Review of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Josh H — 09 Nov 2008

Last night's noir was 1955's Kiss Me Deadly. My knowledge of Mike Hammer is limited to vague memories of some 80's TV shows starring Stacy Keach, but Hammer strikes me as a little soft, a little too put together to really walk the walk of the noir private dick. Nevertheless, this movie kicks ass.

The first half hour is enough to sell the whole thing. In it, we get a half naked woman (Cloris Leachman!) running down a highway at night, a near car-wreck, some snappy dialogue, a kidnapping, our half naked woman being tortured with pliars and then shoved with our hero into a car and sent over a cliff. Hell, yeah.

The plot progresses pretty true to form. Mike sticks his nose where it doesn't belong, and wiseguys take a few pokes at it. There's nothing in it for Mike Hammer except some shadowy feeling that he should and a chance to piss of the cops and the badguys. There are dames and there are dames. Velda, Mikes "secretary" a accomplice in his divirce racket, is shamelessly head over heals for Mike, and there's plenty of heat there, including the scene where they half kiss, half talk that's by turns silly and pretty damned hot.

That's the key to Kiss me Deadly: the constant threat of slipping into either comedy or surrealism.

There's a pretty strong tradition of surrealism in the noir flick: see Touch of Evil and those hilarious scenes with the biker gang talking through the walls. I wonder how much of this is a (un)natural extension of the expectation that someone will necessarilly be slipped a micky: seeking truth in the noir world requires a derangement of all the senses. In Kiss Me Deadly, the surrealism comes in two forms: Nick, the greek car mechanic and sidekick who screams Va-Va-Voom and other nonsense (My Mustache! my Father's Mustache!) and the box that lies at the center of the mystery. We know it has something to do with nuclear power, but we get no real information. Tarantino almost certainly borrowed from this film with Marcellus Wallace's mysteriously glowing briefcase, but in Pulp Fiction, no one burst into flames.

There's a sense in which the surrealism takes over, which is why both the openning and closing are such perfect parallels to David Lynch's most accomplished film after Blue Velvet: Lost Highway. In Lost Highway, we get a touch of noir in our surrealism, and identity is fluid in the extreme, a tendency already begun here.

Oh, i'm just randomly making connections without saying anything cogent. Just watch the movie!