Country: USA
Language: English | Italian | Spanish
Release Date: 9 September 1955 (France)
A frightened woman is running barefoot on a highway, trying desperately to flag a car. After several cars pass her by, the woman sees another car approaching, and to make sure either the car stops - or, she's killed, she stands in the path of an on-coming car. Private Investigator Mike Hammer is the one at the wheel, and after almost hitting the woman, he tells her to get in. The woman's name is Christina Bailey.. She is obviously on the run, being barefoot and wearing nothing but a trench coat, and the scent of fear. Whoever was after her eventually catches up with them. Christina has information they want, but dies while being questioned. The killers fake an accident by pushing Hammer's car off the road, but, he survives, waking up in hospital two weeks later. As Mike starts to investigate Christina's death, he's told by the police to stay out of it, but, the hard-nosed PI proceeds anyways. Little did he know that Christina's secret would lead to death and destruction.
Kiss Me Deadly is the black-hearted apotheosis of film noir, and a key film of the 50s, embodying the profoundest anxieties of Eisenhower's America: it ends with the detonation of a nuclear device on Malibu beach and, presumably thereafter, the end of the world itself. Robert Aldrich's moral universe is so violently out of kilter that even his opening credits run upside down. His hero, Mike Hammer, is an amoral, proto-fascist bedroom detective and 1,000% scumbag, but the villains he encounters are far, far worse.
Kiss Me Deadly opens with a woman, naked under a raincoat, fleeing headlong and barefoot down a highway at night. Rescued by Hammer, then un-rescued by her faceless original captors, she dies screaming under gruesome torture with pliers (Aldrich was always at the vanguard in his use of violence). Thereafter, Hammer finds himself on a terrifying hunt through the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, from his gleamingly modern office in posh Brentwood to the dilapidated flophouses of Bunker Hill, as he bludgeons, browbeats, blackmails and brutalises his way inch by inch towards a resolution that will destroy everyone and everything, all in search of the elusive "Great Whatsit" – a deadly, molten, much sought-after package that's grandfather to the suitcase in Pulp Fiction and the Chevy Nova in Repo Man.
Aldrich, a patrician aristocrat and a committed leftist, despised Mickey Spillane's nihilistic worldview and Mike Hammer's Cro-Magnon brutishness, and gave them the adaptation they deserved. Ralph Meeker, who usually played scumbag saddle-tramps and mobsters, bagged the sneering lead role and remains indelibly detestable even today: "Open a window," says one disgusted cop, as Hammer leaves the room. Surrounded by gargoyles and grotesques, even on his own team – he uses his secretary Velma as willing sexual bait – Hammer is a cynic who knows everything about human weakness but nothing about the frame he's in. And it all ends with a bang – the big bang.
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