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Kiss Me With Your Best Shot... Nuke Nightmares and Kiss Me Deadly
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
This week's DVD Tuesday pick was inspired by the recent limited re-release of a little-known indie movie called Something Wild (1961) — not to be confused with the 1986 Jonathan Demme film of the same name — starring '50s tough guy Ralph Meeker. Watching it, I couldn't help but think of Meeker's greatest role: Mickey Spillane's two-fisted private investigator Mike Hammer, in the flat-out astonishing Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
Now, Spillane's name is a red flag: His novels are often dismissed as lurid, misogynistic, red-baiting, sadistic anachronisms designed to glorify white male privilege and excuse fascistic vigilantism. And that's not far off the mark, though they're also hypnotic pulp fiction. Spillane, a reactionary conservative to the core, hated Kiss Me Deadly, and not just because director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides (who died less than two weeks ago) dropped the comma from the title. That's only partly a joke: Spillane once demanded that Signet Books destroy 50,000 copies of his 1952 novel Kiss Me, Deadly because the comma was left off the cover. But more to the point here, Spillane hated that the left-leaning Bezzerides, who escaped blacklisting but was regarded with McCarthy-era suspicion, had turned his straightforward crime story about drug-dealing Mafiosi in New York into a sunburnt Los Angeles fable rooted in atomic paranoia.
Astonishingly, he didn't seem to mind that Bezzerides, Aldritch and Meeker transformed tough-guy Hammer into a nihilistic sociopath too busy brutalizing people to bother doing any detecting, or that they crammed it full of hoity-toity allusions to Pandora's box, Lot's wife, opera and the poetry of Christina Georgina Rossetti.
Made at the tail end of the original film noir cycle, Kiss Me Deadly opens with a girl (a young Cloris Leachman, a revelation if you know her only as Malcolm in the Middle's vitriolic harridan), naked under her trench coat, running for dear life down a darkened highway. Hammer picks her up after she virtually throws herself in front of his car, learns she's escaped from a mental home — she was imprisoned there, she says, not because she's crazy but because she knows something so dangerous she doesn't dare share it — and talks tough until the girl's pursuers overtake them. Then he's useless: They beat him within an inch of his life, torture her to death with a pair of pliers and push them both off a cliff in Hammer's prized convertible. Hammer survives the fiery crash and gloms onto the dead girl's trail with the dogged persistence of a rabid dog, never finding out much except that she knew the whereabouts of a box containing something his secretary/girlfriend Velda (Maxine Cooper) dubs "the great whatzit" and that everyone who knows anything about it winds up dead.
Kiss Me Deadly barrels towards its literally explosive conclusion with such perverse, feverish intensity that you can't help wonder whether it isn't all a nightmare: Maybe Mike is still back in his hospital bed, hallucinating after that near-fatal car crash. That dreamlike quality clearly appealed to Alex Cox and Quentin Tarantino, who repurposed the trope of the "great whatzit" in Repo Man (1984) and Pulp Fiction (1994), respectively, and makes it such a haunting encapsulation of noir's enduring appeal: Its shadows are more than darkness, and the darkness is apocalyptic.
Things to consider:
Is it all a dream? The movie doesn't end with Hammer waking up, but as with Otto Preminger's equally slippery Laura (1944), you can make a strong case for most of the narrative happening in one character's head.
How thoroughly sex and violence are intertwined, right down to the film's dialogue: My favorite examples are Hammer referring to the bundle of dynamite he finds wired to his car's accelerator as a "sweet little kiss-off" and Velda warning him to stay away from windows because "someone might decide to blow you a kiss."
Interestingly, though Hammer is portrayed as Neanderthal in virtually all his attitudes, he's not racist: He's clearly at home in clubs and gyms whose clientele are predominantly African-American and treats the black boxing manager, club singer and bartender more decently than most people he encounters.
What exactly happens at the end? This question can apply equally to the mangled ending that most of us first saw and to the original ending restored in 1997 — that's the ending on the 2001 MGM DVD. For more about the original and recut endings, I recommend this article.
Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Jan 22, 2007 5:07 PM
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Maitland, I am a huge DVD Savant fan. I really love his reviews (and his penchant for "genre" flicks). He has turned me on to a lot of stuff.
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Jan 23, 2007 7:50 PM
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I saw Kiss me Deadly exactly two years ago. Wish I could remember more about it for the sake of this discussion. I do recall that the racial attitudes displayed by Meeker/Hammer/Spillane were quite different from what one usually saw in films up to and during that era.
Most impressive was the lack of condescension. There wasn't a sense of the black characters being "other".
There is an odd egalitarianism native to some true conservatives-not the reactionary types who seem to have laid claim to that label in the last few decades. It seems that true liberalism and true conservatism meet at a nexus that could be called "live and let live".
People like Spillane/Hammer share certain attitudes with the left; iconclasm,independent thinking and a true desire to measure people by "the content of their character".
Spillane/Hammer believes in giving a guy a "fair shake" and playing "on the square". If you do you should receive the same in return and if you don't receive it, it's because if the failings of the individual. To attribute it to race or ethnicity would be a a cop-out.
I tried to Netflix Something Wild (I really hated the Demme film of the same name) but apparently they don't have it yet. Can't wait to see it.
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Jan 24, 2007 2:33 AM
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DaMess, I loved (loved, loved, loved) the Demme film Something Wild. I love how this small film turns from comedy to thriller, the soundtrack and Melanie's look. I haven't seen it in a long time. Must rectify that!
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Jan 24, 2007 12:06 PM
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Yeah, I don't know achy. I really hated that movie. I think it may be mostly due to the fact that Griffifth and Daniels are two of my least favorite actors. That may have inhibited my ability to look at the film more objectively. I just don't believe Griffifth as an actor and I just don't like Daniels.
Demme has made a couple of films that I liked (haven't seen Philadelphia or the new Manchurian Candidate)-Silence Of The Lambs and Married To The Mob come to mind. But there is a something-maybe you could call it a lack of depth, I'm not sure-that seems to spoil his films for me. I feel the same way about Robert Zemeckis.
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Jan 25, 2007 2:28 AM
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Apropos the call of the Wilds: Sad to say, the Something Wild I mention in this column is unavailable on either DVD or VHS. I understand it used to be on TV all the time, but that's going back several decades. I'm hoping that its recent limited theatrical showings under the IFC banner are the harbinger of an upcoming DVD release.
It's not a great film, but it's a fascinatingly bizarre one. Meeker is quite phenomneal in it, though that's in part because he not only looks awful -- heavy and out of shape when he'd always been fit -- but has an air of defeat that I suspect isn't entirely acting. By 1961, Meeker's once-promising career was on the downswing. Even Kiss Me Deadly, now regarded as a visionary masterpiece, was part of the decline: A low-budget crime picture based on a popular but disreputable novel: it "may rank as the best Spillane -- which is the faintest praise this department has ever bestowed," wrote Anthony Boucher, who reviewed the book for The New York Times. Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1958) was still ahead of Meeker, but the writing was on the wall.
Meeker began appearing on stage in the mid '40s and by 1948 he had a small role in the original Broadway production of Mister Roberts and understudied Henry Fonda for the lead. He took over the part of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire from Marlon Brando in 1949 and headlined the original production of William Inge's Picnic in 1953 -- Meeker won a New York Critic's Circle Award and Paul Newman was his understudy.
But Meeker never really made it in movies -- he picked up some good roles and a lot of mediocre ones. Maybe he looked too thuggish. Maybe he was difficult -- I don't know. But by the time he played a defeated, sadly desperate auto mechanic in Something Wild, Meeker looked the part through and through.
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Jan 25, 2007 10:57 AM
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I pine for the days when old movies used to be shown on local TV. I remember going page by page through TV Guide looking for gems... thank god for Netflix, TCM and FXM.
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Jan 25, 2007 12:15 PM
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Do you mean Fox Movie Channel? There is no FXM: there may have been, but not in this century.
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Jan 25, 2007 3:15 PM
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I chose to use the previous name because it meant less typing and I knew that reasonable people would understand what I meant and would not feel a need to comment on it. It's close enough that no one else seemed to be confused.
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Jan 25, 2007 4:20 PM
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Amen Achy.
I am baffled by those who don't respect the "you know what I mean" clause and who unneccessarily pick nits without contributing anything meaningful to the discussion. I have no idea why anyone woud get such a thrill out of posting such unimportant and irrelevant "observations".
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Jan 26, 2007 4:33 AM
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