Staff Pick: Kiss Me Deadly

Isabel’s Pick!

“Va-Va-Va-Voom!” Wearing a raincoat for a nightie and panting orgasmically, a debuting Cloris Leachman’s nighttime encounter with Ralph Meeker’s “bedroom dick” Mike Hammer leads him — following a jazzy credit sequence that rolls backwards — on a search for a mysterious box. As his legality-be damned methods (which include slamming drawers on hands, casually snapping irreplaceable Carus 78s in half, and slapping every face in sight) lead hm and his succession of babe-magnet-sportscars all over location-shot L.A., the “great whatsit” (ripped of by REPO MAN and PULP FICTION) starts to look like a box that’s too hot to handle and in a cataclysmic ending, it is. Dismissed on first release as just another piece of Mickey Spillane trash, and cited by a Congressional committee as a contribution to juvenile delinquency, Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides’ adaptation — “we just took the title and threw the book away” — was soon embraced by the French New Wavers  “the revelation of Robert Aldrich will no doubt be the cinema event of 1955″ – Truffaut) and has since been hailed here not only as the blackest of noir, but also a biting commentary on McCarthyite America. “Played out through a deranged Cubistic space amid the debris of Western civilisation…the faux Calder mobile and checkerboard floor pattern of Hammer’s overdecorated pad — a bag of clubs in the corner and Hollywood’s first answering machine built into the wall — add to the crazy, clashing expressionism. – J. Hoberman, Village Voice