Caught Kiss Me Deadly today
Amazing film said to be: the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period.
Amazing for the time - and filled with a vision of what was to come via Sergio among others.
Shot in 2r days and released in May of that paradigm-shift year 1955, Kiss Me Deadly was directed by Robert Aldrich from a screenplay by proletarian poet AI. 'Buzz' Bezzerides, taking plot incident and little else from Mickey Spillane's sixth novel starring his hugely popular skull-cracking hero Hammer. The narrator of a DVD documentary supplement about crew-cut Spillane, a "blue-collar writer of comic books", calls it "a left-wing attempt by Aldrich to undermine and criticise the conservative Spillane". In a recorded introduction, Alex Cox reveals that "disguised as a tough-guy detective picture", Kiss Me Deadly "is actually an anti-nuclear parable with classical allusions".
"Actually," Kiss Me Deadly is both things - it wouldn't have any shelf life if it weren't a pluperfect genre film in which every investigative episode has its own kook rhythm. The mongrel authorship contributes to the feeling of a movie that coalesced out of the atmosphere rather than being storyboarded. Gross contrasts define this film, not least that between the rotting filigree of the previous century, in the gingerbread boarding houses and faded gentility of LA's Bunker Hill neighbourhood where Hammer does his snooping, and the streamlined Atomic Age that he's the avatar of, with his clean-machine Jaguar XK and neat-as-a-pin mid-century-modern Wilshire Boulevard bachelor pad. The concluding white-light apocalypse is Armageddon as the epitome of 1950s tidiness: the Big One as Big Disinfectant.
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