Kiss Me Deadly (

1955

)

There is a popular misconception that paints the 1950s as a naive and innocent time, usually popularized by boomer writers who solipsistically projected their own childhood naivety and innocence onto their parents and the larger world they grew up in. In reality, the adults of the 1950s were a good deal more worldly and experienced than most generations before or hence. They had just lived through not only the bloodiest war in human history, but the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century to boot. More adults of this generation had traveled the globe than any other, and usually, they did so as part of the grim business of waging war. They had married young, for the most part, but a global crisis, military life, and the imminent possibility of death had ensured that their romantic experiences were not solely confined to matrimony. Moreover, the world they came of age in was the scandalous inter-war Jazz epoch, so even the most sheltered farm boy of the period was likely more aware of the world's sleazy underbelly than his suburban offspring.

Sure, during the 1950s entertainment was closely regulated, and what you were and were not allowed to say and depict in television and movies was more carefully controlled than in any time since (save perhaps our own), but this was not because the men and women of the 1950s were unaware of the nastier sides of life. Rather it was quite the opposite, they were overly familiar with the world's darker nature and were taking great pains to protect their children from it. Indeed, if we look at Literature and other mediums targeting adults in the era we see all manner of ghastly stuff that would never be deemed fit for broadcast or screening. Stories of drug addiction, prostitution, pedophilia, and existential misery were the topics of some of the most enduring novels of the decade. As if to prove my point, there are quite a few cultural films that slipped their way through the dragnet of public morality and notions of good taste, and among them is today's film, Kiss Me Deadly, a loose adaptation of Micky Spillane's novel for the same title. If all you know about the 1950s is Leave it to Beaver, then Kiss Me Deadly must seem an almost incomprehensibly violent, crass, and cruel picture. I hope that people who come to this site will have a more nuanced view of the period and the people who lived through it. Yet even for someone more versed in the actual 1950s than the boomer imagining of it Kiss Me Deadly is still a shocking movie, opening with the arresting image of a woman, naked save for a trench coat, running along the side of the highway at night, clearly afraid and fleeing some unseen pursuer.

This is Christina, and just who she is running from is going to be left obscure for almost the entire film. All we get at this point is that she was confined to an insane asylum by someone or some group of someones who took her clothes to keep her from escaping. She is rescued by Private Investigator Mike Hammer, who agrees to give her a ride to the nearest bus stop while trading a few double entendres and engaging in a bit of verbal jousting. The credits roll as they drive along the dark road, coming in reverse from the bottom of the screen to the top like they're signs painted on the highway. I have seen a lot of movies superimpose credits over footage of people driving, and even a few movies that intended to do so but never got around to adding the credits like Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966). However, I can think of none as striking, as simplistic, and as memorable as this. It's a fantastic decision that places our protagonist on a lonely, particularly post-war American, journey to an unknown destination.

Before long the couple is ambushed by thugs, captured, and tortured. Christina, who the thugs are sure knows something important, gets the worst of it and when she doesn't crack the thugs keep going until they kill her. They're so insistent that they even try to revive her after her death, only to be stopped by the lead thug who has a penchant for pretentious monologues. They know Hammer doesn't know anything, so they don't bother interrogating him, instead, they opt to simply dispose of him by shoving him into his car, and rolling him off the cliff. Of course, Hammer is the film's protagonist so he survives the crash, albeit barely, and makes it in more or less one piece to the hospital. There, once he's well enough to hold a conversation, the cops haul him in to give him the third-degree and try to pump him for information. Of course, they are wasting their time, as Hammer doesn't talk to the bulls as a rule, especially not when he thinks that he may have stumbled onto something big and potentially profitable. Undeterred by the physical violence he's already suffered and the mounting threats from the cops to 'stay out of this one or else', Hammer starts to investigate just who Christina was, what she knew, and why the thugs from before were willing to kill to find out.

Kiss Me Deadly shares the same name and the same opening sequence as the sixth entry in Micky Spillane's series of pulp novels about private investigator Mike Hammer. However, that is about all the film shares with its source material. Kiss Me Deadly the novel sees Hammer swearing revenge after a young woman he meets hitchhiking is killed by the mafia. It follows the usual formula Spillane favored for his Hammer mysteries. Hammer falls in love with the girl, she dies horribly, Hammer swears revenge, investigates those responsible, suffers the occasional reversal, delivers an oddly moralistic message, refuses to share information with the police, drinks heavily throughout, bangs a couple of femme fatales for good measure, and finally kills all the bad guys with his .45 handgun (or as is the case in One Lonely Night, a Thompson sub-machine gun).

The film version ditches the mafia angle for the antagonists, instead turning the villains into a ring of atomic spies. Consequently, it winds up chucking out most of the novel's plot line, aside from the inciting incident. Likewise, the setting has shifted from grimy New York City to sun-drenched California, a sensible enough move considering that's where most American filmmakers and actors live and the new setting will save them a considerable commute. Pat Chambers, the police captain who serves as Hammer's constant friend and occasional rival has been renamed Pat Murphy and demoted to lieutenant... for some reason. Maybe the screenwriter was worried that you wouldn't realize he's of Irish descent and decided to Shamrock-up his last name a bit.

Still, despite the change in setting and plot, the screenwriter's boast that he only took the opening scene from Spillane's novel rings false. Yes, there is very little of Kiss Me Deadly in the film, but the new additions seem to have been cobbled together from other Mike Hammer adventures rather than invented from whole-cloth. The atomic spies, for instance, are on loan from Spillane's novel One Lonely Night, though in that book they are explicitly communist fellow travelers and their foreign paymasters, a political sore spot that the film is less willing to probe directly than its literary inspiration (This political cowardice is common enough in an era when filmmakers needed to be anti-communist enough to not draw the ire of the HCUA but not so stridently anti-communist that they alienated the still numerous fellow-travelers embedded in the big studios, so I will give director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides a pass). The sequence where Hammer is stripped of his PI license and conceal-carry permit is borrowed from Vengeance is Mine, which sees Hammer temporarily forced to act more outside the law than usual. The random nymphomaniac who makes a play for Hammer in the mansion seems to have come from Mary Bellamy, a minor character in I, The Jury who seduces Hammer in much the same way though with considerably more success. Hell, even the way that Hammer describes the unknown object of his quest “The Great Whatsit” was taken from The Big Kill where Hammer describes another unknown object that is causing murder and mayhem as “The Great It.”

Still, though, it is undeniable that Kiss Me Deadly the film is a different beast altogether from its literary precursor, and far more significant than the changes in the plot and setting, is the transformation that Hammer has undergone during his leap from the printed page to the silver screen. Hammer in Spillane's novels is a rough customer, no doubt, but he is inescapably a moral agent moving through an immoral world. He is not quite the tragic knight of Raymond Chandler's imagination, as his motivations and methods are nowhere near as high-minded and chivalrous but likewise, he is not a ruthless self-interested, and self-serving villain-protagonist like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. Yes, he drinks heavily, screws loose women, and is not above roughing someone up to get information. However, his less savory actions are almost always motivated by nobler intentions. He is not a cop, which means he can go places and do things that the police cannot, he uses this privileged position to blast criminal scumbags (ostensibly in self-defense) that would otherwise get off with a quick stint in jail and be back their misdeeds almost immediately. When a woman or an old buddy is inevitably murdered at the start of his novels, he moves heaven and earth to find the killer and bring them to justice (usually with the aforementioned “self-defense” shooting) often at great cost to himself both in terms of personal risk and missed opportunities for paying gigs.

He is not moral in his personal habits or professional ethics, but there is a sense that he working for the common good of mankind nonetheless. Whether he is acting as an avenging angel striking down the dope-pushers that prey on innocent people, or by simply shining a light on the seedy underbelly of the world, forcing decent cops and lawyers to dismantle the crime rings and prostitution rackets they would have been otherwise content to ignore, he consciously tries to make the world a better place. He pursues justice with an admirable implacability, only occasionally getting distracted by his alcoholism and libido, and even then not for very long. Invariably, somewhere in the novel's last quarter Hammer will make a speech against whatever criminal organization he is facing in this iteration, be it the Mafia, prostitution rackets, communist spies, or drug dealers. It may seem hokey at times, but it does provide insight into Hammer's motivation. He is a man of action who cannot bear to sit idly by when he sees injustice.

The Hammer we get onscreen is a different sort of creature altogether from his literary incarnation. He is not motivated by the desire to avenge the death of an innocent woman. Hell, he's not even particularly interested in taking a few nasty criminals out of circulation. He smells money in this situation, so when asked by the cops he clams up and starts to investigate himself, figuring that there might be one hell of a payday waiting at the end for him if he plays his cards right. “That girl I picked up was mixed up in something big... And a cut of something big could be something big.” Book Hammer was, for the most part utterly indifferent to the accumulation of money. In My Gun is Quickhe passes up on easy-paying jobs in order to seek justice for a penniless whore who was killed shortly after he met her in a diner. When Hammer does have money far from hoarding it, he spreads it around giving ridiculous tips to every doorman he passes and handing out liberal bribes for information or even just special treatment. Still, this change to his motivation making it go from gallant to mercenary only makes him a typical film noir anti-hero like Sam Spade (though much closer to the novel Sam Spade than the cinematic Sam Spade).

Part of this was just a side effect of a general cultural movement away from romanticizing vigilantes. Book Hammer was meant to be a hard-boiled variant of the gun-totting vigilante archetype that had been popular since the crime waves of the 1920s and 1930s. The rampant crime of prohibition and the Jazz Age had law-abiding citizens escaping into the fantasy worlds where vicious criminals were gunned down by heroic vigilantes rather than given cushy jobs at public expense. Figures like the early DC heroes and The Shadow thrived in this atmosphere, and Hammer though late to the party in the 1940s was also cast in the same mold. The plummeting crime rates of the 1950s meant that regular citizens were less interested in stories about heroes dispensing their own brand of justice and more willing, even in fiction, to leave that sort of thing to the police. Hence the rise of police procedurals like Dragnet, which saw honest cops busting criminals while operating inside the bounds of the law. Comic books and superhero stories gradually pivoted to adventure stories, as the gangsters and murderers who made up the normal rogue's gallery gave way to increasingly eccentric mad scientists and costumed weirdos. Even venerable media empires like The Shadow gradually petered away in the long years of relative peace and safety. It's no surprise that vigilantes all but vanished from the page and screen until crime rates skyrocketed again in the late 1960s and 1970s which ushered in such films as Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) as a response. It seems like vigilantes become popular in media whenever the murder rate gets above 7 per 100,000 people. So if current trends persist get ready for a new batch of gun-slinging heroes in 2040 or so.

However, Kiss Me Deadly is not content with turning Hammer from an avenging angel to a self-interested gumshoe, it wants to make Mike Hammer utterly repulsive to the viewer. I can think of no other reason why the film would, almost immediately, identify Hammer as a “bedroom dick,” and say his specialty was seducing wives so their husbands could get favorable divorce settlements. Even worse, in the case where he's hired by a woman, he pimps out his secretary Velda (who is obviously in love with him and will do anything for him) to pull the same trick in reverse. Not only is this out of character for book Hammer, but it's something that he spent the entire climax of Vengeance is Mine trying desperately to prevent! And in that case, Velda was trying to clear Hammer of a murder charge, not just make a quick buck with a divorce case.

The film also makes Hammer into a sadist who takes a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain on others. In one notable sequence, we see Hammer slam a desk drawer on a man's fingers, a twisted smile spreading across his face while the man howls in agony. Book Hammer would do the same thing if it were warranted, but it's doubtful that he would have so much fun while doing so. Sure, he enjoys killing killers, but usually all he does is shoot them in the guts and let them bleed out. The desire to kill is what drives book Hammer along, hurting the bastards is just an added benefit. About the closest he gets to sadism is a desire to spank a treacherous femme-fatale with a belt in One Lonely Night. The sadism of the cinematic Hammer takes center stage for the film's marketing material, which depicts Hammer interrogating a woman tied to a chair at gunpoint. The image is now the cover of the Criterion DVD and makes the film look like it's a vintage BDSM porno.

Finally, as if being turned into a pimp and a sadist wasn't enough, Hammer becomes a fop to boot. The literary Hammer was rough around the edges in a lot of ways. He dressed sloppy, with his only concession to fashion being a specially tailored suit that allowed him to better conceal his .45 automatic. He takes a certain perverse delight in his physical ugliness, occasionally pausing to check out his reflection in the mirror and confirm that yes, his ugly mug is just as ugly as he remembers. Showering for Hammer is a once-in-a-while thing, not an everyday occurrence if his narration is to be believed. He drives a functional car of some sort, but the books go into no detail about the make and model. Spillane, almost uniquely among working-class, post-war success stories, had no mania for fancy automobiles, indeed the only fancy car he ever owned was a Jaguar that was a gift from John Wayne. Hammer's apartment goes largely unsubscribed but it seems like a no-frills bachelor pad, that is more than a little messy with empty beer cans and unwashed dishes. Hammer in the movie, becomes a preening fashionista, obsessed with slick clothes and fancy cars. When we meet him he's driving a roadster that looks like it's on loan from National Automobile Museum. His apartment is immaculately laid out in a mid-century Gothic style with modern art on display. He even goes in for the latest gizmos and gadgets as evidenced by the fact that he has one of the world's first answering machines built into the wall.

The film wastes no time in needling Hammer for his foibles in this department, with Christina ripping into him for the male vanity of owning fancy cars not long after the credits have finished rolling (or well, climbing in this case). A bit odd seeing as Mike Hammer and his fancy car is her only chance to evade the communist spies that locked her up in an asylum, took her clothes, and will shortly capture her and torture her to death. Seriously lady, get your priorities straight!

All this combines to make this version of Mike Hammer one of the most loathsome “heroes” to grace to appear onscreen at any point throughout the fabulous 50s. He's on par with Chuck Tatum from Ace in the Hole (1951), a movie that famously flopped because audiences found it too cynical, too distressing, and too unpleasant. Kiss Me Deadly will get off more easily than Ace in the Hole (1951), because while Hammer is our hero and while his perverted morality drives the plot, at least he is not primarily responsible for all the murder and mayhem that comes about. The most you can say against him in this regard is that he could have prevented a great deal of carnage if he had the good sense to turn over what he's gathered to the police, but he won't until it's too late and Lieutenant Pat Murphy will dig into him plenty for that to make sure the audience gets the point.

Part of this, generally unappealing depiction of Hammer can be chalked up to professional jealousy on the part of the film's screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides for Hammer's creator Mickey Spillane. The screenwriter would later describe his feelings for the source material as “contempt” but this is very clearly cope. Bezzerides was a successful writer, pocketing $300 a week from the studios, but Spillane was a literary juggernaut who was taking in enough money to afford lavish homes and private airplanes. Hell, Spillane was so successful that after his initial burst of creativity with his Mike Hammer novels, he hardly needed to work. His literary output slowed to a trickle, with the occasional big novel to serve as a payday in between a few short stories written as favors to his friends who published various magazines. Moreover, Bezzerides styled himself as a “socially conscious” writer telling the stories of the working class and downtrodden, and there is nothing a man like that detests more than somebody who tells stories those poor and downtrodden actually want to read.

Bezzerides even tells a story about how Micky Spillane, incensed at the changes the screenwriter made to his novel and his character confronted him when they met by chance in a restaurant. The story is obviously a fabrication, as Spillane was never one to take his writing so seriously that he would cause a public scene. Indeed, Spillane described his own works as “the chewing gum of American literature” and was not above parodying himself and his character in exchange for a bit of cash (see the long-running series of Beer commercials he starred in). He was used to egg-heads and communist sympathizers disliking his work and dismissed their comments out of hand. After all, they were just “losers... The guys who didn't make it... The guys nobody ever heard of... Frustrated writers. And these writers resent success. So naturally they never have anything good to say about the Winners.” The only time that Spillane would cause a fuss over critical reception to his work was when he could use it to drum up publicity for his next novel. He would never give a short word to Bezzerides in the comparative privacy of a restaurant, but he would absolutely mock the man on the radio or television if he thought it would sell a few more copies of The Girl Hunters. Fortunately for Bezzerides, despite his comparative success as a screenwriter he was too small a fish for Spillane to make much hoopla over.

However, I might be too quick in just taking  Bezzerides' at his word that he holds the material he's adapting in contempt. As mentioned above he has a surprisingly in-depth knowledge of Spillane's oeuvre for someone who claims to detest it. He seems to have pulled elements from nearly every novel that Spillane had published by 1955 into his screenplay. Moreover, he seems to have projected his own personal shortcomings onto the character of Mike Hammer, as Bezzerides admitted in a later interview “I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture.” So much of Hammer's foppish vanity is just Bezzerides putting his own foppish vanity onto the character.

Then there is the bizarre, homosexual undercurrent in the film. Included in the cast of supporting characters is Nick, a short Greek mechanic who looks up to Hammer with what looks like latent erotic longing. Coincidentally, Bezzerides is a short, Greek man. I may be reaching here, but there is a real possibility that Bezzerides' “contempt” for Mike Hammer and Mickey Spillane is less an artistic disagreement and more of a repressed sexual frustration. This is pure speculation because if Bezzerides was a homosexual, he was deep in the closet (as in married to a woman with multiple children closeted). However, he would be far from the only self-loathing homosexual in post-war Hollywood.

Yet, it's not just a personal dislike of (or perverse desire for) Hammer (or Spillane) that drives the chastisement of the character onscreen. There is a larger socio-political point at play. Hammer is the latest embodiment of a quintessentially American ideal, a rugged individualist who pursues his ideals with indifference to what the larger world thinks of him. He fucks who he wants to fuck, kills who he wants to kill, and investigates who he chooses to investigate. He works within the law, but only so long as the law is just, if justice is better served by being an outlaw then Hammer is happy to oblige. To hell with any culture, custom, or even law that tries to reign him in and prevent him from doing exactly what he thinks is right when he thinks it is right to do it. Such unapologetic individualism makes Hammer and characters like him a threat to a post-war American order that is becoming increasingly stringent in the conformity that it demands of its people.

The simplistic view of this conformity usually finds itself expressed in childish ideas like “everyone wore the same clothes” and “people were hostile to communist subversives.” However, if we look at early 20th century America we don't exactly see a great diversity in men's fashion nor do we see much tolerance for communists (the first American Red Scare was in the 1910s after all; as it turns out a group of mass-murderers psychopaths, bent on establishing a dictatorship are generally not very popular with the normal people they plan to exterminate). Instead, the conformity of the post-war period generally meant a transformation where small businesses, yeoman farmers, and independent shopkeepers were turned into small cogs in larger organizations. This was true across the board, from the huge nationwide chains that predominated the post-war real-estate space to the governmental agencies (which had grown to leviathan proportions under Roosevelt and the New Deal), to the military which even after the end of WW2 was still orders of magnitude larger than it's pre-war self. America was no longer a nation of individuals with their own interests, it was a nation of vast organizations to which individuals happened to belong, and if those individuals failed to fit in they would have to be sanded down until they did.

Most commentators recognized this development as a negative one, as it meant the traditional American virtues of independence and self-reliance would gradually be eroded to nothing. However, more than a few post-war thinkers welcomed the remaking of American society, Aldrich and Bezzerides plainly among them. To them, the Atomic age was a period too dangerous, and too complex to allow individuals to act according to their own wishes and in accordance with their own consciences. It was time for free-thinkers and self-reliant cowboys to surrender their independence in the name of collective security.

Thus, it turns out that “The Great Whatsit” Hammer is seeking is a box full of fissile material that burns with the intensity of a sun and emits a shrill scream whenever he cracks the latch even an inch. It's a combination of the Pulp Fiction (1994) briefcase and the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It is the horrifying nature of this Great Whatsit that forces Hammer to give up his go-it-alone attitude and reach out for help from Pat and the cops. Only, by then it's too late. Both the box and Velda are in the hands of the bad guys. In the end, the day is saved by no heroic action of Hammer, but instead by a loathsome action of one of the villains that mirrors his own earlier foolishness. She just can't resist opening Pandora's box, which engulfs both her and the surrounding area in atomic fire.

Of course, atomic fire works on a literal level, standing in for the all-consuming fireball that threatens civilization if mankind fails to control its violent impulses. However, it is also a handy metaphor, particularly for the burning sexual passions gripping the characters. Reign in your sexual impulses, the movie suggests, or expect to be consumed and destroyed by them. In the end Hammer only barely escapes this erotic conflagration by fleeing from the doomed beach house with Velda, his primary love interest, safely in tow, presumably fleeing the inferno of self-serving lust into the safety of sanctioned monogamy. Again, if we assume Bezzerides was a repressed homosexual, this sequence has an additional dimension.

I see Kiss Me Deadly in much the same light as Hondo (1953) and other films of that type. In both cases, they are about taking a non-conforming masculine, particularly American, heroic archetype (cowboy and PI respectively) and forcing them into a new, more conformist masculine role. Hondo (1953) becomes a nurturing father and Mike Hammer becomes a good citizen who cooperates with the authorities. Hondo (1953) gets off comparatively easy because he at every turn abandons his personal desires and values, forsaking them to be a good husband and father. Hammer resists, clinging to a selfish desire to pursue his own interests on his own terms until it becomes obvious that the problem facing him is so large and dangerous that it is irresponsible for him to go it alone. No one man can stand against the splitting of the atom, and the threat of nuclear war forces all of us into our assigned tribes. Both films believe that there is no longer room in American mythology for the go-it-alone badass who plays by his own rules. In the Atomic age, you must be an American first and an individual second.

Examining this film alongside Hondo (1953) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) gives us some insight into the evolving role of masculinity in the 1950s. Hondo (1953) offers the male viewers the promise of all the rich rewards in domestic life, even if it does concede that it is regrettable to see their old independence and freedom vanish with a parting “Too bad... It's a good way.” Kiss Me Deadly on the other hand offers the stick to Hondo's carrot: fall in line with society's prevailing notions of what a man should be and what he should do or else you'll fuck everything up for everyone. At the same time, Hammer's personal shortcomings imply (that he is a fop, a pimp, and a sadist) that any man reluctant to quietly shuffle into a 9-5 and a suburban household with a wife and 2.5 kids is morally debased in some manner. Despite being subversive on the surface with its violence and steamy dialogue, at its core Kiss Me Deadly mandates rigid conformity and sets its sights on any oddballs that go against the prevailing cultural orthodoxy. It feels like a propaganda poster from They Live (1988) where when you strip away the surface level you're left with a flat message urging you to simply “Obey.” Amusingly, of all three films, the only one that seems to be at all aware of the tragedy of masculinity swallowed up by feminine domesticity is The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). It's unsurprising as sci-fi at the time provided the best cover for genuinely subversive ideas, a fact that our cultural commissars have since wised up to judging from the current landscape of sci-fi entertainment.

It would seem then, that I would hate Kiss Me Deadly, as the film is expressing a loathsome ideology that seeks to bind all free men into a pact of collective slavery. While that is true, I'm also the sort that can recognize a damn fine movie even when the subtext is something I disapprove of. This is a magnificent post-war noir, to which only The Big Heat (1953) is a credible rival. The atmosphere of the film is unique and compelling, at some times gritty and realistic and at other times grotesque and surreal. It feels like a nightmare from which only the credits can awaken the audience. It's the seediest, nastiest piece of 1950s crime film I've ever watched, and the only thing I loved more than watching it was teasing apart its themes and message.