Kiss Me Deadly.

Review #1389: Kiss Me Deadly.

Cast: 
Ralph Meeker (Mike Hammer), Albert Dekker (Dr. G.E. Soberin), Paul Stewart (Carl Evello), Juano Hernandez (Eddie Yeager), Wesley Addy (Lt. Pat Murphy), Maxine Cooper (Velda), Cloris Leachman (Christina Bailey), Gaby Rodgers (Gabrielle/Lilly Carver), Nick Dennis (Nick), Jack Lambert (Sugar Smallhouse), and Jack Elam (Charlie Max) Produced and Directed by Robert Aldrich (#105 - What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and #778 - The Longest Yard, and #1014 - The Dirty Dozen)

Review: 
"The power is for the director to do what he wants to do. To achieve that he needs his own cutter, he needs his cameraman, he needs his own assistant and a strong voice in his choice of writer; a very, very strong voice on who's the actor. He needs the power not to be interfered with and the power to make the movie as he sees it."

A director can come from anywhere if their heart is set on it. The descendant of prominent family members of wealth and society, Robert Aldrich found himself with plenty of pressure to succeed in the line of other Aldriches before him, with his father being a newspaper publisher while others had served in office or in war. He attended both Yale and the University of Virginia, but he found himself at odds with his family when it came to his beliefs that were less focused on wealth and money than his family was, particularly with the advent of the New Deal in lieu of the Great Depression. He dropped out of studying economics for a chance at working at RKO Radio Pictures as a production clerk at the age of 23, which resulted in him being disinherited. From this, he would work his way up to positions higher up such as associate directing and producing to writing and directing for television (which he viewed as a crash course for directors in terms of rushed schedules). He worked for a variety of directors for a decade such as Lewis Milestone, Robert Rossen, Charlie Chaplin, and Jean Renoir, learning from their strengths and weaknesses about the fundamentals of filmmaking. In 1953, at the age of 35, Aldrich made his directorial feature debut with Big Leaguer, a low-budget baseball movie that he felt was good, but not what he wanted to express in the film medium. Aldrich found his next effort more to his interest with World for Ransom the following year, and he soon found himself hired by Burt Lancaster for two Westerns in Apache and Vera Cruz (1954), with the relative success of those films helping in him forming his own company in The Associates and Aldrich. In total, the fiercely independent and rambunctious Aldrich would direct 29 total films before his death in 1983 at the age of 65, having a rapid work pace that was equaled with his constant use of crew members like editor Michael Luciano or composer Frank De Vol for several of his films.

It probably isn't a surprise that certain types of people felt this film was a menace to juveniles in terms of delinquency, which was the case of one government commission. Of course the material the film was adapted from attracted its own kind of attention for its violent content (which led to trouble in adapting the generally cold-blooded killer detective to the screen acceptable for the standards of the time) for its hardboiled character of Mike Hammer, which Mickey Spillane featured in thirteen novels over the course of 49 years. The film was an adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was the sixth of thirteen novels (with the series continuing after the author's death in 2006). This was the second of three Spillane novels to be turned into a film in this decade (the other two being I, the Jury and My Gun is Quick). The writing for the film was done by A.I. Bezzerides, who changed the novel's adversary of Mafia gangsters while also adding the nuclear suitcase aspect (as opposed to the pursuit of certain substances in the book) along with changing the occupation of the private eye to divorce case P.I, with Bezzerides noting that he wrote the script with contempt and quickness, which apparently did not sit well with Spillane. In any case, this is a wonderful film noir, filled with plenty of intrigue and tension with a dynamite cast and execution from Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo. Meeker leads the film with cynical conviction, a blunt instrument of macho nature that fits the film's maze of brutality. The rest of the cast follow along in varying levels of principle that range from the cleverly understated Rodgers to the hard-line authority in Addy to the careful menace of Dekker. Of note is the debut of Broadway-turned-television actress Cloris Leachman, who appears for the first couple of minutes in a key role that sticks out in panic. In any case, one finds themselves swept up in the film in its path, whether that means having our lead break a record or hurt someone's fingers or even when it comes to explaining the mysterious glowing whatsit. By the time one has spent 106 minutes with the film, you will find yourself electrified by a film that lands most of its punches with precision and paranoia that makes for an explosive climax, which has thankfully been restored in recent years (for decades, the film abruptly ended on a shot of the burning house that made it look like the lead had died looking around the house as opposed to ending on the beach). On the whole, this is a fine gem in Aldrich's body of work that stands today as a neat noir for a prime decade of thrills and paranoia for audiences to gaze upon.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.