You think our modern world is rife with unprecedented dangers, out of control and more than less overwhelmed by sheer insanity of modernity? You think the Eisenhower era was a paradise of pearl necklace bound housewives doing their chores in easy access skirts and high-heels? You’re wrong.
The 50s had its fair share of cesspools too. Here’s a case in point:
“Do me a favor, will you? Keep away from the windows. Somebody might... blow you a kiss.”
Back in 1955 director Robert Aldrich and inspired screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, adapted Mickey Spillane’s hugely successful but inferior novel Kiss Me Deadly. The coveted heroin that motivates the action of the book is replaced with “the great whatsit,” a mysterious, leather-wrapped metal box that is warm to the touch. A lot of people want it, but why? “Bedroom dick” Mike Hammer senses easy money when he is drawn into the chase in a perversely sideways fashion, and abandons his lucrative divorce-case activities to claim his piece of the pie. Only trouble is that Hammer isn’t nearly as smart as he imagines, and although he leaves a trail of dead and crippled bodies in his wake, he succeeds only in dooming himself and precipitating a literal apocalypse.
“They? A wonderful word. And who are they? They're the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what? Why don't you turn her over to Pat? It's his job to protect her, if she needs protection. Or to question her if that's what's needed. Why are you always tryin' to make a noise like a cop?”
Ferociously directed by Aldrich, one of Hollywood’s true iconoclasts: tilt shots, unorthodox POV shots, low angles, high angles--it all comes together in a sinister, crazily beautiful black-and-white mosaic, impeccably shot by Ernest Laszlo. Even the opening credits crawl up the screen in reverse. Never have beatings, car crashes, torture with pliers, pimping, struggles in the surf, battered faces, finger-breaking, exploding buildings, death by crushing--you name it--looked as creepily seductive. The film’s violence gets into your pores and you want more. Ralph Meeker’s sharply dressed Hammer is remarkable in his cockiness; on the street, mano y mano, he’s a gladiator, but when Hammer enters the whatsit’s world of dark politics and metaphysics (with Bezzerides’s ruminations on pain, fate, death, myth, even the nature of art), he’s pathetically out of his depth, and you cringe when it belatedly dawns on him.
“Look Mike, I like you. I like the way you handle yourself. You seem like a reasonable man. Why don't we make a deal. What's it worth to you to drag your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of.”
Fine supporting performances from Cloris Leachman (the running girl who’s naked beneath her raincoat); Maxine Cooper (as Hammer’s sexy F-buddy/gal Friday, Velda); an even sexier Marian Carr (as a literal Friday, the requisite crimelord’s bored sister who pouts to Hammer, “Won’t you be my friend?”); and Gaby Rogers (as the somnambulistic schemer aptly described by the late critic Carlos Clarens as “a birdbrained Pandora”). And Albert Dekker’s Dr. Soberin, a pretentious intellectual with the killer instinct of a well-dressed wolverine, is one of Hollywood’s most off-putting villains. (He’s not as smart as he thinks, either!).
“Yeah, but what’s in it?”
“The head of Medusa. That's what's in the box, and who looks on her will be changed not into stone but into brimstone and ashes. But of course you wouldn't believe me, you'd have to see for yourself, wouldn't you?”
There’s also a peculiar but appropriately eerie score by frequent Aldrich collaborator Frank DeVol. In all, a towering achievement that, as is well known, greatly influenced the direction of the French nouvelle vague, and must surely be represented on the short list of truly great American movies.
