Kiss Me Deadly (Parklane Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” for my husband Charles and I was a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, produced by Victor Saville for Parklane Productions and released through United Artists. For some reason Victor Saville had been the producer to whom hard-boiled detective writer Mickey Spillane sold the rights to all his novels featuring his unscrupulous private-eye character Mike Hammer, who boasts about not only doing the divorce work Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed but using himself and his secretary/girlfriend Velda Wickman to seduce the opposite-sex members of couples claiming divorce on the basis of adultery so each spouse would have cheated and Hammer and Velda could play them off against each other. I remember being introduced to Mike Hammer as a child via reruns of the TV series starring Darren McGavin (still one of the better actors who’s played him) and then running into him again as I was discovering hard-boiled mystery fiction and the films noir made from those stories in the early 1970’s. I remember reading Spillane’s star-making novel, I, the Jury (1953), in 1973 and finding it basically a testosterone-fueled high-school boy’s attempt to write his own The Maltese Falcon; in both books the detective is investigating the murder of either his partner or his friend and soon comes to realize that the woman he’s been dating (and screwing) is the killer -- only the mature Dashiell Hammett had Sam Spade respond by turning her in to the police whereas spoiled-brat Spillane had Mike Hammer simply shoot her -- fulfilling the title that indicated he would be judge, jury and executioner and hold little or any use for such legal niceties as due process.

The other thing about I, the Jury that put off not only me but also Charles (when he read it considerably more recently than I did) was its sheer lubriciousness: Mike Hammer is not only drawn as irresistible to any woman who crosses his path, but his sexual shenanigans are described as clearly and unambiguously as any mainstream writer working for an above-ground publisher could get away with in the 1950’s. In fact, the best comment on this aspect of Spillane I can think of is an episode of the TV series Happy Days in which the 1950’s high-school kids in that show have scored a copy of I, the Jury and are literally using it as porn. I, the Jury was the first Mike Hammer book filmed -- in 1953, with Biff Elliott as Hammer and Harry Essex doing the screenplay and directing. It was enough of a hit that Saville got United Artists to green-light a follow-up, Kiss Me Deadly, which has become a cult classic and entered the pantheon of admission to the Criterion Collection mainly because of its director, Robert Aldrich, who would later make Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen and was credited here as producer with Saville as executive producer. To write the screenplay Aldrich recruited a writer named A. I. Bezzerides, who inevitably got nicknamed “Buzz,” though the only other credit of his I can remember is as the author of Long Haul, a novel about truckers that got incorporated into the 1940 Warner Bros. film They Drive by Night.

In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for the book The Celluloid Muse Aldrich said, “The original book … had nothing. We just kept the title and threw the book away.” But I remember once browsing through a copy of Kiss Me Deadly at a book counter and noting that both the beginning and the end of the film seemed directly taken from the book -- and the hosts of TCM’s “Noir Alley” showing, Eddie Muller and modern-day noir writer Max Allan Collins (who doesn’t look at all like you’d expect a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction to look -- whereas Spillane himself wore the obligatory fedora and trench coat that had become the trademark look of a noir private eye since the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon, Collins bears a striking resemblance to Elton John, big glasses, blond hair and all), claimed that the film is highly close to the book even though Aldrich and Bezzerides put a more negative “spin” on Hammer’s character and actions than Spillane had. Kiss Me Deadly has one of the most amazing and attention-grabbing opening scenes ever filmed: Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is flagged as he’s driving his Jaguar XK-120 sports car down a deserted road at night by a woman wearing only a trench coat and nothing else. Her name is Christina Bailey and she’s played by the young Cloris Leachman in her first theatrical feature film (though she’d done TV work before this) as one of three young, attractive starlets who get “Introducing” credits in this film.

She’s escaped from an insane asylum, where she was being held by a well-organized and wide-ranging group of criminals whose origins and sheer reach we only learn later. Hammer picks up, easily gets her through a police blockade by posing as her husband, then stops at a gas station to have a branch removed from his car (it got stuck in his right front wheel when his car went off the road trying to avoid running her down). She gives the gas-station attendant (remember gas-station attendants? People who would actually put gas in your car instead of making you do it yourself?) a letter and asks him to stamp it and mail it for him; the letter is addressed to Hammer and contains only two words, “Remember me.” The words are a reference to a sonnet by the British poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), one of the so-called “pre-Raphaelites” who were trying in their own work to evoke a mythical pre-Renaissance Italian past, and though he takes his own sweet time about it Hammer ultimately looks it up and finds it reads like this:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

No sooner has Christina given the gas-station attendant her letter than she and Hammer are kidnapped by carefully unseen people -- all we really learn about them is that one of them,, apparently the ringleader, has a white stripe around the circumference of his otherwise black shoe -- and they have already tortured Christina to death and hung her body in a torture pose to interrogate her until she stops responding and it finally dawns on them that she’s dead. Then they load both her and Hammer into Hammer’s sports car and push it off a cliff so it will look like they died in an “accident,” The mystery of Christina’s disappearance and Hammer’s apparent involvement in it -- and the determination of Hammer’s one friend on the official police force, Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), to keep him from investigating the case (he even has Hammer’s private investigator license and his gun permit pulled) -- just make him that much more curious about finding out what’s going on. Eventually, while he’s being trailed both by the bad guys and by investigators for a special Federal committee on organized crime (modeled after the real-life Kefauver hearings in the early 1950’s which investigated the Mafia and revealed the extent of its investments and involvements in supposedly “legitimate” American businesses), Hammer traces the mystery to a locker in a private gym that contains a mysterious box which contains an ultra-radioactive substance: a brief exposure gives Hammer’s arm radiation burns and a longer-term one causes the person and everything in the immediate vicinity burns up and eventually explodes.

Kiss Me Deadly is one of those movies, like the 1956 original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that came from the most intense period of the domestic version of the Cold War and came off as an ambiguous political metaphor. According to William Everson in The Detective in Film, there was nothing politically ambiguous about Mickey Spillane’s Hammer novels: “Hammer was very much a product of the McCarthy era. The earlier private eyes were sometimes not too bright, their basic assets dogged persistence and a strange kind of integrity, a pride in their work, and a responsibility to their clients. Hammer had no such integrity, and few scruples. He was more ruthless (at least in the books) than the underworld figures he fought and he was particularly inflamed by his crusade against Communists. A latter-day but exaggerated Captain America, he started where Marlowe and Spade left off. Occasionally, they bent the law a little; he took it baldly in both hands and broke it, the end apparently justifying the means.” Aldrich and Bezzerides seem to have been trying to put a more liberal “spin” on the Hammer mythos, but even so as it stands the film Kiss Me Deadly can be read either as a Right-wing metaphor (the dastardly Communists adopting the methods, including wanton murder and torture, of the traditional criminal underworld to get the secret atomic material out of the hands of the U.S. government and use it for genocide against the U.S. and its allies) or a Left-wing one (the unscrupulous government agents determined to retrieve the “Great Whatsit” and not caring how many people they kill or how many lives they ruin in the process).

In their introduction to the TCM showing, Eddie Muller and Max Allan Collins acknowledged the double game Aldrich and Bezzerides had to play: they had to keep their movie close enough to the books to satisfy the Spillane fans in the audience, but they also tried to tip off the more intelligent audience members to critique what was going on and question Hammer’s methods, tactics and values instead of just accepting him as the unambiguous hero Spillane wanted him to be (and to be seen as being). Made towards the end of the original noir cycle, and with cinematographer Ernest Laszlo shooting a lot of it in plain daylight on real locations while also including compositions straight from the height of film noir a decade earlier -- including one shot of a wooden staircase winding up the inside of an apartment building (one wonders if that staircase was a standing set and had a warning card on it reading, “Reserved for directors making film noir”).

Kiss Me Deadly has an unusual place in the noir cycle not only because of its political ambiguity but its rich intellectual allusions: as Alain Silver noted in the entry on Kiss Me Deadly in The Film Noir Encyclopedia, they include “the recurring Christina Rossetti poem, ‘Remember Me’; the Caruso recording with which Carmen Trivago [a mediocre opera singer singing along with a great one, whom Hammer gets to talk by breaking one of his priceless original Caruso Victor 78’s -- as a record collector myself, that scene bothers me viscerally; also the part is played by Fortunio Bonanova, who trained a similarly mediocre opera singer, Susan Alexander, in Citizen Kane] is a Flotow opera, Martha [in which the two male leads disguise themselves as servants to court women and see if they can seduce them without the influence of their money]; Tchaikovsky plays on the radio in Christina’s room (‘She was always listening to that station’) [and among the other classical pieces we hear are Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Etude -- the mysterious atomic box and the machinations around it part of an unfinished revolution?]; a prize fight is being broadcast while Evello and Sugar Smallhouse [the two hit men who killed Christine] are being killed”l; and at least one quite powerful one Silver didn’t mention: the song “Rather Have the Blues,” which is playing on the radio while Hammer drives with Christina (in a version by Nat “King” Cole listed on the film’s credits) and later recurs, long after Christina’s death, when Hammer takes her former roommate Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers) on a date to a nightclub where Black singer Kitty White (who looks very much like Lena Horne except her hair is much shorter; in the early 1950’s Decca Records signed her after they let Billie Holiday go, and though hardly in Billie’s league she’s a quite good singer in her own right) performs it. (Some sources, including Aldrich himself, identify the singer as Maddie Comfort and say White played another nightclub singer in the film.)

Lily is initially presented as a damsel in distress whom Hammer, of course, is willing to help if he can get into her pants -- only at the end it’s revealed her real name is Gabrielle, she was the girlfriend of Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), who masterminded the plot to steal the nuclear box; only she double-crosses him, kills him to gain sole possession of the box, then opens it (the script references both Pandora and Medusa as parallels: the woman who loosed all the evils of humankind on the world by opening her box and the woman with snakes for hair who turned to stone anyone who looked at her) and looses the atomic flame that consumes herself, the beach house she shared with Dr. Soberin and everything and everyone but Hammer and Velda, who escape just in time. (For some reason, after the film was released the producers and distributors decided to cut about a minute and a half from the ending, thereby making it incomprehensible just how Hammer and Velda escaped the explosion of the box. The original ending was only restored in 2004.)

Even more than most noirs, Kiss Me Deadly seems to have an intellectual overlay grafted on top of a simple-minded crime-fiction entertainment, and while a more complex, nuanced actor in the lead than Ralph Meeker (I spent much of the movie imagining how Bogart would have played it, even though by 1955 he was 55 years old and already visibly ill with the cancer that would kill him) might have added additional layers of nuance, Meeker strikes me as note-perfect, the sort of bad actor that can make an excellent effect playing a character just as unsubtle and unscrupulous as he is. One thing Muller and Collins noted in their intro that quite a few of Hammer’s friends are either African-Americans or white ethnics -- including the bizarre comic-relief character of Nick (Nick Dennis), who’s listed as “Nick Va-Va-Voom” on the imdb.com credits list (after something he’s fond of telling Hammer about the power of his cars) and who’s the garage owner who keeps Hammer’s various rides in shape -- the Jaguar, the MG-TD he briefly replaces it with and the early Chevrolet Corvette given to him by Carl Evello, who’s outfitted it with two pipe bombs -- one set to go off when the ignition is turned on and, just in case Hammer misses that one, another that is set to the speedometer so it will blow up the car when Hammer takes it on the freeway and accelerates it to freeway speeds. Later Nick is killed by one of the gang members when they kick out a jack from under a car he’s working on so it falls and crushes him -- yet more examples of the gang’s determination to make all their murders look like accidents involving cars. It’s interesting that I can remember showing Kiss Me Deadly to Charles once before and he didn’t like it because he found it too violent; this time around he seemed to accept that part of Hammer’s world and get into the film, with all its crazy intellectual and political elements stuck onto a thriller whose main source of ambiguity is the disinclination of the filmmakers to tell us until the very end even what the MacGuffin is.