Kiss Me Deadly, based on one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, is classic noir. It's brutal, somewhat surreal, and visually stimulating. Director Robert Aldrich knew how to use a camera angle or tiles to make an image stranger and more lingering.
Mike Hammer, as played by Ralph Meeker, is good looking, friends with black people (notable for the time), and always willing to banter with a beautiful woman. But he's also a sadist, incredibly stupid, and trades on his mistress's body for information and money.
The film begins when Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman, billed as her first role) runs in front of Hammer's car wearing nothing but a trench coat. He quickly discovers that she's escaped from an insane asylum, but doesn't manage to get her to the bus stop as she wanted before they're ambushed and she's tortured to death. It's an opening that perfectly encapsulates the movie. The credits scroll backwards, a real visual trick. They're accompanied by Leachman's panting, brought on by desperation, fear, exertion - violence - but it sounds sexual. And the violence is offscreen - the only thing we see of Christina during the torture is her legs - but still intense.
Kiss Me Deadly is a great film. The plot is strange and sometimes incoherent, but that doesn't dampen the power of the whole. (Particularly because the movie doesn't really linger over scenes - it's quite fast paced.) I'm quite fond of the film's femme fatale. I won't give away which woman it is, but it's a great performance. Strange, but that fits
Kiss Me Deadly.
It's also fun to watch
Kiss Me Deadly because of its influence on film. I loved spotting familiar elements in their original incarnation. Two more modern movies that obviously pay homage to it are
Repo Man and
Pulp Fiction, both of which I love.
I double-billed
Kiss Me Deadly with
Brick, Rian Johnson's high school detective movie that wore its noir influence on its sleeve. Made for a fun night, but my double bill recommendation would be pairing
Kiss Me Deadly with
Repo Man.
