#maxine cooper

[cantsayidont]

KISS ME DEADLY (1955): Apocalyptic film noir nightmare, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane's detective Mike Hammer, who picks up a desperate woman (Cloris Leachman) on the highway late one night and is drawn into a web of brutal violence involving a mysterious package that many people seem willing to kill for.

Spillane was none too happy with the adaptation, which makes Hammer slick and sleazy as well as ruthless, but it's a masterpiece: a hardboiled detective story that often feels like an unsettling waking dream, with an off-kilter visual style that adds to the sense of paranoia and an explosive ending that's still jarring even if you know it's coming. Main debit: Nick Dennis lays it on way too thick as Mike's Greek mechanic pal.

CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: Merciless and memorable. If you're a fan of David Lynch (or REPO MAN) and you somehow haven't seen KISS ME DEADLY, make it a priority.

[gregorygalloway]

Kiss Me Deadly was released on 18 May 1955.

Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides adapted Mickey Spillane's 1952 novel of the same name, but the script has little to do with the novel (other than the search for a mysterious box).

Starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer and Maxine Cooper (in her film debut) as his secretary Velda, Kiss Me Deadly was condemned by the Kefauver Commission (a US Senate Committee established to investigate organized crime, but weighed in on other matters, including pop culture "designed to ruin young viewers") and received mixed reviews on its initial release.

Kiss Me Deadly is now considered to be one of the "most important and influential film noirs of all time and was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 1999 for being ""culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

[scenephile]

...because then you always come to me.

[citizenscreen]

Gilda Gray teaches sex appeal to Maxine Cooper and Ralph Meeker in December 1954. Cooper and Meeker were in rehearsals for Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY (1955).

[musicandoldmovies]

Maxine Cooper and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly

[thebarroomortheboy]

Oh, I know he's not an illusion. I know. He's been yanked out of here. He's been taken away. He told me, remember? He told me maybe someone or something made a mistake. Let us get through when we shouldn't have gotten through. It's gotta come back to get us, somebody up there.

The Twilight Zone | 1.11 And When the Sky Was Opened

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

"NOIR VEERS INTO APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI IN ROBERT ALDRICH'S 1955 MASTERPIECE..."

FILM: "Kiss Me Deadly"

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: Robert Aldrich

SCREENPLAY: A.I. Bezzerides

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ernest Lazslo

DISTRIBUTION: United Artists

"Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the mid­fifties cold-war thaw. With the truce in Korea and the red scare on the wane, ambitious directors seemed freer to mix and match and even ponder the new situation. The western goes south in "The Searchers"; the cartoon merges with the musical in "The Girl Can’t Help It." Science fiction becomes pop sociology in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." And noir veers into apocalyptic sci-fi in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 masterpiece "Kiss Me Deadly," which, briefly described, tracks one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most bru­tal detectives in American movies through a nocturnal, inexplicably violent labyrinth to a white-hot vision of cosmic annihilation.

A crass private eye looking for the big score, Mike Hammer plays with fire and gets burned. From the perversely backward title crawl (outrageously accompanied by orgasmic heavy breathing) through the climactic explosion, "Kiss Me Deadly" is sensationally baroque, eschewing straight exposition for a jarring succession of bizarre images, bravura sound matching, and encoded riddles the likes of which had not been seen in Hollywood since Orson Welles kissed the industry good-bye. Like one of "MAD’s" parodies, the movie unfolds in a deranged cubist space, amid the debris of Western civilization — shards of opera, deserted museums, molls who paraphrase Shakespeare, mad references to Greek mythology and the Old Testament. A nineteenth-century poem furnishes the movie’s major clue."

-- CRITERION COLLECTION, ""Kiss Me Deadly: The Thriller of Tomorrow," essay by J. Hoberman, June 20, 2011

Sources: www.criterion.com/current/posts/1896-kiss-me-deadly-the-thriller-of-tomorrow, Crierion Forum, Pinterest, MUBI, IMDB, various, etc...

[kult-of-tol-in-gaurhoth]

THE WELL-KEPT LADIES OF APOCALYPTIC-NOIR.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on a promo shot of actresses from the Cold War-era atomic noir/thriller, "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), produced and directed by Robert Aldrich.

Left to right: Cloris Leachman as Christina, Maxine Cooper as Velda, and Marion Carr as Friday.

Source: http://mexnoir.blogspot.com/2011/10/kiss-me-deadly.html.