Kiss Me Deadly

Starring:Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Wesley Addy, Marian Carr, Maxine Cooper, Cloris Leachman, Gaby Rodgers, Nick Dennis, Jack Lambert, Jack Elam, Jerry Zinneman, Leigh Snowden, Percy Helton, Mady Comfort, Bing Russell, Ben Morris, Strother Martin, Art Loggins
Director: Robert Aldrich
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com essential video

Kiss Me Deadly starts off with a bang--a young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat runs along a highway, frantically trying to flag down help. In desperation, she finally throws herself into traffic, and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. The pace never lets up--we're not even 15 minutes into the movie and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer, and, of course, a warning to just stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go. The film is exciting, about as dark as a noir can get, and full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots. At the center, of course, is Mike Hammer, a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon. Hammer knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prizefighters, and he makes the ladies swoon, but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's rather emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag. ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?") Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. Kiss Me Deadly is just terrific. Stop reading this review and watch it already. --Ali Davis

Customer Reviews:

The Search for the "Great Whatsit".......2007-01-25

Kiss Me Deadly, 1955 film

The film opens on a highway at night, a woman is running down the road looking for help. A sports car stops to pick her up, she is crying. A police patrol is looking for a woman who escaped from an asylum! Mike Hammer tells them the woman is his wife. Later a big black sedan cut them off and captured them. Christina is tortured to death, then she and Hammer are put in his car which is pushed off the cliff. When Hammer recovers he is questioned by the "I.C.C." about what happened. Hammer is a PI who specialized in divorce actions with his beautiful secretary Velda. Upon his return to his office we see a 1950s telephone answering machine. Then Hammer goes to meet a client. He learned the name and address of Christina's roommate. (We hear a trolley in the street.)

Someone sent a gift car for Hammer. He looks it in the mouth and removes the extra features. Hammer then learns about some new people, and finds out more. He visits a rich man who tells him to drop the investigation. But trouble is his business, and he continues to look for something. Christina's friend Lily is afraid, and asks Mike to hide her. Then Mike's friend Nick is murdered. Velda talks about how some people are always searching for the "great whatsit"! Mike visits a bar to drown his sorrows. A message told him that Velda was abducted. At the office Mike is abducted and taken for a ride. They give him sodium pentothal to get him to talk. But Mike escapes from this trap. Later Mike finds a key and figures out where it belongs, and finds a hot secret.

When Mike goes to visit Captain Pat Murphy he gets a big surprise. Another body had turned up. Mike goes to visit an art gallery after hours, and finds a connection to the leader of the pack. There is an exciting ending after Gabriella opens the forbidden box. [Did "Raiders of the Lost Ark" copy this ending?] The director used a number of odd camera angles for this film set in Los Angeles. It is a sort of low budget film whose violent action is played down and off-screen. [Does it remind you of some TV programs from the 1950s? The search for a missing object may remind you of "The Maltese Falcon", a better novel and film.]

"Kiss Me Deadly" displayed the developed Aldrich style..........2007-01-04

Amidst a virtuoso array of Expressionist lighting effects, Mickey Spillane's private-eye was deglamorized to become a thug motivated by material self-interest and sadistic violence: a brutish incarnation of Cold War paranoia and McCarthyist bullying... The climactic explosive images push the Fascist allegory still further: when Hammer's investigation leads to a modern Pandora's Box, 'film noir' enters the Nuclear Age...

"Kiss Me Deadly" had few similarities with Spillane's story about a gang of dope traffickers... Instead Aldrich reworks the plot so that the criminals are mixed up in the theft of priceless and high1y dangerous radioactive material which they are planning to smuggle to an unnamed power... The complicated story begins with Hammer picking up a scared girl on a lonely road at night and continues through the girl's subsequent death, a kidnapping and a series of very brutal killings...

Spillane's Mike Hammer remains the ultimate in violent private eyes... The killings seem to matter less than the sadism... One scene in which Hammer deliberately breaks the irreplaceable records of an Italian opera lover in order to get the information he wants is more repellent than any of the murders in the film...

Violent but stylish, distinguished by formalized low key effects, "Kiss Me Deadly" is a film of great power and remains unique for its mingling of art and pulp fiction...

Classic Movie, Recieved in a Timely Fashion.......2006-11-10

It was exactly what I wanted, and it arrived quickly.

It's 'The Bomb'.......2006-07-12

This late entry into the film noir genre has some harsh and memorable scenes and an ending unlike any other film noir. Of course, most of those weren't made during the A-Bomb scares of the mid 1950s, as this was.

The movie features a tough, no-nonsense Mike Hammer-like private eye, played well by Ralph Meeker, whose narration is a little dated but fun to hear. This is one of those noirs in which everyone is a tough-talking, tough-acting mug and one never knows who to trust. Except for Cloris Leachman, who is only in the first quick (but haunting) opening scene, the females in here are unfamiliar actresses but people with interesting faces and personalities.

That opening with Leachman is a real attention-grabber and is one of the best starts I've ever seen in a crime movie. It's very creepy, as is the unique ending. I also appreciated the cinematography in here a lot more once the DVD was issued.

a late discovery.......2006-06-27

Great photography (reminded me of the Third Man - studied angles, perfect use of BW) and 1950's sets. The script is somewhat unbelievable and loose and the actors second rate, but who cares.

Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly [Region 2]

Average customer rating:

The Search for the "Great Whatsit"
"Kiss Me Deadly" displayed the developed Aldrich style...
Classic Movie, Recieved in a Timely Fashion
It's 'The Bomb'
a late discovery

Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly [Region 2]
Starring: Ralph Meeker , Albert Dekker , Paul Stewart , Juano Hernandez , and Wesley Addy
Director: Robert Aldrich
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Film Noir | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

Thrillers | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( M ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

The Big Heat
Double Indemnity (Universal Legacy Series)
Criss Cross (Universal Noir Collection)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Fox Film Noir)
Touch of Evil (Restored to Orson Welles' Vision)

ASIN: B00009XW8K

Amazon.com essential video

Customer Reviews:

The Search for the "Great Whatsit".......2007-01-25

"Kiss Me Deadly" displayed the developed Aldrich style..........2007-01-04

Classic Movie, Recieved in a Timely Fashion.......2006-11-10

It was exactly what I wanted, and it arrived quickly.

It's 'The Bomb'.......2006-07-12

a late discovery.......2006-06-27

Great photography (reminded me of the Third Man - studied angles, perfect use of BW) and 1950's sets. The script is somewhat unbelievable and loose and the actors second rate, but who cares.

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