Kiss Me, Deadly - 1955

Mike Hammer has got to figure out what's behind the demise of a late night hitchhiker

Kiss Me, Deadly can be a bit jarring if you're not prepared for how this story (courtesy of director Robert Alldrich) is told and if you're conditioned to seeing the other, more ethical 1950's noir investigators of filmdom. Here, the private detective (played by Ralph Meeker) doggedly pursues a "thread that becomes a string that becomes a rope." This means he often putters around his high-tech (for 1955) luxury apartment trying to figure out why a desperate hitchhiker he picked up on the road one night who told him "remember me" just before meeting a cruel demise is at the heart of a mystery about an obscure object of desire being sought by everybody else in the cast.

Mysterious MacGuffins aren't exactly rare in cinematic mystery stories, but the detective in the story is, with Meeker playing Mike Hammer as one of "the stupidest, sleaziest, most brutal" investigators in fiction, or at least that's how the critic inside the Criterion Blu Ray package puts it. All three of these attributes are mitigated by the fact the film itself is rather a funk of stupid, sleazy and brutal characters, and there's a kind of self-parodying humor (that can be enlarged considerably once you've seen the film in toto) that operates on the fringe of many scenes as we watch gangsters, femme fatales and Hammer go through the steps of telling us a tale of secrets, money, murder and dread.

As Mike Hammer tries to sort things out, he doesn't fare too badly in the brains department, competitively speaking, since just about everyone else lacks foresight and intelligence, too (except for his 'Girl Friday,' played by Maxine Cooper, who is in a constant state of frustration). We're also supposed to recognize the intelligence of Police Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), who coolly and sadly shakes his head as he watches Hammer sink deeper into what Hammer believes will be 'a big score,' the policeman can sense it's actually a one-way trip to disaster.

In lieu of brains, Hammer relies mostly on the built-in pun of his hammer-like fists, and there's some terrific stuntwork (and location filming) in Kiss Me, Deadly, but to top that, we in the end find out that the "big score" is very big, but not the kind anyone expected. The climax of the film itself is a cinematic highlight of special effects that has been lifted from to be reused in numerous other films, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Repo Man.

Kiss Me, Deadly can be taken as is, a stylish, polished and well-told upgrade to the usual exploitation-noir of the 1950s, or it can be seen as a keen-eyed faery tale about the danger of science with Albert Dekker providing a smooth-talking, articulated Dr. Soberin that calmly and intelligently shows us he's just one more fool playing with matters beyond his understanding. There's also the petty delusions of power that the host of criminals in the film traffick in. But repeated viewing makes another element more clear: Director Aldritch inserted a comedic element that if scratched at a little bit by a thoughtful viewer, turns the tale into a bit of a comedy where the joke is continually on Mike Hammer.

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Original Page December 6, 2024