Kiss Me Deadly

KISS ME DEADLY                A-                   

USA  (104 mi)  1955  d:  Robert Aldrich

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 plann'd:

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.

—Remember, by Christina Rossetti, 1862

A low down and dirty apocalyptic film noir, filmed during the end of the noir era, set in the atomic age of the 50’s, where screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, whose novel Long Haul was used for Raoul Walsh’s THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), while also co-writing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) and William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954), alters the focus of the original Mickey Spillane novel, a book he despised, where instead of a mafia drug conspiracy, he adds a new twist of international weapons smugglers who are actually trafficking nuclear weapons.  Conceived out of trashy pulp material, it’s a low-budget B-movie with few emotional attachments that cynically exploits America’s Cold War fear and a 1950’s rising paranoia about the atom bomb, a time when people were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards.  This film opens with a barefoot woman running down the road at night in a state of panic, flagging down a car wearing only a trenchcoat, which nearly causes a crash, but the driver is none other than Los Angeles private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), whose concern isn’t about the lady in distress, Cloris Leachman in her first feature role as Christina, but the potential damage to his always spotless and buffed convertible Jaguar sports car.  Driving her back into Los Angeles, she cryptically mentions that people are after her, having her institutionalized, and should they not make it back into LA, somehow sensing her death is imminent, she mysteriously urges him to “Remember me.”  Hammer’s car is immediately run off the side of the road where he and the girl are left barely conscious.  They kidnap the girl while Hammer and his car are dropped off a cliff, but he somehow manages to survive.  The girl is not so fortunate, as we hear the distressing sounds of her terrifying screams (and see only her dangling feet) while she is being tortured with a pair of pliers in a place that shall not be named, a prolonged sequence taking place offscreen until she is finally silenced.  This scream typifies the atmospheric mood of horror, but also the degree of sadistic exhibitionism on display.     

The film was not reviewed by the New York Times when it came out, calling it too revolting and utter trash, and it was banned in Great Britain, where the prevalent use of violence is way over the top, made worse by the lead character’s sadistic enjoyment of inflicting pain, where he’s forever slapping people in the face to get information out of them.  Only one guy avoids the inevitable by quickly taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, tipped off by the sounds that Hammer was quickly approaching, so when he got punched and slapped around, it made no difference, as he couldn’t talk because he was completely passed out already.  Transplanted from New York to LA, Hammer’s apartment is spacious and modern, with a tape recording answering device built right into the wall, where strange literary and/or artistic references run throughout the film.  His Girl Friday secretary (Maxine Cooper) has modern ideas about sharing work with pleasure, where Hammer actually pimps out her services, specializing in adulterous divorce cases, his sleazy methods repeated to his face by a police investigator, where he often sleeps with the wife while his secretary Velda seduces the husband, then they extort each one to keep this information from coming out in the court proceedings, where Hammer is forced to admit sarcastically, “All right, you've got me convinced. I'm a real stinker.”  But after a warning from both thugs and cops, Hammer doesn’t scare off this case so easily, thinking the panicked girl must have had something valuable that both the police and the criminal underworld want.  His destroyed car is quickly replaced with another one just as snazzy, but he’s smart enough to find the bomb attached to the ignition, while another explosive device is later found by his over-revved mechanic Nick, Nick Dennis from John Cassavetes’ Too Late Blues (1961), a guy who speaks free form the way he envisions sports cars running, “Va-va-voom!”  When Nick gets snuffed out, Hammer has reason to feel the blues, where a lingering theme throughout is Nat King Cole’s version of  “I’d Rather Have the Blues” KISS ME DEADLY - "I'd Rather Have the Blues" - YouTube (2:54), heard first over a car radio as the opening credits roll backwards, and a second time by a black nightclub singer, Mady Comfort. 

Aldrich wreaks havoc with Hammer’s avenging angel character, already one of the darkest anti-heroes in the film noir genre, turning him into an existential narcissist whose livelihood is exploiting (or blackmailing) others to benefit his own plush lifestyle, where his exaggerated sense of masculinity and individualism, so fascinated with women and fast cars, also having the perfect Hollywood bachelor pad, is in stark contrast to the conservative conformity of the times.  Much of the film is set in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, beautifully shot by Ernst Laszlo in contrasting Black and White, accentuating darkness and shadow throughout, shading the moral line.  While the movie is laced with brutality and corruption, filled with bizarre characters, no one is a more intriguing character than Christina’s frightened roommate, Gaby Rogers as Lily Carver, a television actress appearing in only one other feature film, Joseph Strick’s THE BIG BREAK (1953), eventually marrying the very successful American pop songwriter Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.  Compared to other femme fatales, Carver is initially the most vulnerable character onscreen, appearing sweet and soft and in need of protection from Hammer, fearful and perhaps a bit touched in the head, as if her facilities may not all be there.  But by the end, she’s a changed or transformed woman where her body has literally been inhabited (or killed) by somebody else, becoming someone who is perhaps the most devious character in the entire film, where the personality fissure and apocalyptic finale may remind some viewers of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997).  Aldrich delights in confusing compositions, odd or oblique camera angles, views down staircases, creating a bleakly disorienting atmosphere of hopelessness and despair, where some nearly always faceless criminal underworld characters involved in international espionage have got their hands on what amounts to THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), where “the bundle,” or “the box” in this case, may be a miniature H-bomb in a suitcase at an oceanfront beach house.  In what is one of the bleakest endings ever, Aldrich may be going to every expressionistic extreme to remind viewers of what’s at stake, where much like Hitchcock in The Birds (1963), he may be targeting the complacency of the populace, as the director uses a somewhat surreal and apocalyptic wake up call to strike back at foolish humans who continue to believe they are exempt from life’s tragedies.

On Dangerous Ground

ON DANGEROUS GROUND         A-                                                                                    aka:  Dark Highway                                                                                                                    USA  (82 mi)  1952  d:  Nicholas Ray

Guy Maddin, transcribed from a 2009 introduction of the film at the IFC Center:                        Has there ever been a face—rugged and manfully handsome yet fragile with inner agonies promising to explode into volcanic rage—like Robert Ryan’s? Nick Ray harnesses the violent force of this face as Ryan pounds his beat, and every face on it, to Bernard Hermann’s greatest score. Ward Bond has never been more precipitous or more startling—his grief and stupidity as powerful and natural as a mountain cataract.

Actually filmed before his previous film FLYING LEATHERNECKS (1951), this feels like a natural extension of an earlier character, Humphrey Bogart’s Dix Steele at the end of In a Lonely Place (1950), an outsider with a penchant for violence who can’t conform to the rules of society, perhaps the template for John Ford’s Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) character in THE SEARCHERS (1956) or even Scorsese’s Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) character in Taxi Driver (1975).  While the arc of their lives is decidedly different, when we are introduced to all these characters, their propensity for violence is key to understanding their pent up, out of control inner rage, where these men are defined by the jagged edges of their soul, always irritable and dissatisfied, railing at the world around them, but usually it’s a personal disgust with themselves, how ineffectual they are at preventing the sick and twisted perverts of the world from ruining so many people’s lives.  The opening half hour of this film is textbook film noir, On Dangerous Ground -- (Movie Clip) Cop Killers YouTube (3:32), introducing Robert Ryan as a New York City cop Jim Wilson, a guy living alone in a depressingly tiny tenement apartment, who’s been on the force 11 years and seen it all, growing sick of continually dealing with the lowlifes and scum of the earth, “garbage, that’s all we handle,” always having to see the worst side of human nature, growing increasingly rough and physical when making arrests, perhaps crossing the line of police brutality, which he justifies by making the collar, but he’s turned into a loose cannon where his partners think he’s losing it and may crack under the pressure.  Nonetheless, he always starts out cool and collected before something drives him over the edge, as we see in two interrogation scenes here On Dangerous Ground (1952) - Video Dailymotion (5:42). 

Adapted by Ray and A.I. Bezzerides from Gerald Butler’s novel Mad With Much Heart, this is not as well known as other Ray films (though believed to be his favorite), partly because the release was delayed for a year while Howard Hughes tinkered with the editing, adding a new scene condemning police brutality, dropping a posse subplot in the snow, and adding a lushly romantic ending that Ray and film noir devotees disavowed.  By the time it was released, it followed William Wyler’s DETECTIVE STORY (1951), making this feel like a copycat movie.  Structurally, it’s also quite unique, as it breaks formula, starting out as a straight film noir, good cops doing the city’s dirty business but at a psychological price, but in the second half of the film they get out of the city into the snowy expanse of the mountain country, where it feels more like an Anthony Mann western that certainly had its influence on the Coen brother’s Fargo (1996).  Bezzerides’ novel Long Haul was used for Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night (1940), while also co-writing William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), all highly influential projects.  Bezzerides is actually seen early in the film as a corrupt bar owner attempting to bribe Ryan while he’s making the rounds attempting to collect information about a local cop killer on the loose.  When the police chief (Ed Begley) informs Wilson that the police force is being sued for his excessive use of brutality, the chief decides to send him upstate, to get him out into the country where he’ll have a new start and perhaps a fresh attitude.  Little did he know that’s exactly what happens, making this actually feel like two entirely different films.  Perhaps the film’s biggest influence is the outstanding Bernard Herrmann music, very pronounced from the opening credits, then all but disappears as the cops make their rounds in searing realism, before becoming perfectly integrated into the film again, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays a brief excerpt ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1951) - Death Hunt ... (2:26) and Herrmann himself can be heard in brief audio clips of highly demanding rehearsal sessions On Dangerous Ground - Scoring Outtakes - YouTube (2:21). 

As soon as Wilson arrives upstate and hears the particulars, we hear a young girl’s been killed, where her father, Ward Bond at his angry best, is on a vigilante rampage, shotgun in hand and ready to shoot at the first thing that looks like the killer.  Bond drives this second half with his near psychotic rage, which tempers Wilson, seeing himself in the old man, becoming a more restrained police investigator instead of utilizing the heavy handed brute techniques of vigilantism.  Interestingly, Bond was politically to the right of John Wayne and likely Attila the Hun, where he led the Red Scare witch hunt to publicly identify and castigate communists from under every rock in America, where here he plays someone very close to his real character, as much like Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, he’s driven to mercilessly track down and find the killer.  This psychological shift from one psychopath to another can be heard in Hermann’s remarkable score which pulsates with mad energy in wordless sequences as they follow the footprints in the snow, Bond leading at a brisk pace, stomping through the snow, rifle in hand, one following right behind the other until they come upon a cabin in an open meadow On Dangerous Ground -- (Movie Clip) Scared People  (4:13, followed by the trailer).  Entering carefully, they discover a quietly polite blind woman inside, Ida Lupino, playing against type, becoming the calming voice of a gentle woman who is largely dependent on others, due to her condition, changing the tone of the film from wrath to reason On Dangerous Ground : The Blind And The Cop ... (3:22).  But Bond is hell bent and will not be dissuaded until the killer is caught, where the struggle is as much Ryan against Bond as the two of them trying to find the killer.  An interior melancholic mood established through the quiet of a wintry night turns into a psychologically riveting chase scene during the light of day, as by morning, the escapee leads them on a hunt through an open expanse into the rocky cliffs nearby, very similar to the ending in Mann’s Winchester '73 (1950), where a tense struggle leads to an enduring tragedy, where a film noir turns into a film blanc due to the heavy cover of snow.  The music really makes this film, as there are rapidly changing moods that are only accentuated by the score, adding interior depth to what turns into a glorified depiction of fullblown romanticism by the end, as Wilson finally discovers his humanity, where the earlier violence and anger shifts to forgiveness and love, where the close-up image of the embrace of hands is a transcendent Bressonian moment.