Director: Robert Aldrich
Writer: A. I. Bezzerides
Based on: Kiss Me Deadly, a novel by Mickey Spillane
Actors: Ralph Meeker; Albert Dekker; Paul Stewart; Juano Hernandez; Cloris Leachman; Maxine Cooper; Gaby Rodgers
Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo
Music: Frank DeVol
Running Time: 106 mins.
L.A. Noir Apocalypse
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1950s detective story; at least that’s what it appears to be--- it’s more. Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides took Mickey Spillane’s lurid pulp private eye novel and made it into something else: a critique on the Cold War American political/social mindset of the 1950s. They took Spillane’s two-dimensional characters and his standard pulp fiction plot and gave them cosmic significance.
The story deals with detective Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) quest across L.A. for a mysterious box containing something important that several people have died for. Greedy and unscrupulous Hammer thinks it might be “something big”, something valuable, but is totally unaware of what it really is---dangerous nuclear material capable of blowing L.A. and possibly the rest of the world to kingdom come. Hammer’s obsessive quest forms the matrix for Man’s obsessive journey to ultimate destruction. This movie more than any other 50s film, with the possible exception of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), best epitomizes the doomsday paranoia of the period.
Hammer’s quest begins when one night he picks up a woman hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She tells him her name is Christina and that people are chasing her. Mike grudgingly offers to drop her off at the nearest bus stop, but they are intercepted by several gangster types who knock Mike out, torture and murder Christina, and leave him unconscious in his wrecked sports car.
Upon recovery and released from the hospital, Mike sets out, haunted by Christina’s memory and her last words to him “ remember me”, to track down the “something big” she died for--- or the “great whatsit” as his assistant/girlfriend, Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it.
In the course of his odyssey through mid-1950s Los Angeles Hammer meets an assortment of characters: a wily boxing promoter, a nervous truck driver, a cagey morgue assistant, a philosophical furniture mover; sarcastic apartment managers; an opera enthusiast, gangsters, an extremely deadly femme fatale, and various other strange types. Some are helpful, but most, especially the gangsters and the police, try to discourage him from his pursuit; but pig-headed, avaricious Mike takes no heed. In the end he finds what he’s looking for, but the big payoff turns out to be a nuclear apocalypse. The movie ends with him and Velda fleeing into the Pacific Ocean as the Malibu beach house where they were being held by the mysterious and sinister Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) and his gangster minions erupts in a nuclear reaction.
For Aldrich and Bezzerides, political leftists, Spillane’s pulp novel Mike Hammer with his latent fascist inclinations symbolized what they felt was wrong with America at that time of political witch hunts and McCarthy hearings. Instead of Spillane’s hero figure this movie version of him is anything but heroic. Hammer is self-centered and narcissistic, as Christina so aptly tags him. He likes the good life: sharp sports cars, a comfortable art-bedecked apartment, and fancy up-to-date gadgets (e.g. a tape operated answering machine decades before they became available to the public)--- and he’s not particular how he gets it. He uses Velda shamefully, taking advantage of her affection for him by pimping her out to get dirt for his divorce clients. He roughs up old men, insults women, and enjoys inflicting pain. He symbolizes the pettiness of those of us with assumed superior egos. And he, like the rest of us, is too concerned with his own little world to realize what’s going on in the greater world around him. His pettiness in the end will bring down the curtain on us all.
Kiss Me Deadly is a remarkable piece of filmmaking on several different levels. The utter unreality of the style is unique. Almost everything in the movie seems to be out of joint. The whole film has a dreamlike quality that causes the viewer to doubt what he’s seeing and hearing. Camera angles are off, dialogues seem unnatural, sequences appear to have incongruities and odd time lapses. The opening credits tell right off that this movie is not ordinary--- they’re reversed. They move from bottom to top, not in the expected order. The L.A. portrayed is a strange place located between reality and fantasy.
This movie is a cautionary tale, and Aldrich and Bezzerides artfully use mythological and classical allusions throughout the film to express the eternal truths and cataclysmic message they want to relate. Hammer’s investigation is nothing less than a trip into the underworld, and a journey through the labyrinth. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, he even picks up a “golden bough” (in the wheel of his car) upon his entrance, but foolishly discards it, thereby sealing his fate. The “great whatsit” is the fatal box containing the Medusa’s head and guarded by Cerberus the hound of hell. And Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers), Soberin’s femme fatale associate and the woman who out of curiosity and lust opens the deadly box, is no other than Pandora herself bringing ultimate woe and destruction into the world. Who would have thought that a 1950s rather run of the mill film noir could be so ingeniously contrived?
Besides its oddness and offbeat artistry, Kiss Me Deadly has one more very important element to offer the modern viewer: it’s a cinematic time capsule of a long-gone Los Angeles. Dwight Eisenhower was president, take-cover drills were a common occurrence in most schools, and in a couple of years backyard bomb shelters would be all the rage. L.A. was changing fast and Hammer’s quest gives us a last view of what was about to pass away. Hammer does most of his investigating on Bunker Hill--- the former Bunker Hill of decrepit Victorian mansions, rickety old hotels, decaying apartment buildings, and the original Angel’s Flight. His travels also take him from his up-scale apartment building (still there) in a then sparsely populated Westwood, to a gangster’s estate in Beverly Hills (Greystone Mansion), a black lounge in South Central, the Hollywood Athletic Club (still there), a gas station in Calabasas, and finally to a spectacular explosive ending in the surf in Malibu.
Kiss Me Deadly is a one of a kind movie. Once you see it your opinion of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking as formulaic and unimaginative will be forever altered.
No comments:
Post a Comment