Kiss Me Deadly simply took film noir to an inevitable stopping point to such extremes and such absurdity that it left nowhere for the movement to go, and left it doomed to ridicule and parody and decades of tongue-in-cheek reenactments by everyone from Daffy Duck to Joseph Gordon-Levitt.Ĭertainly one could not imagine taking the noir camera work, the skewed angles and deep shadows and high contrasts of black and white, much further than Aldrich does here what began as film’s entry into German Expressionism has simply become another exploited convention. Though, technically, Orson Welles probably gave noir its official, grand goodbye three years later with Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly was nevertheless a harbinger of the end.īy the late fifties, noir was already becoming hard to take seriously people were beginning to look at it as they do today, finding excitement and humor in conventions intended to convey the opposite. It’s no coincidence that the movement all but died shortly after the film’s release. Rather, it is “ultimate” in that it can be viewed almost as a closing bookend and a final word on the movement itself.
I say “ultimate” not to imply that it is the best, for it is certainly not that. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly may well be considered the ultimate entry in that classic movement of American film: film noir. No attempt is made, fortunately, to convince us that this is all anything but silly. In as little time, detective Mike Hammer finds himself lost in another labyrinthine plot. Then it gets a little dark within a matter of minutes, she’s tortured to death and Hammer is left for dead.
#KISS ME DEADLY SERIES#
Cloris proceeds to moan and gasp less as though she is winded than she is fighting back a series of orgasms over the entire opening credits, which sprawl across the screen backward in motion and order as though composed by a dyslexic. He offers his theory that she is a rape victim and is frankly annoyed that she couldn’t have just said “yes” and saved him the trouble of stopping.
He can hardly contain his anger as he begrudges her a ride. Our protagonist, detective Mike Hammer, happens to be the one driving down that stretch of road in a Jaguar sports car that is literally too small to fit him properly his head is in fact above the level of the windshield, and the rest of him fills the two-seater more tightly than he fills his own pants.Īfter running the Jaguar off the road, Mike Hammer takes one look at the naked, terrified woman and his face says it all: not another goddamned broad. In this absurd little film’s opening, a woman you may recognize as a young Cloris Leachman runs barefoot and naked onto an empty desert road in the dark of night.
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