Kiss Me Deadly a Culturally Important Mess!

 

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

Directed by Robert Aldrich

United Artists, 106 minutes, Not-rated.

★★ ½

 

 

 Kiss Me Deadly is almost impossible to rate. I arrived at 2 ½ via some convoluted math: 1 for movie-making, 2 as a story, and 4 for cultural significance (Divide 7 by 3 and you get 2 ½ .)

 

As filmmaking, this Robert Aldrich turkey sinks to the level of Ed Wood camp such as Plan 9 from Outer Space and shares some of its pseudo-science proclivities. Thinking of Kiss Me Deadly as camp will actually increase your enjoyment of it.

 

Aldrich had an interesting idea that oozed of personal vendetta. He was a leftist who expected to be targeted in the post-World War II Red Scare. It never happened, probably because he was such a small fish that potential inquisitors wouldn’t have acquired political or cultural capital by netting him. Aldrich hated crime writer Mickey Spillane, the creator of hard-broiled private investigator Mike Hammer. In Aldrich’s mind, Spillane was a fascist, an overdrawn assessment though not by much. (Spillane admired Ayn Rand–enough said.) 

 

In Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is transformed into a sleaze-bag divorce investigator who gets results by prostituting his secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper). She seduces ‘em and Hammer blackmails ‘em. Hammer is so crude, amoral, and sadistic that cops like the LAPD’s Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) despise him and probably wouldn’t bother to fish his corpse out of the Pacific Ocean were he to meet a suspicious end. As the story begins, Hammer nearly hits a barefooted hitchhiker, Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) when she flags down his racing sportscar. She tells him that she was placed in an insane asylum to keep her quiet, but to “remember me” if her pursuers murder her. That is exactly what happens and Hammer is also captured, drugged, and placed in his sports car with Christina, which is pushed off a cliff and explodes in a ball of fire.

 

We don’t know how he survives; it’s one of many can’t-be-bothered-to-stitch-it plot holes. Hammer launches an investigation–when he’s not having sex with Velda–that leaves more crumbs to follow than Hansel and Gretel. He visits a hood named Carl Evello (Paul Stewart), though this scene seems merely an excuse for his moll Friday (Marion Carr) to throw herself at Hammer like a hamster in heat. He also visits and harbors Christina’s roommate Lily Carver (Gaby Rogers) because, of course, the hoods staking out his apartment would never think to look for her there! Hammer gets personal when a Greek friend, Nick (Nick Dennis) is murdered an excuse to be more violent and more stupid.

 

The movie’s mystery will hinge on a pair of oxfords, a key, an assumed identity, poetry, and (metaphorically) opening Pandora’s box. To call A. I. Bezzerides’ script a mess is an insult to sloppiness. You’ve probably never heard of Meeker, Carr, or Rogers, nor should you. Though he did some 1950s TV, Meeker is a stiff masquerading as an actor and both Carr and Rogers had short careers. Cooper was terrific as Velda, though all of the women in the film are slutty and displayed in lurid poses. Don’t get me started on ethnic stereotypes.

 

 The question arises as to why Kiss Me Deadly is part of the Criterion Collection of films considered as important. It helps if your film is rejected by the Catholic League of Decency. (Nothing attracts attention like censorship!) It might have faded away had the CLD left well enough alone, but French intellectuals associated with the journal Cahiers du cinema, including director Claude Chabrol, championed the film once they saw it.

 

Why? This gets us to cultural significance. Kiss Me Deadly could be billed as Mike Hammer-meets Red Scare-meets fears of nuclear holocaust. The world’s first hydrogen bomb–700 times more powerful than the atomics dropped on Japan in 1945–was tested in 1952, less than two years before Aldrich began Kiss Me Deadly. The H-bomb provided the capacity to destroy all life on Earth. Fear was part of the rationale behind the Red Scare and numerous sci-fi novels and Hollywood films featuring aliens, monsters, mutants, or nuclear destruction. In other words, Aldrich’s turkey attained flight via a Zeitgeist updraft. This makes Kiss Me Deadly so bad it’s good. It did give Cloris Leachman her first break, so there’s that. Besides, it’s a guilty pleasure to watch Aldrich reduce Mike Hammer to a grotesque idiot.

 

Rob Weir