"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...
