The early-to-mid 1970’s in American movies is justly remembered as the time of the New Hollywood movement (or Hollywood New Wave), where directors wanted to depict a different kind of America than what had been put on screen during the studio era, and also combine a love for that studio era with a love of the type of non-English language films (especially European and Japanese) that had played on American screens in the 1950’s and 1960’s. What doesn’t get remembered as much is the 1970’s also saw a number of movies that were revisionist versions of genre movies of the studio era, particularly the western and the private eye movie, which encompassed both the amateur sleuth/drawing room mystery type of private eye movie (like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) and the hardboiled type of private eye movie. For the latter, The Long Goodbye (directed by Robert Altman), Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski), and Night Moves (directed by Arthur Penn) are considered among the best examples. All due respect to those movies – I love Chinatown and Night Moves, and have come around on The Long Goodbye, though it’s still not my favorite Altman – but I would argue Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich and based on the novel by Mickey Spillane (adapted by A.I. Bezzerides), beat them to the punch.
Spillane wrote in the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction as established by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. However, whereas Hammett and Chandler wrote about flawed characters who nonetheless tried to adhere to a moral code, Spillane’s most famous character, private detective Mike Hammer, was unapologetically a brutalist who nonetheless saw himself as a moral crusader against anybody who Spillane didn’t like (especially drug dealers and Communists). Towards that end, Spillane, who started out writing for comic books until he switched to novels because they paid better, eschewed Hammett’s spare prose and Chandler’s romanticism (which admittedly could get wearying at times) for rat-a-tat, punchy writing that would seem like a parody of macho posturing were it not for the fact Spillane so obviously believed in it. Hammer was his hero, and it’s precisely this ideal that Aldrich and Bezzerides undercut with their movie version.
Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is driving one night when he comes across Christine (Cloris Leachman, in her film debut) running barefoot along the road, and wearing only a trenchcoat. She tells him, “Remember me” before some men drive Hammer off the road, take Christine, kill her, and leave him for dead. Hammer wakes up in the hospital, accompanied by Velda (Maxine Cooper), his secretary/lover, and Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), his friend on the police force. Though Murphy tries to tell him not to investigate any further, Hammer tries to find out what happened to Christine, as he thinks it’s part of something big. He goes to Christine’s apartment, where he discovers Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), who claims to have been Christine’s roommate, and says she’s scared the people who killed Christine will come after her too. Hammer also ends up tangling with Carl Evello (Paul Stewart), a gangster who works with Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), a mysterious crooked doctor, as well as the search for a mysterious black box, or as Velda refers to it, “the great whatsit.”
The private detectives in earlier film noirs, such as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or Philip Marlowe in Murder my Sweet and The Big Sleep, were involved in missing persons cases, and even though those cases ended up revealing a lot more, the detectives were darker than “amateur” sleuths like Philo Vance and the Falcon, and they also butted heads with the police (most notably the scene in The Maltese Falcon when Spade delivers an angry rant towards the district attorney, only interrupting himself to ask the stenographer if he’s getting everything down), there was still an air of respectability about them (the closest to disreputable is probably Jeff Bailey, aka Jeff Markham, the private eye played by Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, and he finds out there are lines even he won’t cross). There’s nothing respectable about Hammer. He works on divorce cases – if it’s a husband suspected of cheating, Velda seduces him to catch him in the act, while if it’s the wife, it’s Hammer who does the work – and again, he tries to find out what happened to Christine not because of any sense of morality, but because he thinks he’s onto something big that will help him break out. Also, even though this was made during the Production Code era, Hammer is willing to manhandle anyone (including an opera singer and a coroner) to get information, as well as seduce any woman he comes across (even Evello’s girl). About the only redeeming qualities Hammer has are his friendship with Nick (Nick Dennis), his auto mechanic, his friendships with African-American characters (including Eddie Yeager (Juano Hernandez), a gym owner), and his drive to save Velda when she’s kidnapped. This is in direct contrast to Spillane’s novel, where Hammer’s actions are considered heroic, even by Murphy, whereas in the movie, he’s warning Hammer to stay off the case because he’s screwing everything up.
Along with the attitude towards Hammer, the other major change from the novel (even though Aldrich and Bezzerides keep a lot of it) is what Soberin, and eventually Hammer, are after. In the novel, it was heroin, as Spillane had it in for drug dealers, whom he considered on a par with Communists, whereas in the film, it’s an attaché case containing something nuclear-related. That part is hinted at in the film when Murphy drops the hint, “Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity” to Hammer in order to warn him off, as well as when Dr. Soberin describes the box as “Pandora’s Box”. It also gets hinted at when Hammer finds the case at an athletic club and opens it, only to close it immediately after the light and radiation burn his wrist. That sets the stage for one of the most infamous endings ever, when Lily – or, at least, the woman pretending to be Lily; she’s actually working with Dr. Soberin – shoots Dr. Soberin dead because he won’t share what’s in the case with her, then shoots Hammer before opening the case, only for that same light and radiation to emerge, burning her to death and causing the house she and the others are in to eventually explode. Oddly enough, in the studio-enforced ending, everyone dies, while in Aldrich and Bezzerides’ ending, a wounded Hammer manages to rescue Velda and they both escape.
One trait the film does share with the novel is Aldrich’s baroque style matches Spillane’s rat-a-tat prose, though without the macho posturing that made the novel wearying for me. Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (in the fourth of five movies together) deftly blend location shooting (the exteriors) with sets (the interiors). At one point in the movie, Hammer is kidnapped by Shug Smallhouse (Jack Lambert) and Charlie Max (Jack Elam), two of Evello’s thugs, and gets drugged, which was not new for film noir – in Murder my Sweet, Edward Dmytryk’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell my Lovely, Philip Marlowe gets drugged as well by the bad guys – but what makes this sequence different is Aldrich and Laszlo shoot Soberin (when he’s questioning Hammer) so you never see his face, making him all the more menacing and otherworldly. And the final sequence certainly shows Aldrich pulling out all the stops. This also serves as a nice contrast to Bezzerides’ dialogue, which is elliptical where Spillane’s was punchy, which is brought out with Dr. Soberin, who speaks almost entirely in flowery riddles, even near the end, when “Lily” is asking him what’s in the case (or as she calls it, the box), and he speaks of Pandora’s Box, among other things.
At the time, Meeker had been a contract player for MGM, as well as a stage actor (he replaced Marlon Brando on A Streetcar Named Desire, and originated the role of Hal, the drifter, in Picnic: William Holden played the role in the 1955 movie version), with his best role being the affable if somewhat troubled ex-cavalryman Anderson in Anthony Mann’s dark western The Naked Spur. Playing Hammer required Meeker to step up his game, and he does, using his physicality in a way that he’d never really do again. Meeker can go from superficially charming to menacing on a dime here, especially when he’s at Evello’s party and goes from coming on to one of the women there to beating up on Shut and Charlie. Of the three main actresses, only Leachman went on to have a prolific acting career, though Cooper concentrated on political activism and Rodgers was involved with songwriting. Still, all three are very good. Velda may be jaded, but she’s smart in ways Hammer never will be, and Cooper projects that well. Leachman doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but you certainly understand why Hammer is curious to find out what happened to her, as she projects an air of mystery. In an interview, Rodgers apparently said Aldrich told her to play the part as if she was a lesbian, which is a wrongful stereotype considering how psychotic “Lily” turns out to be, but Rodgers also projects an air of mystery that works for the character. Finally, while Dekker and Stewart did play good guys in their career, and well (Dekker as Gregory Peck’s editor in Gentleman’s Agreement, Stewart as an ace reporter in Deadline U.S.A. and a nightclub owner in the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole), they were at their best in villainous roles, and they’re both appropriately menacing here. Though Kiss Me Deadly wasn’t popular with critics at the time, today, it’s rightly seen as a terrific film (influencing, among other films, Pulp Fiction, which also had a mysterious case as part of its plot), and again, a revisionist film noir long before the term came about.
