Movie Review – Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Written by A.I. Bezzerides & Robert Aldrich
Directed by Robert Aldrich

At one point, around the halfway mark, I turned to Ariana and said, “This main character… he’s a real scumbag, right?” She agreed. The screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides said, “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.” I haven’t read Spillane’s novel or any of his Mike Hammer work, but I liked how nasty the investigator was. It felt in tune with the world of film noir, where everyone seems to be simmering with misanthropy and taking their anger out on the world. Hammer is no exception to this. Kiss Me Deadly is also a film that has influenced many other pictures as varied as Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Pulp Fiction. This is by far the most cynical of all the noir pictures we’ve watched. 

Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is a private eye who specializes mainly in infidelity cases, creating situations to test unfaithful spouses and catch them on film. While driving down a dark highway one evening, he encounters a woman begging for a ride on the side of the road. Christina (Cloris Leachman) reveals she’s an escapee from a nearby mental hospital and quotes a poem to Hammer. They are forced off the road by thugs who torture the girl to death and then push the car over a cliff with her body and an unconscious Hammer inside. He survives, determined to avenge her death and discover what is happening. The detective eventually meets Christine’s ex-roommate, Lily (Gaby Rodgers), who informs him of a mysterious box that multiple parties are interested in and is connected to the late woman. Soon, Hammer doesn’t know who to trust other than this faithful girl Friday, Velda (Maxine Cooper).

Kiss Me Deadly feels like an act of defiance, and it was an accident. Writer Bezzerides was an outspoken Leftist who wrote this film during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s. He denied that he intended any political meaning by the story’s events, but with the nuclear bomb playing a pivotal role, it becomes political by default. As the contents of the mysterious box become more apparent and then we see its horrible power unleashed in the final scene, an air of bleak hopelessness overwhelms the picture. Many critics have cited how nihilistic the film feels, especially in these moments, and it has even been noted as a definitive work of science fiction. 

Paired with Ralph Meeker’s portrayal of Hammer, the film immediately puts an audience expecting the classic good vs. evil dynamic into an uncomfortable state. This guy is awful, especially in how he treats women, particularly poor Velda. She even says to Hammer at one point to kiss her with “The liar’s kiss that says I love you.” I recalled Michelangelo Antonioni’s films in the late 1950s/early 1960s that focused on an intense mood where love seemed like an artifact of time gone by. It makes sense from the point of view of people living in the wake of two world wars, the second of which ended with a double act of terrorism, the dropping of the atomic bombs, one of the most horrific things one culture has ever done to another. Nuclear energy was awe-inspiring in how it could power a society but just as horrific in how quickly it would rend a hole in one.

The Kefauver Commission, a Senate committee focused on organized crime, condemned Kiss Me Deadly, claiming it was “designed to ruin young viewers.” This was the same period when psychologist Dr. Frederic Wertham was appearing before Congress and writing about the destructive effects of comic books on the youth, citing Batman & Robin’s “homosexual” relationship and how horror comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The reactionaries that got behind these sentiments were the grandparents & great-grandparents of today’s right-wingers. Time truly is a flat circle, it seems, and America will never lack for hoopleheads that think a country as illiterate as the States has any problem derived from reading. Is Kiss Me Deadly an appropriate film for children? Probably not, but not one second of it feels like the picture was made with kids in mind anyway. Maybe parents should monitor what their kids consume instead of trying to punish the rest of us for neglecting their own offspring.

The film was directed by the great Robert Aldrich, a filmmaker who might have looked a bit square and was anything but. He’d go on to direct many other noir films, but also Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen. Aldrich’s films turned their nose up at the censorious Puritans of the era, preferring to make pictures that pushed what was acceptable in American cinema. We are the better for it because Kiss Me Deadly had such a profound effect it is cited as one of the essential films to jumpstart the French New Wave and its obsession in the early period with American noir. This was my first viewing, and I completely understand how this film blew people’s minds when it was first released. For the 1950s, it was very raw about sex in particular. Hammer doesn’t get shy admitting he’s slept with a few clients’ wives to get the evidence needed and regularly hooks up with women he meets in passing. I also don’t think the picture fully lets him get away with it, especially with how sympathetic Vera is. Her loyalty really makes Hammer look like an asshole. 

Kiss Me Deadly captures so many elements that make noir a titillating and influential genre of storytelling. This world is the bleakest I’ve seen so far in the series. There’s no attempt to sugarcoat anything. No heroes exist in this place. Hammer is trying to do something good for Christina, but that doesn’t make him a white knight. Dirty Harry wanted to stop the Scorpio Killer, but that didn’t make him any less a delusional fascist. The world is a complex place where most people dwell in the gray, and very few make it to the ends of the spectrum. Kiss Me Deadly reveals how powerless we are in the end, though, using a glowing nuclear doom to underline that in an undeniable manner. Yet again, this is a must-watch for anyone who loves the noir genre or wants to see the films that helped shape the best of American cinema.