hospitable place in the film noir movies made in Hollywood during the late 1940s and early 1950s. All are steeped in the mood of pessimism created by World War II with its extermination camps and nuclear bombings. But Kiss Me Deadly, released in 1955, is the most hopeless and least romantic of them all.

The claim that less-than-great novels make better films than literary masterpieces holds true here, and in extreme form. Aldrich's screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides adapted his script from the novel of the same name by Mickey Spillane, a perpetrator of vernacular mysteries that were hugely popular in the post-World War II American era of McCarthyist communist paranoia, but that read like schlock today.

In an excellent essay J. Hoberman contributes to the booklet included in this Criterion edition of the film, he quotes Spillane's private eye hero Mike Hammer expressing his views at the end of another Spillane novel: "I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it... they were Commies."

Left-leaning Aldrich and Bezzerides found the tone and style repellent, and adapted the novel in a way that must have startled Spillane.

"I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it," wrote Bezzerides of his screenplay. "It was automatic writing. Things were in the air at the time and I put them in."

Those things had to do with nuclear annihilation. The communists in Spillane's novel became smugglers of fissionable nuclear materials in the movie, with their politics undeclared, and the atmosphere of nihilism that surrounds not only the smugglers themselves, but almost everyone connected with the situation on both sides is so vicious and depraved in one way or another that the film gives the feeling that if the world is going to be destroyed, it has it coming.

The beginning is startling. A woman wearing a trench coat and nothing else (Cloris Leachman in her first role) jumps out into the street in front of Mike Hammer's (Ralph Meeker) speeding sports car. He angrily picks her up and learns that she has been imprisoned in a mental hospital by powerful people she dares not name: "What you don't know won't hurt you."

KISS ME DEADLY (USA, 1955, b&w, 106 min.) Directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Ralph Meeker, Gaby Rogers, Maxine Cooper, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman and Paul Stewart. In English with optional English subtitles. The usual Criterion bonanza of extras includes a video tribute to the film by director Alex Cox; excerpts from The Long Haul , a 2005 documentary about screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, a documentary about Mickey Spillane, author of the novel upon which the film is based, and an alternative ending to the film. Criterion Blu-ray 568 (Region A). Also available as a DVD.

She asks to be taken to the nearest bus stop, but adds that, if somehow she doesn't get there, "remember me", a Christina Rosetti-based literary clue that will fuel that latter part of the film.

She doesn't make it the bus. The brutality of Kiss Me Deadly is remarkable for its era (Aldrich had a lot of trouble getting it made because of its violence).

After Hammer's cars is forced off the road by a mystery vehicle, the movie cuts to a shot of the woman's legs twitching as she is being tortured. When her screams stop and she is dead, a man appears carrying what looks like a large pair of pliers or pincers. Moments later Hammer's car, with him in it, is pushed off a cliff. At this point the film is about 10 minutes over.

He survives, of course, and reveals himself to be a sleazier character than he is in the Spillane novels. He is a "bedroom dick", a detective who uses his sexy secretary/lover to get his clients' husbands in compromising positions so that they can sue for divorce.

"Open a window," a policemen says in disgust after Hammer leaves the room following an interrogation connected with the woman's death. But by then Hammer has begun investigating the murder on his own, despite warnings from the police to stay clear of it, and the movie becomes increasingly nightmarish with each of his discoveries. I've noticed that in many discussions of Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich's and Bezzerides's retake on Hammer is described as brutal and stupid. He is brutal _ the first thing he does upon meeting a person he suspects is holding out on him is to start slugging, and there is a shocking scene where he gets the goods from an evil, elderly forensics man by crushing his fingers in a drawer. But he is not stupid.

He picks up on clues and knows techniques for tracking down the people he needs to find just as well as the detectives in less bizarre private eye movies. And as for brutality, he gets as much as he gives. It is easy to lose count of the times he is knocked unconscious, in one instance by a massive dose of sodium pentothal, and at the film's apocalyptic conclusion he is rendered completely helpless.

His investigations eventually lead him to a box, concealed in a sports club locker, that is hot to the touch. When he opens it just a crack it produces a weird, wailing noise and light shoots out that burns his hand. In 1955 people knew as well as we do now that fissionable material does not behave that way, and it is interesting seeing the comments on websites that dismiss the film for its physics. The box and its contents, called the Great Whatsit by Spillane's secretary Velda, is not something to be seen in literal terms. That is why the image of the light-emitting box has become one of the cinema's classic images, quoted in movies like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Alex Cox's Repo Man (Cox offers an appreciation of Kiss Me Deadly as an extra on the disc).

In addition to its searing radiation, the box also sheds light on the true nature of a number of characters, including the chronically self-confident Hammer himself. His strongest line, uttered when his police force friend and nemesis tells him that his discovery links to the Manhattan Project and Trinity, is one that Spillane's Mike Hammer would never have been capable of, a terrified: "I didn't know!"

The original ending of the film was lost for many years, replaced by an even grimmer shorter one. Both are included on this disc, as they were on an earlier DVD release, but discussing them would involve spoilers.

The performances in the film vary. Maxine Cooper's Velda, dressed and styled as an Elizabeth Taylor clone, feels artificial, but Meeker's Hammer is excellent, exactly hitting off the incongruities that make the character interesting. Best of all is Gaby Rodgers, with her strange, whining voice, as a woman who seems to be targeted by the same people who killed the Leachman character. She is an unnerving presence who hijacks every scene she appears in. What happened to her? According to IMDb she is still alive but her performing career ended in 1962, and most of her work was on television.

Albert Dekker as the smuggler-in-chief (we see only his feet until the very end of the film) does well with his stentorian dialogue with its references to dark myths that plug into the movie's final-days theme. Strother Martin is indelible in a tiny role as a truck driver who has accidentally killed a man.

Hoberman mentions that Kiss Me Deadly was dismissed as junk upon its first release, and that The New York Times didn't even bother to review it. As is so often the case, it was the French who first recognised its greatness.

Hoberman quotes Claude Chabrol in an almost hysterically adoring review, seeing it before others did as what it is, one of the great American films. The transfer from celluloid onto this new Criterion Blu-ray would be hard to improve upon.

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