Review of Kiss Me Deadly

Introduction

A hugely influential hard-core Noir. Having proved his worth with the mildly revolutionary Burt Lancaster westerns ‘Apache’ and ‘Vera Cruz’ in 1954, director Robert Aldrich continued his revisionist streak with an adaptation of a Noir-ish pot-boiler, featuring Micky Spillane’s misanthropic/misogynistic P.I. Mike Hammer. Here, Hammer picks up a flustered blond, petrified of an unknown pursuer; driven off the road, said blond is mutilated and killed and Hammer dizzily pursues the case. As he attempts to collar unseen forces involved in a faceless scam, Hammer resorts to dealing with brutish Hoods on his own gutter-level, as ignorant to the true gravity of the case as the dazzled, and soon to be awe-struck, audience.

Video

A fairly hazy transfer, complete with mediocre definition and occasional, minor, print damage.

Audio

See the video: scrappy, clangy and totally mono. Not nice.

Features

The appreciably sleazy trailer, and precisely nothing else.

Conclusion

From the disorientating intro, set to Nat King Cole’s plaintive yearning over the inverted credits, Aldrich’s film is a sour, skewed masterpiece of the 1950s. The machinations of the intricately confusing macguffin-plot are maintained with robust efficiency by Aldrich, and although the plot is ultimately shrewdly conventional exposition, the real juice bubbles beneath the soiled veneer. Meeker’s ambivalent, clandestine flings with his complex, slightly aloof mistress Velda (Maxine Cooper); Ernest Laszlo’s dazzling off-kilter camerawork, Michael Luciano’s seamless cracker-jack editing and a fantastically bitter, acerbic performance from Ralph Meeker.

The film is most conventionally read as a metaphor of the inexplicable, indefinable evils of the Cold War, nursing and parodying the paranoia with a scathing, nihilistic glee. However, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ is really the apex of its genre: Like the best hazily existential Noirs, it conspires to push Meeker into a totally causally inefficacious role within the narrative: a passive, scrambling protagonist, constantly groping for answers, achieving the final ‘revelation’ through the futility of chance as much as his own street-wise intuition. Ice-cold Dr. Soberin’s “great whats-it” is the icing on the Nietzschean cake, leading to perhaps the most audaciously radical ending in American cinema.

Aldrich would continue to make acerbic, revelatory pictures like ‘Attack’, ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’, even the bitterly exhilarating macho yarns ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Longest Yard’, but he never managed to make a purer, more unremittingly savage film than this. As appetizing as sucking on a lemon perhaps, but a masterpiece nonetheless, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ is among the finest films of the 1950s. But alas, we can’t stop there, MGM’s back-cat disc needs answering for. This disc is perhaps the perfect example of the Achilles heel of DVD, the format’s popularity has meant its ‘classics’ possess little imagination, little scope for new ways of looking at the cinema of the past: the old guard are halloed with double disc sets and deluxe remastering, whilst this blustering, boorish, brilliant, unforgettable film is shuffled below the radar. So, in the words of Margherita Sarfatti in Tim Robbins’ ‘Cradle Will Rock’: “What a shame to let the classics slip away.”