Late at night, amoral detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) picks up an hitchhiking escapee from an asylum (Cloris Leachman). Shortly afterwards, she’s tortured to death and he’s in the hospital, wondering how he can make a profit on this mystery. Without showing proper concern for the safety of his adoring secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper), who he normally uses to entrap husbands, Hammer digs into a twisted case involving crass cops, more-than-usually cruel thugs, a drugged femme fatale, foolish government agents, and a box, the contents of which are more than any of them can handle.
If you know Mike Hammer from the novels or other films, well, forget him. Or remember him only for the joy in the changes. This is a different Mike Hammer. Not the homophobic, commie-hating, misogynistic defender of right-wing morality; this Mike Hammer is a sharp playboy, with no concern for how things should be, but only what he can get. He drives sports cars and has perhaps the first answering machine—a strange unit utilizing an LP. He is a skilled fighter, and takes glee in beating on anyone he can. But he’s not a savage, technically. He needs justification for his violence, which then allows him to smash a man’s head against a wall two or three times more than necessary, and many, many more than a hero would. He is almost supernaturally attractive to women, yet he shows little interest in them as they kiss and caress him. This has lead to many college term papers on how Hammer is homosexual. Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is just another level in a film that has enough subtexts to fill forty books.
Kiss Me Deadly was considered shocking in 1955. The Kefauver Commission (federal censors) named it the year’s greatest corrupting influence on America’s children. While I’m happy to discount anything that was coughed up by the Commission, the film does have the power to jolt the viewer, even after fifty years. Partly that’s due to the violence: torture, murders, beatings, an immolation, a hand is crushed. More than all of that, it is the off-kilter universe which makes it a strange viewing experience.
As I point out in my overview of Film Noir, films of this genre always take place in a different world than ours—close, but deformed. Kiss Me Deadly is set in a reality more twisted than usual, as if we are looking through several funhouse mirrors at once. Through it we see the normal Noir world in the same way The Maltese Falcon or The Big Clock showed us ours. People are more extreme, angles are odd, and the whole world is dark and claustrophobic. Even the credits run backwards. Plus, this is a science fiction film, but explaining that is giving away too much.
Kiss Me Deadly is infused with hopelessness. Sure, all Noirs have a degree of bleakness, but it’s different here. Hammer is still reasonably jolly for most of the picture, but the message is clear: There is no future. Why? Velma says it best:
They? A wonderful word. And who are they? They’re the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what?
Here, the great whatsit is represented by a box, and it is one of cinema’s greatest icons. Quentin Tarantino swiped it for Pulp Fiction as Alex Cox had a decade earlier for Repo Man. But there was a way out in those films. Not here. You can put a lot into that box, but the specifics don’t matter. It’s too late, and one way or another, that box we shouldn’t have been wasting our time looking for is going to be opened.
Critics and film students have often commented that Hammer is weak, foolish, and dabbling where he doesn’t belong, but that’s not the case. Yes, he’s in way over his head, but so is everyone else. He’s the most able one in the game, there’s just no winning hand to be had.
Kiss Me Deadly is a wonderful, nillistic portrait of a lost world. It’s fast moving, exciting, thought-provoking, and weird in every way.
Mike Hammer was also portrayed on screen in I, the Jury (1953), My Gun Is Quick (1957), the horrendous The Girl Hunters (1963), and I, the Jury (1982).