The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction, crime

DIRECTOR

Robert Aldrich

WRITERS

A. I. Bezzerides (screenplay); Mickey Spillane (novel)

STARS

Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman, Gaby Rodgers

BEFORE

1955 Aldrich adapts Clifford Odets’s play The Big Knife, about Hollywood corruption.

AFTER

1962 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is Aldrich’s twisted drama with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

1967 In Aldrich’s wartime thriller The Dirty Dozen, Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Ernest Borgnine, and Charles Bronson form a suicide squad.

Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) is a mysterious blonde with a terrible secret. She begs private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to forget he ever saw her. For the viewer, however, nothing about Kiss Me Deadly is easy to forget, from Christina running barefoot down a highway at night, her eyes wide with fear, to the movie’s shocking climax.

The movie used the form of a pulp-fiction crime drama to explore the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that had developed in the US by the 1950s.

Science fiction meets noir

Robert Aldrich’s crime thriller is based on one of a series of popular novels about the exploits of thuggish Los Angeles private eye Mike Hammer. Aldrich uses the story to explore the weirder pathways of the film-noir detective genre, adding a sinister science-fiction edge. The movie opens with Christina’s escape from a mental institution and veers into a quest for “the great whatsit,” a strange box that is hot to the touch and must never, ever be opened. The paranoid nihilism of 1950s science fiction overlaps with film noir: instead of a priceless jewel or a lost statuette, these pulp-fiction crooks are fighting over a doomsday weapon. Yet despite its bleakness of spirit, Kiss Me Deadly is highly entertaining. The dialogue is diamond sharp in every scene. “The little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope,” wisecracks Velda (Maxine Cooper), “and from the rope you hang by the neck.”

What else to watch: The Maltese Falcon (1941) ✵ Murder, My Sweet (1944) ✵ The Big Sleep (1946) ✵ Touch of Evil (1958) ✵ Repo Man (1984)