Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

One Brit tradition, and perhaps one, even in other countries is almost overnight to ‘celebrate’ a building (however ugly), a person (however unpleasant) or a practice (however pointless) once it can be regarded as ‘old’. An eyesore of a decrepit, red-brick public convenience will evoke howls of outrage when after fifty or so years of a sorry existence, it is scheduled for demolition. Something similar happens with films.

Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is his take of the Mickey Spillane pulp novel Kiss Me, Deadly [sic – why Spillane used a comma and Aldrich dispensed with it I have not idea]. I haven’t read the novel, though I did once try to read a Spillane story but did not feel encouraged to carry on.

Made more than 72 years ago, it gets plaudits from those who like to hand out plaudits, but, honestly, they are not much deserved.

Apparently Aldrich made several changes to the story, but crucially he kept many aspects of Spillane’s take, not

least having the main protagonist, Mike Hammer, an often unpleasant misogynist. Perhaps that kind of thing went down well in the early Fifties but it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth 70-odd years on.

Google the film and you will come across descriptions of Aldrich as a ‘maverick’ director and that his Kiss Me Deadly ‘inspired’ France’s ‘nouvelle vague’ young directors.

For many, folk who regard themselves as ‘film buffs’ and are ‘passionate about cinema’, both claims might impress and be thought to buff the the film’s credentials quite a bit.

Me, I can take it or leave it: what counts is the film itself and I regard it as very much of a curate’s egg.

One of the changes Aldrich made was, somewhat drastically, to alter the ‘story’ to make it, for its time, more ‘relevant’, but that does allow him to conclude it in spectacular fashion, though it has to be said that fashion is also not a little ludicrous.

Yet there are too many loose ends, and the whole concoction lacks something crucial and at the end of the day it does not convince.

What is interesting is Aldrich’s use of location filming in Los Angeles and much of his camera work, although whether it was original or just what he had picked up from previous film noir – as which this film is classified – I just don’t know. I’m not a film buff, I just like watching films.

If it is bona fide film noir (and enough with the foreign phrases, matey!) you can do better, not least Billy Wilder Double Indemnity and the – albeit eventually incomprehensible – Howard Hawks 1945 version of The Big Sleep.

Kiss Me Deadly (even without the comma) is something of an also-ran honourable mention in the film noir stakes. Oh, and I have no idea why Spillane and then Aldrich went with the title Kiss Me Deadly. It makes a certain convoluted sense but . . .