Robert Aldrich, 1955, US, 105 mins
Cast: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Maxine Cooper
Review by Mike Bartlett
In his bizarre documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which looks at the history of the eponymous city through clips from Hollywood movies, Thom Andersen reserves special praise for Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. He notes how this independently produced film noir makes a point of taking its story out onto the real streets of LA and setting crucial scenes in recognisable locations rather than studio sets. This unaccustomed freshness to a genre usually associated with cramped rooms, shadowy alleyways and dimly-lit stairwells can still be felt in Aldrich’s film now. From the opening sequence shot from an open-top car on an out-of-town highway to the deserted petrol stations or bare, echoing hotel rooms where the action takes place, Kiss Me Deadly feels raw and immediate in a way its more stylised cousins do not.
It’s not just in the ‘feel’ of the film that Kiss Me Deadly stands apart from other noir; its treatment of the usual “private-eye” material is also distinctive. With Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), it forms a trilogy of apocalyptic noir, in which the emotional and physical devastation of the genre is taken to an extreme. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the ‘Big Bang’ itself – the core of a nuclear bomb – and the final scene, where the Pandora’s Box is opened, and a screech (literally – the sound design is extraordinary) of fire and brimstone pours out into the world is one of the most shocking in American film history. But what is even more disconcerting is the way Aldrich portrays super-sleuth Mike Hammer. Years before Robert Altman got to Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1971), Aldrich tore through the romantic role model of Humphrey Bogart and produced a ‘hero’ who was a violent meathead, a walking embodiment of American individualism gone mad, blundering his way into situations and causing death and mayhem as a result. As such, Aldrich cleverly undermines the very genre he’s working in just as he perfects the means of its suspense.
Kiss Me Deadly has something for every kind of film fan – the classical finesse of Hollywood’s studio age, the rawness and intelligence of the ‘60s counterculture picture, and the playfulness and irony of the modern indie (the opening credits roll upside-down). The cinematography is metallic, the dialogue lethal. It’s like a knife in the gut from an era when American film was losing its edge. Aldrich never quite matched it again – though Ulzana’s Raid (1971) came close – but at least its re-issue should endear it to a whole new generation of hard-boiled aficionados.
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