Kiss Me Deadly

Robert Aldrich’s snarling, cold-war masterpiece takes novelist Mickey Spillane’s acidic private detective Mike Hammer down some of the most crooked roads of film noir. As he becomes ensnared in a radioactive conspiracy, Hammer makes fateful stops in such iconic Los Angles locations as the Hollywood Athletic Club, the vertiginous streets along Bunker Hill, and the desolate ends of the Malibu coast. Aided by a curvaceous assistant, Aldrich’s Hammer, who lives in a modish bachelor pad and speeds through town in a convertible Corvette, is equal parts hard-boiled tough and conspicuous consumer. Misunderstood in the US, banned in Britain, and hailed by Cahiers du Cinéma as “the thriller of tomorrow,” Kiss Me Deadly remains an intoxicating thrill ride.

“If the film noir were to be forgotten . . . Kiss Me Deadly might serve as the supreme reminder of what the genre had been. . . . Los Angeles [is] a new Wild West of colorful opportunists and rising grifters, where the snappy patter is balanced by the faux respectability of grandiloquent murderers [and Aldrich’s] weirdly cocked angles are cut together with a jagged spontaneity akin to visual jazz.”— Richard Brody, The New Yorker