Kiss Me Deadly **** (1955, Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Wesley Addy) – Classic Movie Review 2209

Producer-director Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film noir crime movie stars Ralph Meeker, who is on scalding form as Mickey Spillane’s private detective hero Mike Hammer. This first-rate Aldrich thriller is a hugely imaginative, ahead-of-its-time study in paranoia.

This unpredictable, nihilist yarn about private eye Hammer endangering his life in trying to assist a woman (Cloris Leachman, in her cinema debut) on the run while trying to find a box of radio-active material, known as the ‘Great Whatsit”, is exactly in tune with Aldrich’s taste for pulp fiction, sadism, helter-skelter action and intelligent meaning.

It gives him plenty of opportunity for his visual bag of tricks, while commenting in a darkly comic way on the film noir world of violence and the nuclear fears of the time. The movie is a slightly older cousin of Dr Strangelove.

Attacked by the right-wing on its original release, Kiss Me Deadly was idolised by French New Wave critics (and so was Aldrich) who helped it on its way to its present status as a respected cult classic.

Also in the cult cast are Juano Hernandez, Maxine Cooper, Jack Elam, Strother Martin, Gaby Rodgers, Jack Lambert, Fortunio Bonanova and James Seay.

Aldrich started a writing campaign for the free speech rights of independent film-makers after the Kefauver Commission, a federal unit dedicated to investigating corrupting influences in the 1950s, named this film as 1955’s number one menace to American youth.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2209

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