Kiss Me Deadly

Opening with a nude woman in a trench coat running down a dark street and panting sexually while she flags down cars, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly introduces itself as a very different kind of film even before the reverse-scrolling credits. Not exactly a standard Mike Hammer whodunit, the film centers around the “great whatsit,” a mysterious box whose contents are so profoundly important that its pursuers are willing to kill and die for it, including Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman), the hitchhiker who predicts her own death and asks Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to “remember me.” Hammer’s brief encounter with Christina leads to his being knocked out, tortured, shoved over a cliff in his car, injected with sodium pentothal, his best friend Nick (Nick Dennis) crushed to death, and his secretary and sometimes lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) taken hostage and locked away. While the plot may seem over-complicated to some, Kiss Me Deadly is perhaps best appreciated as an experience of anxiety, a fever dream, a symbol of the frightening atomic age, its fuel perhaps the contents of that sought-after box. Wesley Addy plays police lieutenant Pat Murphy, who understands the significance of these events and warns Hammer to stay away, and Paul Stewart plays Carl Evello, who seems to be pulling the strings and doling out the assassination orders. Laszlo’s inventiveness with the camera shines through in every scene, and Bezzerides’ script builds momentum lead by lead, incident by incident, so that an exploding house on the beach seems like the only plausible conclusion.