Kiss Me Deadly
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Movie Reviews of Kiss Me Deadly
Movie Review: HEY RALPH, NEXT TIME GET GABY A BOX OF WINE GLASSES, PLEASE
Summary: 4 Stars
Offbeat noir that gets better with each viewing. Ralph Meeker, a sidelines character actor best known to the baby boomer gen for his frequent guest appearances in numerous 60's TV series and 70's TV movies, plays reknown fiction-author Mickey Spillane's trademark "Mike Hammer" private investigator [PI] character. Remember when the Western met the living dead in the form of vampires [CURSE OF THE UNDEAD, 1959]? Well now another odd combo as it's film noir meets the atomic age. This noir is different. The opening credits roll in reverse, driving scenes are filmed from behind and the bad guys doing their dirty work are often filmed below the knees [or not at all] with only gait, voice and the viewer's imagination creating the picture. And the two female leads have much shorter hair than we're used to seeing in noir.
Vet character actress Cloris Leachman, who we are all familiar with from her numerous 70's TV movies, her role as Phylis in the Mary Tyler Moore show [1970-77] and a couple of noteable Mel Brooks' comedies [YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, 1974, and HIGH ANXIETY, 1977] is the first person we see in this film, playing a mysterious figure named Christina. We all remember her chiseled facial features---hawk-like nose and sickle-like lips---but here, younger and with the short, blond, croppy hair and raincoat-only attire appears surprisingly attractive. She hails Meeker's sports car on a desolate highway one lonely night and asks for a lift. Inside she tells her story of escape. The two are followed and kidnapped by persons unknown who incapacitate Hammer and torture her. The unconscious duo are then brutally driven off a cliff to their certain demise with only Hammer surviving. Now it's time for Hammer to dust himself off and figure out this bizarre encounter.
Before being intercepted Christina gives Hammer a verbal message containing two words. A letter she mailed at a gas station before her death is received by Hammer days later and contains the same two words. Hammer knows that nobody is going to kidnap you, torture you then drive you off a cliff because you stepped on their daisies. Somebody's after something and it's not a bag of shells.
What carries you through this film is Meeker and his monotonous yet always-thinking, simmering and unpredictable persona. Despite his sordid nature he manages to keep us interested in his welfare---we don't want that nice hair to get mussed up. Meeker's only other noteworthy movie roles was playing the groveling, condemned soldier in Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY [1957] and as the military psychiatrist in THE DIRTY DOZEN [1967]---remember his report informing Lee Marvin that he had a group of both imbeciles and psychopaths on his hands . He's focused and in the zone in this one, easily his career best performance. He's always nattily attired and the hair perfectly groomed despite his escapades. Kind of reminds me of that that kid in class we all had in high school who was different---with the neat, pressed clothes, perfectly groomed and always bringing the brown paper bag with lunch from home instead of gagging on the lousy cafeteria food. And the gals would often be on his periphery. This pampered and pompous kid was quite a source of annoyance to the rest of us "normal" dudes in class as was Meeker to the police lieutenant---also searching for the truth---on his tail. Meeker was able to decipher Christina's message because, among one of many admirable traits of this austere, aloof but likeable PI, was an ability to look and listen carefully and remember details. Hey, generation X could learn a lot from this guy.
Interestly, the only person in the film to bring a child-like grin to his stoic face is his auto mechanic friend Nick ["va-va-va-vroom"] who is probably the only person he genuinely likes. His "secretary" Velda is obviously the person he trusts the most. When Nick is mysteriously murdered in his auto shop and Velda is kidnapped he goes on a septuagenarian slapping spree. Love the way Meeker gets things done---and procures the info he needs--- with alacrity and economy: a slap across the chops here, a desk drawer vising some fingers there, lauding then breaking a priceless record, stopping a nocturnal predator with a box of popcorn. Wish he carried a gun, though.
Another memorable performance is provided by Christina's roommate Gabriella, played a by little-known actress named Gaby Rodgers. She reminds one of an older, middle-aged, more corpulent, trail-beaten Anne Heche. Rodgers' not-soon-forgotten oddball , missing-a-marble performance as Christina's androgynous , missing roommate is great. Her on-and-off plaintive and whimsical demeanor and child-like voice with the staccato-like delivery were engaging, and deceiving too, as they did not portend her eventual psychopathic meltdown [figuratively and literally]. Her performance soon brought to mind two other similarly flavored performances: Melanie Griffith [THE DROWNING POOL, 1975] and Jennifer Tilley [BOUND, 1996] and there are probably others. Fine work by Director Aldrich with his insightful pick for a singular and probably influential femme fatale characterization. Hard to believe the talented Rodgers never made it after this.
Nice seeing veteran actor Albert Dekker whose last film was THE WILD BUNCH [1969]. Always loved his deliberate and mysterious voice which allowed him to play exotic, erudite characters so well [you've got to see him in Dr Cyclops, 1940]. Here he played the mastermind of the obscure and nefarious group. The ending is morose and open-ended. The film seemed to prey on the 50's fear of Cold War nuclear posturing. Worth your time if you like noir or just for Meeker and Rodgers' raw and terrific performances.
Movie Review: A fine low-budget thriller with great noir visual style. If only professional critics would stop talking about nuclear metaphors
Summary: 4 Stars
When Nat Cole's smooth, melancholy delivery sends "Rather Have the Blues Than What I've Got" out of Mike Hammer's car radio late one night, we know nothing good is going to happen. Hammer has just picked up a desperate young woman named Christina who had been running down an isolated California two-lane rode.
"The room is dark and gloomy, you don't know what you're doing to me
The way it has got me caught, I'd rather have the blues than what I've got."
The lyrics might not be good, but Cloris Leachman's frightened urgency as Christina sets the movie on the fast track. It's not long before Hammer's car is forced off the road, he's beaten senseless, and wakes up on a bed listening to shrieks of pain as Christina, hanging from her wrists, is tortured to death in a vain attempt by someone to learn a secret. In the short time we knew Christina we'd come to like her. She knew people were after her. She tells Hammer to let her out at a bus stop while he drives on. "That bus stop will be coming up pretty soon," Hammer says to her, "and I don't even know your name." "You forget. I'm a loony from the laughing house," she tells him. "All loonies are dangerous. Ever read poetry? No, of course you wouldn't. Christina Rossetti wrote love sonnets. I was named after her." "Christina?" Hammer says. "Yes, Mike. Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don't make that bus stop..." "We will," Hammer tells her confidently. "...if we don't," she continues, "remember me."
Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is a private eye who specializes in divorce work. He has a suggestive, live-in secretary named Velda. He and Velda often set up honey traps for the poor-sap husbands, and a little side action involving blackmail brings in extra cash. Hammer is a hard head, has no respect for the law but seems to love dishing out vigilante justice. Beating thugs to within an inch of their lives gives him satisfaction. From the time he decides to do justice to the memory of Christina to the conclusion of the movie, Mike Hammer meets one person after another who he beats, slaps, crushes their hands and breaks their phonograph records as he tracks down the mysterious Mr. Big, a man determined to posses a leather box which stays warm...a box that you open only if you want to die.
Kiss Me Deadly is a good movie for two reasons. It has great noir style and is one of the best photographed noirs, by Ernest Laszlo, I've ever seen. It also is directed by William Aldrich with supremely confident craftsmanship. Aldrich gives us efficient story-telling with no dawdling. He keeps the plot moving with a deft combination of tension, violence, menace and some fine, off-center characterizations from the secondary actors. The movie has narrative rhythm.
It also has the curse laid on it of tedious analysis by popular culture enthusiasts and film critics who should know better. Says one critic, "Kiss Me Deadly is the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time." Oh, come on. Kiss Me Deadly is a very well-crafted low budget pulp mystery thriller. Because that warm thing in a box happens to be nuclear, and because the movie ends with a bang, too many people, in my view, have read all sorts of pretentious allegories into the film. These people lay on the analysis of Kiss Me Deadly as heavily as makeup on a street walker. In 1999, for goodness sake, Kiss Me Deadly was even deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. I prefer the amusing viewpoint of A. I. Bezzerides, who wrote the screenplay. Bezzerides denied any intent to make the movie a metaphor for the potential horrors of the Cold War. "I was having fun with it," he has said. "I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting." That he did, including a clever clue using a phrase from Christina Rossetti's fine poem, "Remember." In fact, said Bezzerides of the script, "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".
Although the movie starts with some poor song lyrics, let's end with some good lyrics from Rossetti's Remember, written to her husband before she died. They are the key to Mike Hammer's puzzle...and the key was found in a beautiful corpse's stomach:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The Region 2 DVD film transfer is in excellent shape. The only extra is the movie trailer. There is a Region 1 DVD that went out of print but which might still be tracked down. It has the planned ending where the implication is that everyone blows up, as well as the release ending where almost everything blows up but which leaves Hammer and Velda surviving. I think the release version is much more effective that the nuclear downer version would have been.
Movie Review: Out In The Be-Bop Doom's Day Night
Summary: 4 Stars
Sure I`m a film noir buff. And sure I like my film detectives that way as well, Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Phillip Marlowe and so on. Normally Mickey Spillane and his 1950s-style detective, Mike Hammer, would no hit my radar though. Believe me I did, however, spent many a misbegotten hour reading Spillane's detective stories, maybe as much for cover art work that ran to provocative bosomy, half-clothed femme fatale dames in distress as for the insipid story line that ran heavily to Mike's anti-communist warrior pose ready to smash heads at the drop of a hat, and grab an off-hand kiss from every dame he ran into along the way. Aside for the question of that scurrilous (now scurrilous, maybe) cover art that is better left for another day my tastes in detectives were more to the "highbrow" Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet and their more knight-errant-worthy story lines, and a little more reserve in the fist department, although for a damsel in distress they were ready to duke it out with anyone, and gladly.
That said, now along comes this classic 1950s film noir Mike Hammer story line and I was hooked, well, maybe not hooked so much as intrigued by it. Moreover, director Richard Aldrich seems to have had a flair for the noir film, from those black and white filmed shots of streets scenes in the seamy Los Angeles be-bop night (and day too, come to think of it), to an incredible be-bop jazz bar scene, complete with "torch" singer where after the lost of a friend Mike gets plastered (drunk), to the endless line-up of high end "golden age of the automobile" cars on display. Of course there is the normal bevy (maybe two bevies, I didn't count) of alluring, mysterious women just waiting to fall into Mike's arms when he comes within fifty paces of them, and he is, as usual, ready to put on his white knight uniform when he senses that something in evil in the world, and he most definitely is willing to thumb his nose as the governmental authorities who are always just a step, or seven, behind the flow of the action. But most of that is all in a day's work for a noir detective. What makes this one stick out is the doom's day plot.
Of course, the 1950s was not only about the rise of the "beats" and of teen alienation and angst-driven rock and roll but the heart of the international Cold War, a scary time no question, where if things had taken a half-twist a different way. Well, who knows, but it was not going to be pretty. And part of that Cold War, a central part, was the presence of the "bomb", and for those who are too young to remember that was nothing but the atomic and hydrogen bombs that could, at any non-be-bop minute, blow the planet away.
And it is that threat that underlines old Mickey Spillane's tale. See, with that kind of threat, but also the power potential , private parties, evil private parties could think of all kinds of nasty ways to wreak havoc on the world. If only they could get just a little of that bomb power. And that lust, that seemingly eternal lust, for power by certain of our fellows is where we are heading. See, someone privy to the atomic secrets (no, not the heroic Rosenburgs, this guy was in it for the dough) had a little pot of the stuff ready for the highest bidder. And the highest bidder, so to speak, also happens to be a guy with plenty of dough to buy a ton of modern art (and a fondness for classic quotes). I knew there was something funny about those modern art collecting guys. Didn't you?
And all it takes to spoil that nefarious plan is one Mike Hammer. Now, and here is the beauty of the Spillane method, this is not for governmental agents to handle, as one would think in trusting 1950s America, although they are hot on the trail but one threadworn detective. Threadworn? Yes, threadworm. See Mike is nothing but a low-rent, dirt-peddling divorce work detective (in the days when such dirt was necessary to get that desperate divorce), working this racket with his girl Friday (and lure), Velda. But see maybe Mike just fell on hard times and needed some dough (although his car, office set-up, digs... and fetching Velda belie that). But once Mike gets on the case, and only when he knows in his gut that something is wrong and he has that feeling here, then they are no limits. He faces off the mob (naturally, if there is something evil to broker they are in on it), half-mad women (one that he picked up on the hitchhike road, kind of, and her roommate) and that relentless modern art collector before he is through. I could go on but, really, this is one you have to see. And add to your list of film noir be-bop nights.
Movie Review: A genuinely pleasant surprise
Summary: 4 Stars
The temptation these days is to dust off modestly entertaining but little known films of the past, slap 'em in a nice DVD package, and market them as "the cult classic that's finally on DVD!" At first glance, that seems to be the case here. But I have to admit that after watching my new DVD of "Kiss Me Deadly" (which I ordered from Amazon after they helpfully sent me an e-mail about the movie, announcing its availability in the fashion described above), I happily added it to my growing DVD collection instead of targeting it for unloading or trade. Here are five things that this film noir fan liked, or at least found interesting, about this movie:1) The Mike Hammer of the books, who is a man of conscience (if not pacifism), is converted here into a sleazy detective who wallows in messy divorce cases, manipulating their outcome to his advantage. One may not like this interpretation, but it's undeniably interesting and different. Funny thing, though: despite the alterations to his character, Hammer still remains somewhat likable.
2) Classical music (symphonies, opera, etc.) is heard repeatedly throughout the film, usually emanating from radios in the dwellings Hammer visits during his investigation. Don't know exactly why, but I liked the juxtaposition of hearing cultured music while watching the sleazy, brutal elements of the story unfold.
3) Hammer drives a couple of cool looking open-top convertibles during the movie, and we are sometimes treated to a sort of hovering-over-the-trunk-looking-forward view as he drives along. Most movies settle for the usual camera-in-the-backseat-looking-over-the-driver's-shoulder shot, but the innovative set up described above allows us to drive along with Hammer AND see most of the cool car's exterior, too. It's hard to describe these shots in a more specific manner, but viewers will notice and appreciate them immediately.
4) I liked the mysterious box with the strange, glowing contents that everyone is after. It's creepy and fun. Also fun to think about: the plot device of having an object that everyone badly wants is clearly inspired by "The Maltese Falcon", and the fact that the object here is a box with something glowing inside it in turn inspired a similar item in the film "Pulp Fiction" decades later!
5) It was a good move to affix the longer ending onto the DVD release of this film. Simply put (but without giving too much away here), the longer ending makes it clear whether or not our hero survives this adventure. The shorter ending (included in the DVD's "extras" section, so viewers can compare for themselves) is ambiguous and unsatisfying, as one could make a case either way about Hammer's fate. There is certainly a place in film noir for ambiguity, but- trust me- in this particular story it's much better to know for sure who lives and who dies.
So, if not a true "cult classic", I guess I have to say that "Kiss Me Deadly" is nevertheless a solid entry in the private eye genre, and it delivers the goods. The movie is moody, involving, dangerous, sexy, and damned fun to watch. It has all the things one likes to see in private eye movies, but several original touches, too. Oh, yes- the DVD features a picture that is crystal clear and sharp as a knife; it looks like they made the film yesterday. In short, pick this one up.
Movie Review: "Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ... Ralph Meeker ... Robert Aldrich (Director) (2001)"
Summary: 4 Stars
United Artists presents "KISS ME DEADLY" (18 May 1955) (106 min/B&W) (Fully Restored/Dolby Digitally Remastered) -- Regarded by many critics as the ultimate film noir, and by many more as the finest movie adaptation of a book by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly stars Ralph Meeker as Spillane's anti-social private eye Mike Hammer. While driving down a lonely road late one evening, Hammer picks up a beautiful blonde hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman), dressed in nothing but a raincoat. At first, Hammer assumes that the incoherent girl is an escaped lunatic; his mind is changed for him when he and the girl are abducted by two thugs. The men torture the girl to death as the semiconscious Hammer watches helplessly. He himself escapes extermination when the murderers' car topples off a cliff and he is thrown clear. Seeking vengeance, Hammer tries to discover the secret behind the girl's murder. Among those who cross his path in the film's tense, tingling 106 minutes are a slimy gangster (Paul Stewart), a turncoat scientist (Albert Dekker), and the dead woman's sexy roommate (Gaby Rodgers). All clues lead to a mysterious box -- the "Great Whats it," as Hammer's secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) describes it. Both the box and Velda are stolen by the villains, at which point Hammer discovers that the "Whats it" contains radioactive material of awesome powers. The apocalyptic climax is doubly devastating and we now know there are two endings to the film just recently discovered.
Ralph Meeker made an excellent contribution as Mike Hammer. He dominates the film with his presence. Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Mirian Carr, Maxine Cooper and especially Cloris Leachman, in her screen debut, make this film the favorite it has become.
Director Robert Aldrich transcends Kiss Me Deadly's basic genre trappings to produce a one-of-a-kind melodrama for the nuclear age.
Under the production staff of:
Robert Aldrich [Director/Producer]
Mickey Spillane [novel "Kiss Me Deadly"]
A.I. Bezzerides [Screenplay]
Victor Saville [Executive Producer]
Frank De Vol [Original Music]
Ernest Laszlo [Cinematographer]
Michael Luciano [Film Editor]
BIOS:
1. Robert Aldrich [Director]
Date of Birth: 9 August 1918 - Cranston, Rhode Island
Date of Death: 5 December 1983 - Los Angeles, California
2. Ralph Meeker [aka: Ralph Rathgeber]
Date of Birth: 21 November 1920 - Minneapolis, Minnesota
Date of Death: 5 August 1988 - Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California
the cast includes:
Ralph Meeker - Mike Hammer
Albert Dekker - Dr. G.E. Soberin
Paul Stewart - Carl Evello
Juano Hernandez - Eddie Yeager
Wesley Addy - Lt. Pat Murphy
Marian Carr - Friday
Maxine Cooper - Velda
Cloris Leachman - Christina Bailey
Gaby Rodgers - Gabrielle
Nick Dennis - Nick
Jack Lambert - Sugar Smallhouse
Jack Elam - Charlie Max
Mr. Jim's Ratings:
Quality of Picture & Sound: 4 Stars
Performance: 5 Stars
Story & Screenplay: 5 Stars
Overall: 4 Stars [Original Music, Cinematography & Film Editing]
Total Time: 106 min on DVD ~ United Artists ~ (06/19/2001)