1955 Directed by Robert Aldrich
One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina, an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.
Ralph Meeker Albert Dekker Paul Stewart Juano Hernández Wesley Addy Marian Carr Maxine Cooper Cloris Leachman Gaby Rodgers Nick Dennis Jack Lambert Jack Elam Jerry Zinneman Leigh Snowden Percy Helton Marjorie Bennett Strother Martin John George Fortunio Bonanova Nat King Cole Kitty White Mady Comfort Art Loggins Robert Sherman Eddie Beal Leonard Mudie Mort Marshall
키스 미 데들리, Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, El beso mortal, Un petó mortal, Líbej mě až k smrti, Rattennest, Φίλησε με, Μέχρι Θανάτου, En quatrième vitesse, Un bacio e una pistola, Śmiertelny pocałunek, A Morte num Beijo, O Beijo Fatal, Sărută-mă ucigător, Целуй меня насмерть, Natt utan nåd, Öp Beni Öldüresiye, Цілуй мене на смерть, 死吻
USA
New York City, New York
USA
Germany18
Netherlands16
Germany
Netherlands
USA
Sleaze has never been poured so slickly into a suit and tie as in “Kiss Me Deadly.”
Director Robert Aldrich heels ever met a genre he couldn’t exploit. He turned melodrama into hagsploitstion in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” and war epics into… Nazikillingsploitation (?) in “The Dirty Dozen.” Grim pretension stood no chance when he aimed his social and satirical lens.
So, in “Kiss Me Deadly,” does classic era noir fall, also, to Aldrich — done in by its own neorealist roots; attacked with the obliterating weapons of oddity and otherworldliness.
“Deadly” stars Ralph Meeker as a two bit PI — overpriced, even at that cost. The film tracks the skeezoid of a gumshoe as he follows the trail…
A masterclass of aggressive framing. Every shot a new punch. Another statement of purpose: the movie doesn't move towards an apocalyptic ending, but it reinforces that its world is long gone and beyond saving. Aldrich don't offer any out, but he crafts a visual style that mirrors the unreadable plot as a way to move with certainty towards narrow lack of morality. It starts unstable in the celebrate opener and keeps finding new ways to expand it. Kiss Me Deadly doubles on itself, it is about the thirst for knowledge that only brings with it more paranoid destruction.
Kiss Me Deadly screams onto screen with an opening scene that immediately alerts audiences to its explosive intentions. Out of the blackness of the theater we see a woman emerge wearing nothing but a trench coat, standing in traffic risking her life desperately trying to hitch a ride. Beginning films with a "cold open" wasn't unheard of in 1955, but it was incredibly rare before the 1960's when TV serials standardized it. This opening would have been startling not only because of its content, but because audiences would not have been expecting it. Finally someone picks her up, and she sobs quietly over the opening credits—which scroll backwards, top to bottom. This creates a fundamentally unsettling atmosphere which tells us…
Action! - The Postwar Hollywood 3: Reworking Aldrich
I remember the ending here being wild, but not THAT WILD. Jeez! Only the opening of the Ark in Riders gets close to beat it.
I don't have much to add to what I said in my first review. I've come to love even more the way it weaves of film noir, psychological, and paranoia thriller together. It's almost as if you're caught in a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare. You get your casual slick and punchy film noir dialogues, and there's a groundedness, but you also get scenes like the opening with the mysterious woman running down the street and her death scene with the camera angles and everything feeling…
Casual sadism and nuclear conspiracy, a mysterious string of circumstances leading to an inevitable rope. Kiss Me Deadly is so wild it’s practically an anti-noir, Ralph Meeker’s cool evil provoking a protagonist of the nastiest kind. Influence creeps from the shadows, the striking links to Pulp Fiction and Se7en being the least of it. This takes everything we’ve come to expect from the genre and subverts it in an unflinching horror-house fashion. A film-noir dipped in irradiated acid.
its not a surprise at all that french new wave directors found the production of this film as inspiring as the film itself; independently made with all the ingenuity and spontaneity of an expensive United Artists picture (Rebecca comes to mind), endlessly compelling, and always dicking around with the conventions in new ways that it feels like a cinematic mad scientist experiment. i feel like its most evident in the compositions, some of the most creative i've seen in film let alone film noir. there's a particular moment where light is manipulated to reveal a character is not alone in a room, and its the most fucking alarming shit ever. inspiring would be underselling it. a lot to learn from this one.
[spoilers ahead]
Everything mainstream American culture feared and denied in the 1950s thrived in the noir films of the era. And so, in noir, women had power, corruption was rampant, survival was always in question, and the United States was an urban nation, populated by immigrants and Black and brown people. In many ways, the most powerful, ferocious rejection of the story America told itself in this era -- of the world of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best -- is Robert Aldrich's 1955 masterpiece, Kiss Me Deadly.
Among other things, Aldrich's film -- based on an inspired, audacious screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides -- stands as a wholehearted, mocking dismantling of the kind of masculinity personified by its…
DEADLY"
"KISS ME
It's all about the reaction shots here. They reveal Mike Hammer may be a rough PI but he doesn't have a heart of gold - he doesn't even have a heart. He leers, he snarls, he grins, and generally comes off as a sadistic misanthrope who somehow stumbled into a profession that only barely justifies his most violent tendencies. When he actually does anything remotely noble - help an old man carry a heavy suitcase, rescue his secretary Velda (whom he recklessly endangered in the first place!) - he's just going through the motions, without any comparable shots of his face. If there were, he'd probably look bored, or impatient for when he next gets to brutalize or torture somebody again.
I'd check with Eddie Muller on this but in my limited knowledge of the genre this must have the most nightmarish climax in all of noir.
In my opinion, every movie should just be about a hard nosed L.A. gumshoe trying to track down a mysterious box
The "woman in trouble" metaphor beckons the apocalypse. A monument to film noir as an aesthetic and a foundation where strict rules are followed and leads are chased until the inevitable collapse of genre gives way to a nuclear anxiety that not only destroys the film, but everything entirely.
