Review of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Sourav B — 03 Dec 2010

A beautiful blonde is frightfully running through a desolate highway. We don't know why she's running but she is running and running wearing only a raincoat. A car comes down the road and she gets in the way. The car skids to the side of the road and stops. Inside of the car is a man. He lets her in and they go on driving. He notices that his car for some reason is going more towards the right so he stops at a gas station not too far and gets a branch that was stuck under the car out. The girls name is Christina Bailey and the man is Mike Hammer. At first the man thinks she's just an escaped lunatic nut after he and the girl are abducted by a couple of thugs he changes his mind. The men torture the girl to death as Hammer watches semiconsciously helpless. He escapes the same fate when the murderers' car topples off a cliff and he is thrown out of the car. Looking for vengeance he tries to discover the secret behind the girl's murder. The plot takes Hammer to the apartment of Lily Carver, an attractive blonde who is posing as Christina's ex-roommate. This Lily tells Hammer she has gone into hiding asks him to protect her. As it turns out, she is after some mysterious box that, she believes, contains something worth a fortune. "The great whatsit", as Hammer's assistant/lover Velda calls it, at the center of Hammer's search is a small, mysterious piece of luggage that is literally hot to the touch and contains a dangerous, shining substance. This little "McGuffin" like thing comes to represent the 1950s Cold War fear and nuclear paranoia about the atomic bomb that penetrated American culture. Both the box and Velda are stolen by the villains, at which point Hammer discovers that the "great whatsit" contains radioactive material of incredible powers and thus comes a great and shocking ending to one of the best films of the Cold War era.

Kiss Me Deadly is absolutely one of the definitive film noirs and highly influential especially to the Nouvelle Vogue of French cinema like Truffaut, Godard, etc. as well as the films by David Lynch (Lost Highway), Alex Cox (Repo Man) and Tarantino especially Pulp Fiction (the box gives off a powerful light just like the McGuffin in Pulp Fiction does). Robert Aldrich's direction is a thing of beauty. His choice of angles in the film are just stunning and there are many shots I'm sure influenced Orson Welles for his film Touch of Evil. The camerawork by Ernest Laszlo is utterly brilliant. The script is full of femme fatales and is very twisty. It is very much a comment on the paranoia of the time. Not only is it one of the definitive film noirs it is also the definitive B movie. It is also very violent for it's era. This film is a thing of beauty. Absolutely a must see! 10/10.