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This article is about the 1955 film. For the Generation X album see Kiss Me Deadly (album). For the Lita Ford song, see the article on her album Lita (album).
| Kiss Me Deadly | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical Poster | |
| Directed by | Robert Aldrich |
| Produced by | Robert Aldrich |
| Written by | Story: Mickey Spillane Screenplay: A. I. Bezzerides |
| Starring | Ralph Meeker Albert Dekker Paul Stewart Cloris Leachman |
| Cinematography | Ernest Laszlo |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | May 18, 1955 |
| Running time | 106 minutes USA: 104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $410,000 (est.) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Kiss Me Deadly or properly Kiss Me, Deadly (1955) is a film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A. I. Bezzerides based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Spillane ordered Signet Books to pulp 50,000 copies of the book because they left the comma out.http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1823306,00.html
Kiss Me Deadly is considered a classic of the noir genre. References (usually to the glowing briefcase) appear in such diverse films as Steven Spielberg\'s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Alex Cox\'s Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino\'s Pulp Fiction (1994), David Lynch\'s Lost Highway (1997) and Richard Kelly\'s Southland Tales (2007).
In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
The film grossed $726,000 in the States and a total of $226,000 overseas.
Contents |
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 semi-consciousness, 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 that is hot to the touch and contains a dangerous glowing substance. It is ultimately revealed to be stolen radionuclide material, which in an apocalyptic final scene apparently reaches explosive criticality when the box is fully opened.
The original American release of the film shows Hammer and Velda escaping from the burning house at the end, running into the ocean as the words "The End" come over them on the screen. Sometime after its first release, the ending was crudely altered on the film\'s original negative, removing over a minute\'s worth of shots where Hammer and Velda escape and superimposing the words "The End" over the burning house. This implied that Hammer and Velda perished in the atomic blaze, and was often interpreted to represent the End of the World. In 1997, the original conclusion was restored. The DVD release has the correct original ending, and offers the now-discredited (but influential) truncated ending as an extra.
Critical commentary generally views it as a metaphor for the paranoia and nuclear fears of the Cold War era in which it was filmed.[Nuclear-powered nastiness: It\'s one of the darkest noirs ever made. But, says Alex Cox, the classic Kiss Me Deadly is a parable at heart, Alex Cox, The Guardian, June 16, 2006Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film, Stephen Prince, Praeger/Greenwood, 1992, ISBN 0275936627Anti-Communism and Popular Culture in Mid-Century America, Cynthia Hendershot, McFarland & Company, 2003, ISBN 0786414405 Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this meaning in his script ("I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting")A. I. BEZZERIDES obituary, Tom Vallance, The Independent, London, January 20, 2007
The original novel, while providing much of the plot, is about a Mafia conspiracy and does not feature espionage and the nuclear suitcase, elements added to the film version by the scriptwriter, Al Bezzerides.
It further subverted Spillane\'s book by portraying the already tough Hammer as a narcissistic bully, 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, breaking an informant\'s treasured record collection, or roughing up a coroner who\'s slow to part with a piece of information. Bezzerides wrote of the script: "I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it ... I tell you Spillane didn\'t like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn\'t like me".AI Bezzerides: Screenwriter victim of the Hollywood blacklist, he is renowned for three classic American film noirs, obituary, Ronald Bergan, The Guardian, February 6, 2007..
| Mickey Spillane\'s Mike Hammer | |
|---|---|
| Novels | I, the Jury (1947) • My Gun Is Quick (1950) • Vengeance Is Mine! (1950) • One Lonely Night (1951) • The Big Kill (1951) • Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) • The Girl Hunters (1962) • The Snake (1964) • The Twisted Thing (1966) • The Body Lovers (1967) • Survival... Zero! (1970) • The Killing Man (1989) • Black Alley (1996) |
| Films | I, the Jury (1953) • Kiss Me Deadly (1955) • My Gun Is Quick (1957) • The Girl Hunters (1963) • Margin For Murder (TV, 1981) • I, the Jury (1982) • Murder Me, Murder You (TV, 1983) • More Than Murder (TV, 1984) • The Return of Mickey Spillane\'s Mike Hammer (TV, 1986) • Come Die With Me (TV, 1994) |
| Television | Mickey Spillane\'s Mike Hammer (1958-1960) • Mickey Spillane\'s Mike Hammer (1984-1985) • The New Mike Hammer (1986-1987) • Mike Hammer, Private Eye (1997-1998) |
 American films of the 1950s |
|---|
| 1950 • 1951 • 1952 • 1953 • 1954 • 1955 • 1956 • 1957 • 1958 • 1959 |
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