The wind is blowing colder
It looks like love is stale and older
My luck don’t look so hot
I’d rather have the blues than what I’ve got
— as sung by Nat King Cole
A barefoot woman, naked beneath her trench coat, runs in a panic down a darkened highway. Her gasps are the only audible thing on the soundtrack, even after she is picked up by a wayward traveler named Mike Hammer. The gasps and moans persist as they head forward, extending the anxiety of the scene. Then the credits begin to roll . . . in a perverse, backward way, crawling down the screen from top to bottom and across the sportster Hammer drives. The couple will not been together for long. And soon the soundtrack will be filled with her piercing screams.
“Remember me,” she had told him.
Audiences in 1955 had never seen anything like Kiss Me Deadly and now, 70 years later, it still seems so strange, modern and chilling that it remains a remarkable experience. Chances are, you are more likely to have seen the films it has influenced – such as Repo Man, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Dr. and even Raiders of the Lost Ark – than the movie itself. In its day, it was so controversial that it was censored in Britain and savaged by American critics and politicians. But the French hailed it as a masterpiece that helped pave the way for the nouvelle vague. U.S. theatergoers were largely unmoved and it disappeared quickly, which is why it has never been fully embraced as the classic film it is.
Even as kids, we knew that the 1950s TV shows such as “Happy Days” was a cotton-candy myth, a fantasy world of Elvis, tailfins, and pom-pom girls. But the political chaos of the 1960s and the cultural upheaval of the 70s worked together cement its image of that decade as an idyllic time, a respite of stability and prosperity, and a sort of mass-produced nostalgia took serious root. It certainly worked to the advantage of Ronald Reagan – a stalwart of the 50s – in his 1980 bid for the presidency.
Kiss Me Deadly is all about the rot beneath the porcelain surface of the 50s, in the same way a film like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet would be for the 1980s. The film noir movement was born of the time after World War II, where a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder among returning GIs along with economic instability helped spur a new kind of cinematic language, one premised on betrayal and fatalism. By 1955, the genre had mostly played itself out, at least in its original form.
But there still were stories to be told about dark hearts, shadowy streets and deep-seated evil. Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich and written by A.I. Bezzerides, reimages noir for the nuclear age. America was beginning to recover from the poison of the Joseph McCarthy Communist witch hunts, but concerns about the Soviet threat remained sky-high. Still, some filmmakers were beginning to consider whether the increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons wouldn’t simply result in a war in which both sides would lose.
I’ve already covered on Nuclear Theater an earlier atomic noir, Pickup on South Street from 1953, and the differences are striking. That film involved a contest for government secrets between American and foreign agents, with the idea that patriotism meant making sure the Russians never got an edge. Kiss Me Deadly is a different animal. The threat, as it exists, is never made clear. The antagonists are largely hidden and their aims opaque. The hero, Mike Hammer, is a slow-witted brawler who always seems a step behind.
Let’s talk about him. Private eye Mike Hammer was a character created by pulp novelist Mickey Spillane, who wrote with the touch of a steam shovel. Hammer roughed up the bad guys, got the girl, got his way, all with maximum violence and all described in what kindly might be referred to as airport prose. Aldrich and Bezzerides weren’t much interested in that guy; in interviews Aldrich called him a “fascist.” But they used Spillane’s novel as a starting point to explore paranoia in 50s America.
Hammer, as played by brawny Ralph Meeker, is the one at the start of the film breezing down the highway in his ragtop Jaguar when he comes across the gasping woman (Cloris Leachman) running in the trench coat. Hammer almost immediately loses her, which sets him off an investigation into the darkest corners and brightest streets of Los Angeles and one which places him in mortal peril.
Hammer is a breed apart from the L.A. detective as had been known. In short, he’s no Philip Marlowe. Where Marlowe strolled the back streets of the city as a sort of gallant, introspective knight with a .38 at his hip and whiskey in his drawer, Hammer is more of a blunt instrument. No narrative musings on the state of the world or philosophies on the fall of man arise from him. He likes money, tailored suits and fast cars. He likes women. He’s a bit of a sadist. Instead of some walkup flop, he lives in a jet-set bachelor pad that even contains a prototype answering machine. He works divorce cases, sometimes blackmailing both sides into a settlement, and is held in bemused contempt by the local cops. He’s like Jack Nicholson’s JJ Gittes from Chinatown without the polish or the intellect. All brash and cash.
But you could argue that the nobility of a Marlowe, born of a time when America came together to battle the Axis powers, had no place in 1955, after much of the country had turned on itself in the misguided hunt for Red agents. The crooks Hammer encounters are of a newer breed as well. They aren’t gangsters running numbers in a back room; they’re industrialists sitting by the pool in Izod shirts. Mike Hammer, in his shiny convertible and his sleek mid-century modern apartment, might just be the ugly face of the new post-war America, prosperous, arrogant and suspicious.
And yet, at times Meeker suggests there’s something deeper within Hammer that wants more than shaking down divorcees even if he can’t articulate what it is. He may believe the case offers him some form of redemption for his misbehavior. There’s a scene near the end of the film where Hammer gets drunk at a Black jazz club and seems completely at ease. Why that is the movie won’t explain. But as he navigates the hovels and furrows of LA’s (now vanished) Bunker Hill neighborhood, it feels as if he’s descending toward a darker, even demonic, fate.
It takes most of the movie for the story to reveal its central mystery: a box that glows white-hot when opened, something that may prove irresistible to its keeper. What is it? And once unleashed, what could happen? That too, is never explained, although the film’s final shots make it clear that it’s a tool of the apocalypse. At that point, the film’s allusion to Pandora becomes explicit. Some things should simply be left alone. Not an easy task for a hands-on guy like Mike Hammer.
WHERE TO WATCH IT: Kiss Me Deadly is not an easy movie to find, but some digging might produce it on YouTube or something of that ilk. I highly recommend the disc from the Criterion Collection for its presentation.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Yes, Cloris Leachman — our runaway woman in the opening scene — went on to supporting roles in films such as The Last Picture Show and Young Frankenstein. But she was probably best known for playing Phyllis on the ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
And here’s 1976 TV ad starring Mickey Spillane (who reportedly hated the film) for Miller Lite.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 7/10. What did I say about the box?
DUST CLOUDS: Produced on a shoestring budget as an independent film, Kiss Me Deadly nonetheless is considered to be a classic Los Angeles film because of its extensive on-location filming, including the demolished Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown LA and the iconic Angels Flight railway, at a time when most studios used artificial backlots. According to Redfin, the 85-year-old Beverly Hills house where the film’s pool scene is filmed now is valued at $42 million. Just your regular 8 bd/10 ba fixer-upper.
WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: Shogun (S1, Hulu), Ripley (S1, Netflix), Resident Alien (S3, SyFy). Film: Born to Kill (Wise, 1947), Love on the Run (Van Dyke, 1936).
PERSONAL NOTE: I took a week off from Nuclear Theater while vacationing in Scotland. While visiting Stirling Castle, near Edinburgh, I came across this inscription in one of the courtyard walls:
In 1304, Sir William Oliphant of Aberdalgie, a Scottish knight, helped defend the castle from the English forces of King Edward I. After an extended siege, William was captured and imprisoned. (This became a running theme for the clan, sadly). Freed after swearing allegiance to England, William became a governor at Perth, which soon succumbed to the forces of Robert the Bruce, who ranks with William Wallace as a Scottish hero/liberator.
The Bruce apparently held no hard feelings toward William for his defection and left him alive. He was later memorialized with the inscription at the castle. My ancestor, also named William Oliphant, left Scotland from near the Stirling region in the early 1800s and came to America. So, that was pretty cool to find. No word on what kind of movies Sir William favored.
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