Valued friend, great writer, and all-around terrific guy Les Phillips has given me permission to run his review of Kiss Me Deadly. After seeing the film based on his recommendation, I realized that he summed up my feelings perfectly.
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KISS ME DEADLY (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich). The first scene of KISS ME DEADLY is unforgettable: the eloquent, urgent face of a desperate woman – it’s Cloris Leachman She’s running toward us along a dark highway, clearly running for her life, fighting to tell her secret and fighting to save herself – from what threat or horror, we don’t know.
That’s the prelude to one of the best crime movies ever made. What sets it apart? There are many noir or noirish films with convoluted plots, saucy molls, and decrepit private-eye offices. Many are suspenseful, energetically directed, and framed in good black and white photography. KISS ME DEADLY has all that, plus the sheer brutality that only a Mickey Spillane novel can inspire. Aldrich captures Spillane's direct, casual, dark violence beautifully. He also gave KISS ME DEADLY a new plot – we got gangsters here, certainly, but we’ve also got the Cold War; something radioactive this way comes, and lurks at the center of the mystery.
Aldrich makes a corpse rolling down a loopy stairwell into poetry in motion. And the actresses! A revelation in each small part, no common performance or gesture where something weird will do. Ralph Meeker is Mike Hammer, and he’s properly sadistic but also strangely bland. This is probably a good thing. The action, the plot, the dames are the point of KISS ME DEADLY. A friend says that Aldrich should have cast Richard Widmark; that would have been overkill, no pun intended. What a good film.
