The film opens with a visually stunning sequence (Ernest Laszlo was the cinematographer) with Christina Bailey (Cloris Leechman in her first film role), barefoot and naked save for a trench coat, running along a very dark southern California highway desperately trying to flag down a ride. Unlike Sam Spade or Philip Marlow, Hammer has no moral center and is himself a homme fatale – he crashes single mindedly through the case leaving a trail of collateral damage, human and cultural, behind him. Kiss Me Deadly‘s Mike Hammer specializes in divorce cases in which he and his secretary/assistant/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) use sex to entrap their clients’ spouses and perhaps blackmail them. The film’s plot has readily recognizable, albeit amped up, film noir elements: omnipresent corruption, sleazy thugs, a femme fatale, sexy women on the make, rundown and upscale Los Angeles locations, a sexually suggestive song performed live in a night club, shadows on the wall. Bezzerides and Aldrich thus slyly used the film as a medium to metaphorically critique America’s moral decline exemplified by Mickey Spillane novels, Hugh Heffner’s (then new) Playboy Magazine, and amoral Cold War politics. ![]() Notching it up considerably, Bezzerides and Aldrich portrayed Kiss Me Deadly‘s Mike Hammer as a thuggish, misogynistic, hyper-macho, “what’s in it for me?” proto-fascist bedroom detective who doesn’t realize until way too late that he is irrevocably deep in stinking hubris do-do. Hammer’s antagonists were gangsters and Communists. Spillane’s Mike Hammer was a new sort of hero at that time – a vigilante enforcer who was detective, judge, jury, and executioner all in one. Mickey Spillane’s pulp fiction detective novels were hugely popular in the early 1950s. Bezzerides ( Thieves Highway, On Dangerous Ground) and producer/director Robert Aldrich ( Vera Cruz, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, The Dirty Dozen) transformed Mickey Spillane’s 1952 Mike Hammer detective novel of the same title into an existential antinuclear parable with mythical and biblical allusions. The genius of Kiss Me Deadly and what sets it apart from other film noir classics is that left-leaning screenwriter A.I. These are the shadowy unknowns detective Mike Hammer chases in 1955’s penultimate film noir, Kiss Me Deadly. The film’s great whatsit is fissionable nuclear material, the possession of which has apocalyptic consequences. ‘They’ are underworld criminals, Communists, and government agents. ![]() The noir conspiracy central to Kiss Me Deadly is ‘they’ want to get ahold of the great whatsit. ![]() And who are ‘they’? ‘They’ are the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit.” Velda to Mike Hammer: “‘They,’ a wonderful word.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |