Robert Aldrich's notorious 1955 Kiss me Deadly is an icy blast of contempt for the pulp material, a Mickey Spillane novel, on which the film is based. It's evident that Aldrich despises the garish primitive plot and its equally primitive protagonist. The film is remarkable for its unique aesthetic -- it's as if everything is designed to seem sloppy, ill-conceived, and cartoonishly slapdash. Aldrich's movie operates according to a curmudgeonly ethos of irritation -- the film maker is irritable, the character snap at one another viciously, and the way that the movie is constructed irritates the viewer. But, one of a kind, the movie is weird kind of masterpiece.
Kiss me Deadly's plot is absurdly secondary to the film's real subject matter, that is, sadistic violence. At one point, a damaged female character notes that the protagonists are all searching for the "great whatzit" -- a MacGuffin in the form of a nuke in a suitcase. The characters in the story beat, torture, and murder one another for ninety minutes, than the "whatzit" is revealed, and, with an apocalyptic explosion in a shabby Malibu beach cottage, the whole thing comes to an end. The movie seems mostly shot at night, on various locations in a gritty LA that seems primarily vertical, lots of steps and steep hillsides -- the film begins with a naked Cloris Leachman running in a trenchcoat, barefoot down a black highway; the contrast between impenetrable black and brilliant headlights is glaring, tabloid-inflected, blinding; in the end of the film, the same lighting effects predominate: the "whatzit" turns into a Pandora's box, incinerating a woman foolish enough to open the box, and the beach house flashes with astounding arc-light flares before becoming inundated in bone-white flame on the edge of the roaring pitch-black Pacific. Aldrich delights in mismatches, busted continuity, impossible insert shots -- when Leachman, hung naked is tortured with a pliers, we hear her screaming hysterically. She kicks her white bare legs. But, in some longer shots, even though the soundtrack features her shrill shrieks, her legs aren't flopping around in the air -- is she screaming while already unconscious or dead? Later, an annoying minor character, Nick the Greek (I kid you not!) is murdered by being crushed under a car that he is servicing -- the bad guy lowers the hydraulic lift so that the car smashes the man like a bug. Aldrich inserts a shot from overhead, a position that should be blocked entirely by the descending car body, just so that he can entertain us with a close-up of the Greek's mouth screaming -- the image is completely baffling spatially, but it makes sense as a kind of bizarre grace-note, an emblem from a perspective that doesn't exist intended to heighten the savagery of what we are seeing. The opening titles are utterly disorienting -- the crawl of words comes from the top of the screen so that the name of the actor playing Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) reads "Meeker Ralph" -- we want to read from top to bottom but the rolling crawl is in the wrong direction: the direction that we read opposes the direction of the print unscrolling on the screen. This heightens the viewer's apprehension of the bizarre, ungrammatical title: Is it "Kiss me Deadly" or "Deadly me Kiss"? Aldrich directs everything for maximum shrillness -- the film luxuriates in ethnic stereotypes: there is the caricatured, infantile Greek, a loudmouth dwarf who seems to worship the thuggish Hammer, various African-Americans who are all boxers, it seems, or jazz signers, and, no less, than two comical stage-Italians. The bit players are all grotesques -- a hit-and-run motorist stutters and stammers with neurotic trepidation, a corrupt hunchback coroner tries to shake-down Hammer before the hero gives him a beating (the coroner has cut a clue out of the belly of the defunct torture victim, Cloris Leachman -- her mutilation continues even after she is dead.) The gangsters are gorillas in tight bathing suits lounging around a pool serviced by cut-rate Marilyn Monroe lookalikes -- every woman in the film is either a hysterically promiscuous whore or a hag. Illustrating the level of grotesquerie is the fact that one of the thugs is played by the wall-eyed Jack Elam, the squinty Jimmy Finlayson of the fifties and sixties. Everyone leers and makes sexually suggestive remarks while grimacing for the camera. The police detectives are all suave monsters, totally corrupt and indolent -- in the background in the stationhouse, we can see one policeman playing solitaire. (The cadaverous head detective taunts Hammer, saying that he is too dumb to understand what he has inadvertently discovered; in this genre of film, statements of that form are disproved by the narrative -- not in this picture, Hammer doesn't have any idea what is going on.) The soundtrack blares with non sequitur radio announcers and music. Aldrich's baroque visual style is replete with pointlessly bizarre camera angles and unmotivated perspectives -- for instance, he shows us a view of the roaring Pacific from underneath the ratty-looking Malibu beach house that suggests that someone is either hiding there or will need to conceal himself (or herself) in that space. The shot shows phosphorescent surf bisected by huge black forms -- the supports of the house. The effect is similar to some of Robert Motherwell's huge canvases in the series entitled "Elegies for the Spanish Republic", vast black forms obliterating a background. This is not a gratuitous reference; the film is filled with allusions to modern art and one of its villains is a dealer in hideous-looking abstract expressionist and expressionist canvases. We expect the startling image of the underside of the beach house to be motivated by some narrative necessity but it is not -- the shot just exists as a counterpoint to the violent action in the cottage. Indeed, Aldrich's aesthetic of affronting his material and annoying the viewer extends to all sorts of other pointless devices: the leader of the bad guys is always shown as a pair of expensive shoes, pin-striped trousers, and a silvery, unctuous radio-announcer's voice. Why? There's no need to conceal the man's identity -- we never find out exactly who he is anyhow. So what's the point? (It's like an Ed Wood effect: I wonder if the actor playing the bad guy, Albert Dekker, was ill for most of the movie and couldn't be filmed). In one scene, the camera starts with a close-up of a Black boxer pounding away at a punching bag; then, the camera tilts and moves to follow a Masai-like Black man, tall as a tree, in a boxy suit descending a flight of dirty stairs. The Masai-tribesman, who we see only from the rear, passes Mike Hammer who is climbing up the stairs toward the camera -- an astonishingly complicated and showy (and thoroughly pointless) way to introduce the main character to the scene. In many shots, the characters are lit and filmed in a way to emphasize their unattractiveness -- Velda, Mike Hammer's girlfriend, is shot in close-up in one sequence with her face smeared with some kind greasy cream -- the splash of light on her brow mirrors the sweat on Hammer's face. Some of the violence, particularly a knife-fight on flight os steps, is exceptionally graphic -- these scenes retain their ability to shock 60 years later.
At the center of this grotesque circus is Ralph Meeker playing Mickey Spillane's tough-guy hero, Mike Hammer. Meeker has a broad, remarkably stupid-looking Slavonic face -- he is like a bargain basement Arnold Schwartzeneggar. Hammer sports a wolf-man style haircut (unlike the natty and ghastly pompadours atop most of the other male characters) and he is weirdly passive. Every woman in the movie throws herself into his arms but he merely smooches diffidently with t hem while muttering lines of expository dialogue -- the only thing that seems to enliven him is the prospect of a good beating; he grins salaciously before bitch-slapping the various thugs and venal crooks that he encounters. He has a trusty and loyal secretary, also his mistress, Velda. Hammer pimps Velda to various bad guys to sqieeze information out of them. This is part of his trade -- one of the cops says that Hammer, a private eye, is a "bedroom dick." Velda is masochistically delighted to seduce villains to learn their evil designs and she has a bruised fat-looking mouth like a piece of rotting fruit. Hammer despises every form of art -- he smashes a Caruso record to torture an Italian opera singer and glares at the various abstract art works on the walls of the vicious art dealers gallery. (It's odd that his apartment, featuring a huge unburnt log in an always cold fireplace, also has a Calder mobile and what seems to be Jackson Pollock paintings on the wall.) When the desperate Cloris Leachman whispers to him: "My name...it's from the poet...Christina Rossetti -- but, I suppose, you're not much for poetry..." the look of disdain on the thug's face is worth the price of admission alone.
Kiss me Deadly is unique: the film masterpiece as an irritating mess. Every time I see this film, it grows in my estimation.
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