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Airbolt 
"teil mann, teil maschine"
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 Posted - 08/23/2007 : 23:36:55
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I just brought a book about Noir which featured a section on one of my top 10 films - " Kiss me Deadly " ( They had it as a sort of final bookend of the classic noir cycle altho there were neo-noirs to follow )
Anyway , I bring this film up to see if fellow FWFRs are also enthusiastic about this film.
CONTAINS SPOILERS******************************************
It is a very nasty piece about a very nasty set of individuals , There are few redeeming qualities about any of the people involved and yet we are mesmerised. The most innocent character is introduced and very quickly tortured to death while the "hero " is out cold.
This isn't right! Surely the hero saves the girl?
Very quickly we notice that there is a threat hanging above anyone who gets too close to the secret. The thugs are stone-cold killers capable of torture so dropping a car on the hapless mechanic is no problem to them. The crime under-boss lives higher up the food chain at a mansion with a pool. Yet he is still surrounded by street hoods and floosies. He gives Mike Hammer one chance then shows him the Door - in one of the most chilling scenes in the film. You know this is a man with absolutely no limits.
So , the hero must be some sort of dogged and resolute knight im the grand Chandler tradition. Nothing of the sort. Hammer is a low-life window peeper who pimps his girlfriend to finagle money from divorcing couples. He follows up the case of the dead girl not out of a sense of revenge but because he can smell a buck. Even the police warning him off doesn't do the job.
Hammer attacks the case like a bullying thug ,smashing a witnesses prize records and beating a milksop clerk. All the time he is being lead around by a psychotic femme fatale who is wearing dead womans shoes.
All this takes place in a starkly angular Los Angeles filmed in beautifully atmospheric black and white. Particularly effective are the scenes shot in the pre-skyscraper Bunker Hill.
The ending is as bleak as the rest of the film . How Mike and Velma survive an atomic explosion is debatable but is included in at least one of the versions available.
Ralph Meeker carries off a fascinating case study of a corrupt, amoral man with very few redeeming features. The supporting cast is equally strong and even the bit parts are well filled . I especially remember the terrified reporter who genuinely looks in fear of his life.
I could go on but at least this is an indication of the strengths of this film.
Are there any FWFRs out there who share my enthusiasm for this film? |
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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 08/24/2007 : 01:17:12
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quote:
Originally posted by AIRBOLT
I just brought a book about Noir which featured a section on one of my top 10 films - " Kiss me Deadly " ( They had it as a sort of final bookend of the classic noir cycle altho there were neo-noirs to follow )
Anyway , I bring this film up to see if fellow FWFRs are also enthusiastic about this film.
CONTAINS SPOILERS******************************************
It is a very nasty piece about a very nasty set of individuals , There are few redeeming qualities about any of the people involved and yet we are mesmerised. The most innocent character is introduced and very quickly tortured to death while the "hero " is out cold.
This isn't right! Surely the hero saves the girl?
Very quickly we notice that there is a threat hanging above anyone who gets too close to the secret. The thugs are stone-cold killers capable of torture so dropping a car on the hapless mechanic is no problem to them. The crime under-boss lives higher up the food chain at a mansion with a pool. Yet he is still surrounded by street hoods and floosies. He gives Mike Hammer one chance then shows him the Door - in one of the most chilling scenes in the film. You know this is a man with absolutely no limits.
So , the hero must be some sort of dogged and resolute knight im the grand Chandler tradition. Nothing of the sort. Hammer is a low-life window peeper who pimps his girlfriend to finagle money from divorcing couples. He follows up the case of the dead girl not out of a sense of revenge but because he can smell a buck. Even the police warning him off doesn't do the job.
Hammer attacks the case like a bullying thug ,smashing a witnesses prize records and beating a milksop clerk. All the time he is being lead around by a psychotic femme fatale who is wearing dead womans shoes.
All this takes place in a starkly angular Los Angeles filmed in beautifully atmospheric black and white. Particularly effective are the scenes shot in the pre-skyscraper Bunker Hill.
The ending is as bleak as the rest of the film . How Mike and Velma survive an atomic explosion is debatable but is included in at least one of the versions available.
Ralph Meeker carries off a fascinating case study of a corrupt, amoral man with very few redeeming features. The supporting cast is equally strong and even the bit parts are well filled . I especially remember the terrified reporter who genuinely looks in fear of his life.
I could go on but at least this is an indication of the strengths of this film.
Are there any FWFRs out there who share my enthusiasm for this film?
Hi
I'd prob'ly be in the 'admire' rather than 'love it' line for this one. Granted I haven't seen it for decades, but as I recall, Aldrich is really in control of the material. And Meeker -- well, he was theatre trained [I seem to remember he studied at the Actors Studio in NYC, but I may be wrong about that.] He certainly did stage work in NYC before going to H'wood. He never really made it to the A-list of movie stars -- too pretty to be a real heavy and not pretty enough for a consistent leading man. All that intensity made him a non-contender for the soppier stuff.
So Mike Hammer suited him perfectly. Dark, ambiguous, and equally comfortable with both seething rage and explosive power.
But I think it's the ambiguity of the film as a whole that makes it work, despite its flaws - which mostly concern the balance of disaster both micro and macro.
The movie fulfills nearly 100% of noir requirements ... and exaggerates them to make the deeper point. It was the mid-50s and the US intelligentsia were just beginning to piece together the implications of a national sense of malaise emerging despite the residue of wartime triumph. It was a reaction to political repression, the shocking realization that the very freedoms the war had been fought to protect were being secretly eroded from within, primarily due to the machinations of J Edgar Hoover and Sen Joseph McCarthy. A military man was in the White House and the country expected him to govern as he'd administered the ETO. Korea was far away and two years over, but news kept seeping through that it hadn't been the same 'just' war as WWII. The execution in 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the first electric chair victims 'in peacetime' underscored a daily antagonism toward America's wartime ally Russia. School children wore metal dog-tags as a requirement and underwent weekly air-raid drills, crouching in corridors away from windows and covering heads with arms to protect against nuclear attack.
That's the daily reality that was underpinning an increasingly prosperous economy built on war reparations and the paving of the way for the rise of the multi-national.
Millions of women who'd found a new kind of self-confidence doing 'man's work' during the war, had gone through about a decade of crawling back into their shells so as not to threaten the egos of their men.
Fashions went from blatantly provocative during the 40s to what was called 'more feminine' but which entailed a reliance of stiff, confining undergarments. Hairstyles were more sculptured, more controlled.
All of this was reflected in films like Kiss Me Deadly. There's an almost shocking acknowledgment that we're all tainted, that schematic classifications of Good vs Evil just do not apply. There are no Bad Guys. We're all Bad Guys. Just as we're all Good Guys.
For a generation that thought it had drawn very clear lines, suddenly the world had gone hazy.
The other major factor to contextualize the film -- and to a certain extent most noir films of the era - was the emergence of television. It had many repercussions but perhaps the most powerful was the daily unifying cultural experience which not only made sure everyone knew of the shared values of the nation, but proved the fallibility of human behavior. Naturally both government and advertisers were extremely wary of this perception and did all they could to counteract it, including promoting the propaganda of some 'typical American family.' Such a family, of course, never existed, but there it was as a daily aspiration.
Kiss Me Deadly shot bullets right through the heart of those cultural lies. It exaggerated them for effect, and it achieved its aim - exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream by revealing the underbelly.
That's why it's so uncomfortable to watch, so impossible to like any of the characters, and -- so rare for any film, why it provides no real point of identification. Even the victims don't elicit sympathy. It's not that we blame them for their plight, but it's almost as though we blame them just for being there at all.
Anyway ... apart from that -- how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
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Kiss me Deadly
