Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

You won't be disappointed!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Fantastic!

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

A private detective picks up a disturbed hitchhiker and sucks himself into a devilish plot ...Hugely pretentious noir, with very stylish direction but mostly plodding dialogue. The overall feel is of the East coast brought to the West coast, before it was the '60s. Ballet in leotards, Schubert played over the radio with a warm corpse in the room, a let-me-tell-you-how-I-did-it speech phrased in perfect classical mythology. A big flaw is the slow pace, which lets you dwell on the plot holes - fatal in the weird world of noir.The lead actor is brutish, and the females are dowdy. But the performances are solid, and there are plenty of good scenes - the stand out is at the pool-side, with the gangster bookies.Overall: I liked it, but the writing doesn't match the ambition.

While there have been at least one he at film noir every year between 1944 and 1957, it was getting past the golden years when legendary director Robert Aldrich stepped in and created this sleeper masterpiece. It's a Mike Hammer caper, joining him with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as a name who would become legendary in that genre. An incredibly macho performance by Ralph Meeker as Hammer adds his name to the list of all the great brooding, strong but basically quiet anti-hero. And at the forefront of this melodrama? None other than the versatile Cloris Leachman, as far from Phyllis Lindstrom, Frau Brucher and Nurse Diesel as you can get!Highly complex, this starts with Hammer forced to stop for the fleeing Leachman in the first 5 minutes so he doesn't run her over. He would have been lucky had he done that because the journey he ends up on is as dangerous as any film noir caper that you could imagine. Voices are heard, faces are not seen, yet the plot thickens into a stew that would clog the drains of the man made Los Angeles river. Highly complex yet never convoluted, this is a thinking man's noir, a dark vision of society so ugly that it appears to be much more modern than it is. The masterminds of crime here are not playing around, and several truly brutal murders draw Meeker further in to the web of danger. An incredible array of character players join in to provide a chilling atmosphere that turns the streets of L.A. into a dark vision of hell where no tinsel can be lit.

Before you hear the title Kiss Me Deadly and begin to enthusiastically sing the chorus of Lita Ford's super-de-duper 1980s hit of the same name, consider that the film Kiss Me Deadly is not soaked with hairspray, musical production echoes, or unironic leather. It's not a cringeworthy exercise in sweaty nostalgia; it's a fundamental work of film noir. I throw the term "film noir" around in reviews quite often, sometimes seriously and sometimes comparatively. But Kiss Me Deadly is not slight nor an imitation of the genre: along with The Big Sleep, Raw Deal, and The Third Man, it is one of the defining films of the era. Yet it subverts conformity like the plague. Sleazy private eyes and gun-toting broads are fun and all, but what if you suddenly want to embark on a wildcard journey into what resembles an abstract Lichtenstein painting? Don't listen to the crowd; just do it.The film opens in typical noir fashion. The setting is a kettle-black road in the middle of nowhere, cars zooming in-and-out with the frequency of a moviegoer seeking out Sylvester Stallone's newest movie. But cracking the deadly calm of the shot is a frantic blonde, barefoot, dressed only in a white trenchcoat. Desperate for someone to hitch her out of the nightmare she's living, she lunges in front of a speeding convertible. Inside this convertible is Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), a detective. The woman, Christina (Cloris Leachman), has just escaped from a local mental institution; but being caught by her doctors seems to be the last of her worries. Someone, or something, is bothering her.But her worries become a reality when a group of thugs block the road, knocking out Hammer and brutally murdering his passenger. The next day, he awakens in a hospital bed; paramedics discovered him, his car, and Christina's body residing on a rocky cliff in the early hours of the morning. Despite almost being killed in the violent series of events, though, Hammer is intrigued. Christina, it seems, was part of something bigger, something more threatening. Without hesitation, he takes the case. But as it develops, it becomes quite clear that it isn't going to pass by with the sinfully simple workings of the divorce cases Hammer usually supervises.Kiss Me Deadly has all the usual noir touches, but there's something compellingly, and unusually, artificial about the atmosphere. Everything looks as though it's part of a set (most likely due to the film's microscopic budget), but its cheapness, purposeful or not, establishes the tone even more than the material. Unlike other film noirs of the time, Kiss Me Deadly doesn't take itself seriously (even if the characters hardly ever crack a smile). It exists in the same universe as a comic strip that stars a Man with X-Ray Eyes or a bloodthirsty Martian disguised as a sex goddess. The film is distinctly fantastical; while The Big Sleep slithers by with witty dialogue and lethal underbellies, Kiss Me Deadly seems to have more in common with Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. This shouldn't suggest that it's a shoddy film; it should suggest that it's in love with itself, fond of its penny dreadful exterior, and isn't afraid to push much of its mystery onto a strange box that kills every person who opens it.When I watched Kiss Me Deadly for the first time, I didn't understand its critical acclaim. Yes, it's good, but what does it have to offer that other run-of-the-mill film noirs couldn't? Years later, my appreciation has risen by several miles. It isn't so much that Kiss Me Deadly is of superior quality; it's that it is just so, so, so ... otherworldly. Not otherworldly like the mansion Jesus probably lives in up in Heaven or Margot Robbie's beauty, but otherworldly like the realm you might find yourself in if a mirror was a door. The film is of scrumptious pulp quality, unmatched by its peers. Every scene looks like a comic book frame, every character is stock (but not quite). The poster promises "blood-red kisses!" and "white-hot thrills!" And with its campy priorities in mind, it delivers those promises with a wink and a healthy serving of idiosyncrasy.

Based on the pulp novel by Mickey Spillane, this utterly bizarre film noir features Ralph Meeker as private investigator Mike Hammer, who makes the grave mistake of picking up runaway psychiatric patient Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) on a rural road late one night; shortly after, they are attacked, he witnesses her murder, and the two are tossed in his car and pushed over a cliff. Hammer survives, but finds himself in a web of mystery surrounding Christina's perplexing warnings that ultimately lead him to a mysterious box that is hot to the touch, filled with light, and emits ungodly sounds straight out of hell.Robert Aldrich, who later infamously directed the cult thriller "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?", directs this quirky and surreal film with a great deal of flair— while it at times appears as through-and-through noir, there are plenty of weird twists and turns in the labyrinthine plot as Hammer ventures from character to character, trying to piece together just what the ghostly Christina was caught up in. It's a talky film that relies on a lot of "he said, she said" in relaying crucial plot content (the matter of fact as well as the totally bizarre), but its pacing is even handed, its characters straight shooting, and its spooling of the peculiar details candid and effective.The black and white cinematography lends a significant darkness to the film that enhances its overall off-kilter tone; this is bolstered by the fact that the bulk of it takes place at night. The acting here not astoundingly great, but it's not exactly subpar either— the dialogue is admittedly hokey at times, but given the pulp novel source material, this is forgivable, especially since the film makes up for all of this in mood and presentation. Ralph Meeker is a solid leading man, oozing masculinity and an ego that borders on chauvinism while the female counterparts playfully dance around him— aside from Leachman's character, who wryly indexes him within the first five minutes— she's also the first to die. Feminist readings of the film aside, "Kiss Me Deadly" is probably the most bizarre film noir in cinematic history, and it's also one of the darkest. Its influence can be seen in contemporary film, explicitly referenced by Alex Cox in "Repo Man" and in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," and more subtly in the works of David Lynch. The infamous final scene is jaw-dropping and unexpected, and potentially (depending on how you want to look at it) leaves the audience with more questions than answers. Given the Cold War context in which the film was made, the nuclear angle is the most plausible and discussed of course, but Aldrich's dramatic presentation of the iconoclastic "Pandora's box" is still more unnerving than radioactive fallout, the apocalypse, or Pinhead and his vassals. 9/10.