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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1950s
    Movies - 1950s Movies - K 2 Mins Read

    Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

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    Kiss Me Deadly is the blackest of film noir movies – a masterpiece wrenched by director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A I Bezzerides from Mickey Spillane’s trash novel.

    The movie is shot through with poetry (Remember Me by Christina Rosetti), unspeakable violence (the kicking naked legs of a woman tortured vaginally with a pair of pliers), hopped-up street talk (“3D-Pow! Va-va-voom!”), strange characters, and fringe-fantastical elements.

    After credits that roll the wrong way and a nighttime drive, the desperate Christina (Cloris Leachman), naked under a trench coat, flags down thuggish private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker).

    She drags him into a plot involving spies, hoodlums, cops, a mastermind so erudite that he can only speak in metaphors when warning a dim blonde not to tamper with something deadly enough to kill everyone in range, codeword-dropping secret agents, and a suitcase containing “the big whatsit” – a box of glowing fissionable treasure that might be either pure plutonium or the head of Medusa.

    Meeker’s nasty hero (note his smile as he tortures innocent witnesses by breaking irreplaceable opera records or slamming hands in drawers) sucker punches his way through a cast of perverts and sluts, then – at least in some prints – goes up with a mushroom cloud that rises from a beach house at the 1950s apocalypse of a finish.

    The film looks cheap. It probably was cheap. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is an essential piece of cold war paranoia.

    Mike Hammer
    Ralph Meeker
    Dr G.E. Soberin
    Albert Dekker
    Carl Evello
    Paul Stewart
    Eddie Yeager
    Juano Hernandez
    Christina Bailey
    Cloris Leachman
    Pat Murphy
    Wesley Addy
    Friday
    Marian Carr
    Radio announcer
    Marjorie Bennett
    Velda
    Maxine Cooper
    Trivaco
    Fortunio Bonanova
    Gabrielle, ‘Lily Carver’
    Gaby Rodgers
    Nick
    Nick Dennis
    Charlie Max
    Jack Elam
    Doc Kennedy
    Percy Helton
    Sugar Smallhouse
    Jack Lambert
    Ray Diker
    Mort Marshall
    Horace the Super
    James McCallion
    Mrs Super
    Jesslyn Fax
    Sammy
    Jerry Zinneman

    Director
    Robert Aldrich

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