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Rating: Two bare legs run at night on the black asphalt of a suburban Los Angeles road. A girl wearing only a trench coat desperately asks for a ride by rushing against a convertible Jaguar speeding down the road. Mike Hammer, private detective, is not too talkative this time: "Get in"... and the opening credits roll over the beautiful song of Nat King Cole covering the girl's panting.
In 1955, Robert Aldrich was about to enter the pantheon of auteur cinema, as he was acclaimed by the young and strict French critics who would give birth to the nouvelle vague. Shortly after, Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" was released, and Jean Luc Godard criticized some of its banal symbolism... How strange life is, today everyone praises Kubrick's film while "Kiss Me Deadly" is almost unknown.
But why did Aldrich's film make Truffaut and his colleagues bow? Because it gives a movie lesson: the angles of shooting, the use of lights, the staging make each frame so rich that you don't know where and what to look at, with the awareness and fear of having missed something fundamental. The camera is placed at the eye level of Hammer, semi-conscious on the ground, gazing at the lifeless legs of the tortured girl and the shoes of the unknown killer, or placed above the heads during the apartment search, with the little light on Mike's shadowed face revealing the sense of danger. He never looks directly at the people he interrogates but wanders around the rooms, apparently distracted, flipping through a book abandoned on a chair or snooping among the knick-knacks...
The director rummages through a pulp novel by Mickey Spillane centered on a box which various characters fight over, turning it into a parable of the insecurity of the times, the quest for a sort of noir grail leading to destruction. The same character of Mike Hammer, who should be a magnificent loser, as shown by Kubrick in his film and John Huston in "The Asphalt Jungle", here is a scoundrel who earns neither the director's sympathies nor ours. Just think of the scene where he is questioned by the police after the car he was traveling in is found destroyed in a ravine along with the woman's body. The disgust of the cops for a character living luxuriously, blackmailing unfaithful husbands and wives with the help of his secretarial lover Velda, is palpable: "Ok, you’ve convinced me I'm a worm, can I go now?"
Hammer stops at nothing, uses others to his advantage: the girl, friends (the mechanic Nick with his contagious greeting va-va-voom!), strangers, are merely pawns to be moved cynically and sometimes sacrificed on the chessboard of his own convenience. The performance of Ralph Meeker is exemplary in its one-dimensional nihilist rigor, another actor (like Bogart, for example) would have loaded it with too many nuances, but a character like this doesn't need them because the director requires the paradox of the audience's identification with a negative protagonist. Even the "friendly" cop distances himself when he sees the burn on his wrist, similar to the sores of Hiroshima survivors, making him realize he's dealing with an ignorant bully deceived even by the woman he believes to be a victim: " Listen Mike, I'm about to utter some innocent words with very important meaning: Manhattan Project...Los Alamos...Trinity."
But it's too late to avoid the final cataclysm on the beach of Malibu, even though scum like Mike Hammer will always manage to survive the contempt of others, bullets, and even the atomic bomb.
Cult.
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