- From its iconic opening credits to its explosive finale, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly grabs standard noir conventions by the lapels and flips them on their head. In the case of the credits, this is a literal inversion as the words stream down in reverse order, as though the audience is driving toward a warning sign painted on the road. The road in this case is a dark highway outside San Francisco and the warning arrives in the form of a terrified woman named Christina (Cloris Leachman) who flags down Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for a ride. "If we don't make it to the bus stop...remember me," she says. They don't, and he does.
- Mike Hammer is not one of those tough-but-noble private detectives you may have read about in the pulps. He unapologetically specializes in divorce cases, often setting his sultry secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) on the men while he tackles the women. Incidentally, everybody in the film employs verbal italics when describing Velda as Mike's secretary, and Velda doesn't exactly do much to dispel the rumors. For his part, Mike doesn't really seem too particular about who he's kissing, but he does have a pronounced interest in pulling at threads, strings, and ropes in pursuit of what Velda memorably terms "The Great Whatsit." The local police lieutenant (Wesley Addy) cancels Mike's license, but that's all the more motivation for an investigator as stubborn as Mike.
- I imagine somebody could explain how the various characters in this movie relate to one another, but that somebody isn't me. I know there's a charismatic "va-va-voom" mechanic (Nick Dennis), a nervous informant (Mort Marshall), an Italian opera singer (Fortunio Bonanova), a boxing coach (Juano Hernandez), and a truck driver (Strother Martin). There's also a wealthy crook (Paul Stewart), whose friendly half-sister (Marian Carr) drags Mike to the poolhouse. (Whether or not the film intended this as a running joke, all of the women in this film throw themselves at Mike without getting anywhere.) There's also a pair of thugs (Jack Elam and Jack Lambert), one of whom is incapacitated twice offscreen. There's a classically educated big boss (Albert Dekker), also mostly offscreen. Finally, there's a woman who claims to have been Christina's roommate. She's literally the most curious one of them all.
- Which brings us to the ending of Kiss Me Deadly, which is equal parts Pandora's box, Medusa's head, and Lot's wife all rolled into one. The apocalyptic visuals associated with the Great Whatsit are so famous that they have shown up in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Repo Man, Pulp Fiction, and multiple David Lynch projects. What those other works didn't reference, however, was just how clueless a protagonist Mike Hammer really is. There are plenty of fictional detectives who have gotten in over their heads, but I can't think of anyone more consistently out of their depth than this version of Hammer, who tears into a lead-lined box of fissile material in the middle of a locker room. Although the incredibly seductive Cooper steals the scenes she's in, Meeker does a great job capturing Hammer's off-putting sadism and aloofness. Mickey Spillane's version of the character had his problems, too, but at least he also possessed some vague awareness of his flaws.
- Based on the novel by Mickey Spillane, sort of.
