Kiss Me Deadly

Director: Robert Aldrich

1955 / 106min / DCP

Aldrich’s va-va-voom hard-boiled doomsday thriller begins on the road to nowhere and ends at a burning beach bungalow that may be the lit fuse setting off Armageddon, following gumshoe Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) on the trail of a “great whatsit” through the seediest nooks and crannies of midcentury Los Angeles. Hammer, the he-man hero who made a mint for pulp novelist and arch-misogynist Mickey Spillane, becomes little more than an unprincipled, gadget-fetishizing, knuckle-dragging thug in Aldrich and Meeker’s treatment, an acidic coda to the classic film noir era that would become a touchstone work for filmmakers David Lynch, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Kaizo Hayashi, for his Maiku Hama trilogy, among many others.

Distributor: Park Circus

Part of After the Case