Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 American film noir produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, and Wesley Addy. It also features Maxine Cooper and Cloris Leachman appearing in their feature film debuts. The film follows a private investigator in Los Angeles who becomes embroiled in a complex mystery after picking up a female hitchhiker. The screenplay was written by Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides, based on the 1952 crime novel Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane.

Kiss Me Deadly grossed $726,000 in the United States and $226,000 overseas. The film received the condemnation of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which accused it of being "designed to ruin young viewers", a verdict that director Aldrich protested. Despite initial critical disapproval, it is considered one of the most important and influential film noirs of all time.

The film has been noted as a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave, and has been cited as a major influence on a number of filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alex Cox, and Quentin Tarantino. In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Cast

Production

Development

In October 1954 Robert Aldrich announced he would produce and direct two Mickey Spillane stories the following year, for Parklane Productions, an independent company owned by Victor Saville. The stories would be Kiss Me, Deadly and My Gun Is Quick. Saville turned over control to Aldrich because he was busy on The Silver Chalice.

The screenplay was loosely adapted by A.I. Bezzerides with contributions from Aldrich, though it "made no effort to follow the book's convoluted plot, [though] both are structured around [a] search for a mysterious box."

Differences from the novel

Kiss Me Deadly departs from other Mike Hammer films in that Hammer never carries a gun. This is explained when Lt. Murphy tells Hammer his PI license and gun permit have been revoked. Although he is held at gunpoint, pistol whipped, and even shot, he complies with the gun ban, relying only on his fists to hammer people into submission or worse. The screenplay also departs from Spillane's novel, replacing the mafia conspiracy at the center of the novel with an apparent case of espionage and a mysterious suitcase serving as the film's MacGuffin. The film further departs from the book by portraying Hammer not so much as a sleuth of the hardboiled school than as a sleazy, narcissistic bully, perhaps the darkest private detective in film noir.

Los Angeles locations

Kiss Me Deadly is a time capsule of Los Angeles, much of it filmed in the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Many of the locations disappeared in the urban development of the late 1960s, although a few remain.

  • The Hill Crest Hotel, NE corner of Third and Olive Streets (Italian opera singer's home)
  • The Donigan 'Castle', a Victorian mansion at 325 S. Bunker Hill Avenue (where Cloris Leachman's character lived, used for interior and exterior shots)
  • Apartment Building, 10401 Wilshire Boulevard, NW corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen (Hammer's apartment building; still standing)
  • Carl Evello's Mansion, 603 Doheny Road, Beverly Hills, California
  • Clay Street, an alley on Bunker Hill beneath the Angels Flight funicular (still operating), where Hammer parks his Corvette and then takes the back steps up to the Hill Crest Hotel, although when he approaches the hotel's large porch, he is on the Third Street steps opposite Angels Flight
  • Club Pigalle, 4135 S. Figueroa Avenue (the black jazz nightclub that Hammer frequents)
  • Hollywood Athletic Club, 6525 W. Sunset Blvd. (where Hammer finds the radioactive box; still standing)

Release

thumb|right|upright=1.1|thumbtime=74|[[Trailer (promotion)|Trailer for Kiss Me Deadly]]

Critical response and analysis

Critics have generally viewed the film as a metaphor for the paranoia and fear of nuclear war that prevailed during the Cold War era. "The great whatsit," as Velda refers to the object of Hammer's quest, turns out to be a mysterious valise, hot to the touch because of the dangerous, glowing substance it contains, a metaphor for the atomic bomb. The film has been described as "the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period." A leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this metaphor in his script, saying that "I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting."

Film critic Nick Schager wrote, "Never was Mike Hammer's name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane's legendary P.I. with brute force savagery... The gumshoe's subsequent investigation into the woman's death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society's dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man's return to the primordial sea – with the director's knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre's romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. 'Remember me?' Aldrich's sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget". Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of its critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 37 reviews. The consensus states, "An intriguing, wonderfully subversive blend of art and commerce, Kiss Me Deadly is an influential noir classic."

François Truffaut wrote, "To appreciate Kiss Me Deadly, you have to love movies passionately and to have a vivid memory of those evenings when you saw Scarface, Under Capricorn, Le sang d'un poète (Blood of a Poet), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and The Lady From Shanghai. We have loved films that had only one idea, or twenty, or even fifty. In Aldrich's films, it is not unusual to encounter a new idea with each shot. In this movie the inventiveness is such that we don't know what to look at--the images are almost too full, too fertile. Watching a film like this is such an intense experience that we want it to go last for hours. It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page. This is the film of a young director who is not yet worried about restraint."

Accolades

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! scope="row" rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"| American Film Institute

| 2001

| AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills

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| 2005

| AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes

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| 2008

| AFI's 10 Top 10 – Mystery Film

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Home media

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released the film on VHS as part of their "Vintage Classics" collection in 1999, and on DVD in 2001, with the alternative ending as a Special Feature. A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in June 2011, and also includes the alternative ending. In 1997, the original ending was restored after the missing footage was discovered in the vaults of the Directors Guild by Glenn Erickson. Its apocalyptic elements earned it an entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Kiss Me Deadly has been cited as a stylistic precursor of the French New Wave.

See also

  • List of American films of 1955
  • List of cult films

Notes

References

Sources

  • Parish, James Robert and Michael R. Pitts. The Great Science Fiction Pictures. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1977. .
  • Strick, Philip. Science Fiction Movies. London: Octopus Books Limited, 1976. .
  • Warren, Bill. Keep Watching The Skies: Science Fiction Films of the Fiftees Vol I: 1950–1957. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1982. .
  • Me Deadly essay by Alain Silver on the National Film Registry website
  • Kiss Me Deadly article by Alain Silver ("Evidence of a Style")
  • Kiss Me Deadly: The Thriller of Tomorrow an essay by J. Hoberman at the Criterion Collection
  • Kiss Me Deadly photos from the set
  • Kiss Me Deadly article by Glenn Erickson ("The Kiss Me Mangled Mystery")
  • Kiss Me Deadly essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 , pages 500-502