Kiss Me Deadly

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Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A. I. Bezzerides based on a Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery story.

Kiss Me Deadly is considered a classic of the film noir genre. References (usually to the glowing briefcase) appear in such diverse films as Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997). The picture grossed $726,000 in the States and a total of $226,000 overseas.

Plot

Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a tough Los Angeles private eye who is just slightly less brutal and corrupt than the crooks he chases.

One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina (Cloris Leachman), an attractive hitchhiker he picks up on a lonely country road. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semiconsciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case. It develops that "the great whatsit" [as Hammer's assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it] at the center of Hammer's quest is a small, mysterious valise containing a dangerous glowing substance. According to Turner Classic Movies: there are two versions of the movie in existence: A USA released verison where he is alive at the end of the film, and a European release, in which he is killed at the end of the movie.

Hammer is surely one of the darkest of anti-hero private detectives in the film noir genre. He apparently makes most of his living by blackmailing adulterous husbands and wives, and he takes an obvious sadistic pleasure in violence, whether he's beating up thugs sent to kill him or roughing up a coroner who's slow to part with a piece of information.

In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

External links

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