Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 American film noir produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, and Wesley Addy.The film has been noted as a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave, and has been cited as a major influence on a number of filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alex Cox, and Quentin Tarantino.In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".One evening, Hammer is forced to suddenly stop his sports car by Christina, an escapee from a nearby psychiatric hospital, who is running barefoot along the road, wearing nothing but a trench coat.Carl's thugs kidnap Hammer and take him to an isolated beach house, where another of their associates, Dr. G. E. Soberin (revealed to be responsible for the murders of Christina and Nick), injects him with sodium pentothal before interrogating him.[5] In October 1954 Robert Aldrich announced he would produce and direct two Mickey Spillane stories the following year, for Parklane Productions, an independent company owned by Victor Saville.The screenplay also departs from Spillane's novel, replacing the mafia conspiracy at the center of the novel with an apparent case of espionage and a mysterious suitcase serving as the film's MacGuffin.He readily resorts to violence, whether he's defending himself against the thugs Evello sends to kill him, breaking a potential informant's treasured record to get him to talk,or roughing up a coroner who has the temerity to demand payment in return for a key that Christina had apparently swallowed before her death.[9] "The great whatsit," as Velda refers to the object of Hammer's quest, turns out to be a mysterious valise, hot to the touch because of the dangerous, glowing substance it contains, a metaphor for the atomic bomb."[11] Film critic Nick Schager wrote, "Never was Mike Hammer's name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane's legendary P.I.The gumshoe's subsequent investigation into the woman's death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society's dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man's return to the primordial sea – with the director's knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre's romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp."[13] François Truffaut wrote, "To appreciate Kiss Me Deadly, you have to love movies passionately and to have a vivid memory of those evenings when you saw Scarface, Under Capricorn, Le sang d'un poète (Blood of a Poet), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and The Lady From Shanghai."[25] Homage is paid to the glowing suitcase MacGuffin in Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and John Frankenheimer's Ronin (1998).[citation needed] In Southland Tales (2006), Richard Kelly pays homage to the film, showing the main characters watching the beginning on their television; later the opening of the case is shown on screens on board the mega-Zeppelin.In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.