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Kiss Me Deadly [1955]
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Mike Hammer is a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon; he knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prize-fighters and he makes the ladies swoon--but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?"). Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. --Ali Davis
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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
A terrific film noir full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots, Kiss Me Deadly is about as dark and exciting as noir gets. A young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat throws herself into the traffic to flag down help and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. Not even 15 minutes into the film and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer and, of course, a warning to stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go.
Editorial
Special Features
English
Region 2
Editorial
Synopsis
Hard-hitting detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) takes on thugs and atomic secrets in Robert Aldrich's fast-paced thriller KISS ME DEADLY, an adaptation of the Mickey Spillane novel. The night goes awry for Hammer soon after he picks up a scantily clad hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman). The next thing he knows, he's assaulted by a couple of goons and the sultry drifter turns up dead. As Hammer tracks down the murderers, he realises he is involved in an international conspiracy--one that could cost him his life. Generally considered to be the best of the many films centring on Spillane's classic protagonist and lauded as a primary inspiration and building block for the French Nouvelle Vague, KISS ME DEADLY boasts nightmarish imagery, a careening, sinuous plot, and an unforgettable shock ending.
A fine low-budget thriller with great noir visual style. If only professional critics would stop talking about nuclear metaphors
Review date: 2007-09-24 Rating: 8 out of 10
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. There're 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 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 includes 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.
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Reviews
A lot more to this than meets the eye...
Review date: 2007-03-18 Rating: 8 out of 10
Over thirty years ago, long, long before Sky had tied up new releases and the quality back catalogue, a film fan could educate him or herself through the simple expedient of watching terrestrial tv. Most nights from about 11 pm BBC2 was showing classics of British, world or US cinema. That's how I first stumbled on "Kiss Me Deadly" - a bored teenager flicking through the very limited range of channels available. That turned out to be one of the most memorable film experiences of my life. Its been called the best film noir ever. Its fair to say that's probably wrong, but misses the point. As a late example (1955) it represents the apogee of film noir and to my mind you really can't begin to understand it until you understand the US in the fifties - affluent and expansive but paranoid and terrified. That's assuming (and this is apparently a matter of debate) that this unique film, and in particular its conclusion, came about in the way the film makers intended.
There's no real point in describing the plot - it's as unfathomable as most of the film noir genre - it's the style that counts. Then, three quarters of the way through, the film throws a real twist at you, leading inexorably to the final beachhouse scene. At that point, conventionality goes out of the window - along with the world and everything else...
Top spot-low budget.
Review date: 2006-12-12 Rating: 10 out of 10
Micky Spillane was not Doestoyevski, so you'd expect films of his detective fiction to be far from Oscar-winning works.
In this case,Ralph Meeker is perfect. As Mike Hammer, he is convincingly, by turns, slow on the uptake, brutal, brutalised, and unable to resist the notion the femme fatale, stunningly portrayed by Gaby Rogers, could just be innocent.
There's enough style and styialisation to stay with you and your remeberances of this film forever. Thankfully,it doesn't pad the film out, and never gets in the way of the action.
Robert Aldrich made some astonishly good films, and some good bad or indifferent that nobody understood. None of that need trouble you here-this is good v evil,black v white, but you won't cotton on to which is which until the very climax.
And that IS a climax!! I won't spoil it for you-it's just too intriguing a film not to own.
Brutal and the best Film Noir of them all
Review date: 2006-08-25 Rating: 10 out of 10
This film will stun you with how many immatations it has spawned. The stylised speech the scenes where the violence is just merely suggested now shown to you with popcorn dropping photography. i feel that to truly grasp the impact of this film you have to understand the times, the culture and the politics of the era then you will see why this film is considered the best film noir. I would recommend that you buy it or rent it , if you love the film noir genre and do not have this film you are missing a treat
a terrible beauty
Review date: 2005-12-16 Rating: 8 out of 10
A great artwork. Appears at first to be a piece of low budget exploitation, but the sharp dialogue, moral ambiguity and intriguing plot machinations rope you to something at once more strange and ironical and more bitterly poignant than any other noir. Amidst the harsh words and fisticuffs, Christina Rossetti's elegaic poem 'Remember Me' emerges like a jewel in a mud puddle as both plot element (clue and relic of a dead woman) and thematic marker, playing wittily off Hammer's hardbitten materialistic pragmatism to reveal his tragic lack of self awareness, his apparent strength denying him access to transcendence. From there he appears more and more befuddled and vulnerable, a kind of angry everyman bewildered by a modernity encapsulated in the sealed box of nuclear material he's pursuing. One of the film's great achievements is to treat this not as contemporary issue but terrible, murderous beauty. Characters who open the box experience it's awful heat and are greeted with a flash of intense light - ultimately providing the source material for the lethal car boot in Alex Cox's 'Repo Man' and the exploding beach house in David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Albert Dekker
Juano Hernandez
Ralph Meeker
Wesley Addy
Paul Stewart
Creators:
Ralph Meeker (Primary Contributor)
Albert Dekker (Primary Contributor)
Director(s):
Recording label: MGM Entertainment
Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
EAN: 5050070010756
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Black & White, PAL,
Release date: 2003-08-04
Number of discs: 1
Audience rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 101 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1955-05-18
Language: English (Original Language)