DVD Watch

Kiss Me Deadly

The first thing you see onscreen is a barefoot woman – Cloris Leachman, in fact, in her film debut – agitatedly running down a highway wearing nothing but a trench coat. When no cars will stop for her, she flings herself into the path of the next oncoming car and forces it to stop. It's a convertible coupe driven by Mike Hammer, the brute detective created by pulp-fiction titan Mickey Spillane. The woman climbs in, a Nat "King" Cole song comes over the radio, and then the title sequence scrolls down the screen – in reverse. Kiss Me Deadly and its search for the "great whatsit" is off to the races.

Robert Aldrich's 1955 film is one of the quintessential examples of film noir. The movie's visual style is, of course, filled to the brim with the shadows and disorienting angles associated with the form. And its story about a seedy private eye who stumbles onto a huge mystery is the stuff of film-noir antiheroes. But Kiss Me Deadly delivers more than the lurid "blood-red kisses" and "white-hot thrills" promised by the movie's tagline. Fear and paranoia drive the film, and the threat of nuclear holocaust underpins most of the action. As Nat "King" Cole sings, "I'd rather have the blues than what I've got."

Many a film and TV show has been based on Spillane's Mike Hammer character, a hard-boiled, misogynistic lug who derives a little too much pleasure from violence and far too little from high culture and strict morality. However, there's a vast difference between Spillane's novel and A.I. Bezzerides' screenplay. Instead of valorizing Spillane's private dick as a paragon of manhood as in the novel, the film, while acknowledging Hammer's professional efficacy, also holds up his savage instincts as examples of the character's barbarically retrogressive nature. Women may fall into his arms, but they also recite to him his deficiencies. Although Spillane's signature violence still permeates the film, key moments of torture occur offscreen while the horror is filled in by the viewer's imagination. The most significant change between the book and the film, however, is Bezzerides' scrapping of Spillane's Mafia story about a cache of stolen drugs and the substitution of a spy thriller about a box of pilfered nuclear material. It fits perfectly into the prevailing postwar fears and creates real life-and-death paranoia for the characters. The glowing Pandora's box at the heart of Kiss Me Deadly is a haunting trope that was to recur in many movies, most notably Repo Man and Pulp Fiction.