AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s vigilante dick and the right-wing values he espouses by making him materialistic, anti-intellectual, impotent, and even more sadistic and misogynistic than he is on the page.
The Criterion Collection has studded its Region 1 high-definition restoration with supplementary gems. The commentary by noir historians Alain Silver and James Ursini is especially good on how Aldrich and Bezzerides provided the film with “mythic behaviour and mythic structures”, merging Modernism with antiquity and making a Christina Rossetti poem the clue to Hammer’s quest for the Pandora’s Box.
Alex Cox, who used the Pandora’s Box idea in Repo Man, contributes a dramatic video essay. Spillane, who died in 2006, is the subject of a breathlessly hagiographic featurette that shows footage from The Girl Hunters, a British adaptation of a Spillane novel that starred the writer himself. There’s also the original truncated ending, part of a documentary on Bezzerides, and an atmospheric piece on the subsequently redeveloped LA neighbourhood of Bunker Hill where Aldrich filmed.
Cloris Leachman played the girl Hammer picks up on a lonely road at night, Maxine Cooper his assistant Velda, and the wonderful Gaby Rodgers the waif-like femme fatale. Leachman and Rodgers are still alive, and it would have been illuminating to know what they thought about these women’s proto-feminist critiques of the repellent Hammer.
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Watch the trailer for Kiss Me Deadly
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