Kiss Me With Your Best Shot... Nuke Nightmares and Kiss Me Deadly
Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
This week's DVD Tuesday pick was inspired by the recent limited re-release of a little-known indie movie called
Something Wild (1961) - not to be confused with the 1986 Jonathan Demme film of the
same name - starring '50s tough guy
Ralph Meeker. Watching it, I couldn't help but think of Meeker's greatest role:
Mickey Spillane's two-fisted private investigator Mike Hammer, in the flat-out astonishing
Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
Now, Spillane's name is a red flag: His novels are often dismissed as lurid, misogynistic, red-baiting, sadistic anachronisms designed to glorify white male privilege and excuse fascistic vigilantism. And that's not far off the mark, though they're also hypnotic pulp fiction. Spillane, a reactionary conservative to the core, hated
Kiss Me Deadly, and not just because director
Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides (who died less than two weeks ago) dropped the comma from the title. That's only partly a joke: Spillane once demanded that Signet Books destroy 50,000 copies of his 1952 novel
Kiss Me, Deadly because the comma was left off the cover. But more to the point here, Spillane hated that the left-leaning Bezzerides, who escaped blacklisting but was regarded with McCarthy-era suspicion, had turned his straightforward crime story about drug-dealing Mafiosi in New York into a sunburnt Los Angeles fable rooted in atomic paranoia.
Astonishingly, he didn't seem to mind that Bezzerides, Aldritch and Meeker transformed tough-guy Hammer into a nihilistic sociopath too busy brutalizing people to bother doing any detecting, or that they crammed it full of hoity-toity allusions to Pandora's box, Lot's wife, opera and the poetry of Christina Georgina Rossetti.
Made at the tail end of the original film noir cycle,
Kiss Me Deadly opens with a girl (a young
Cloris Leachman, a revelation if you know her only as
Malcolm in the Middle's vitriolic harridan), naked under her trench coat, running for dear life down a darkened highway. Hammer picks her up after she virtually throws herself in front of his car, learns she's escaped from a mental home - she was imprisoned there, she says, not because she's crazy but because she knows something so dangerous she doesn't dare share it - and talks tough until the girl's pursuers overtake them. Then he's useless: They beat him within an inch of his life, torture her to death with a pair of pliers and push them both off a cliff in Hammer's prized convertible. Hammer survives the fiery crash and gloms onto the dead girl's trail with the dogged persistence of a rabid dog, never finding out much except that she knew the whereabouts of a box containing something his secretary/girlfriend Velda (
Maxine Cooper) dubs "the great whatzit" and that everyone who knows anything about it winds up dead.
Kiss Me Deadly barrels towards its literally explosive conclusion with such perverse, feverish intensity that you can't help wonder whether it isn't all a nightmare: Maybe Mike is still back in his hospital bed, hallucinating after that near-fatal car crash. That dreamlike quality clearly appealed to
Alex Cox and
Quentin Tarantino, who repurposed the trope of the "great whatzit" in
Repo Man (1984) and
Pulp Fiction (1994), respectively, and makes it such a haunting encapsulation of noir's enduring appeal: Its shadows are more than darkness, and the darkness is apocalyptic.
Things to consider:
Is it all a dream? The movie doesn't end with Hammer waking up, but as with
Otto Preminger's equally slippery
Laura (1944), you can make a strong case for most of the narrative happening in one character's head.
How thoroughly sex and violence are intertwined, right down to the film's dialogue: My favorite examples are Hammer referring to the bundle of dynamite he finds wired to his car's accelerator as a "sweet little kiss-off" and Velda warning him to stay away from windows because "someone might decide to blow you a kiss."
Interestingly, though Hammer is portrayed as Neanderthal in virtually all his attitudes, he's not racist: He's clearly at home in clubs and gyms whose clientele are predominantly African-American and treats the black boxing manager, club singer and bartender more decently than most people he encounters.
What exactly happens at the end? This question can apply equally to the mangled ending that most of us first saw and to the original ending restored in 1997 - that's the ending on the 2001 MGM DVD. For more about the original and recut endings, I recommend this
article.
Remember: Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This week's new DVD releases
