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With the world obliterated in Kiss Me Deadly, only Hollywood will do for Robert Aldrich's post-apocalyptic terrain. A Bel-Air mansion stands for the land where "failure is not permitted," wags and brutes and scapegoats parade through for a portrait of a psyche dissolved most harshly. The movie star (Jack Palance) is a bundle of shredded nerves rattling inside a tough-guy husk, masculinity is a screen persona bought and paid for by studio contracts, all he wants is "to be able to go away." With the principled wife (Ida Lupino) there's the poisoned marriage that refuses to die, with the agent (Everett Sloane) there are echoes of besieged idealism. The lavish living room is just a padded cell for the increasingly unhinged actor, an agonized panther pacing a decorated cage, a circus ring. Wendell Corey's blandly malevolent fixer, Ilka Chase's prim scandalmonger, Shelley Winters' blabbermouth starlet ("I'm a deductible item") and Jean Hagen bouncing on a couch with backscratcher in hand are some of the tightrope walker and trapeze artistes wandering in and out, Rod Steiger as the platinum studio ogre wielding General MacArthur's pen is the monstrous showstopper. "Your words have hair on them!" Blackmail or blacklist, the dilemma of ignoble stardom in this heated Clifford Odets roman à clef, "a real dish of doves." Aldrich saves the canted angles for the opening and closing, framing the proscenium from deep-focus distances and patiently collecting material for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Legend of Lylah Clare. A Tinseltown exposé like a manicured hand clenched into a fist and rammed into a wall, with the Philistine's ultimate victory turned into a literal black hole by the ascending camera. Truffaut in his review looked backwards and recognized Cocteau and Welles, Godard looked forward and saw Le Mépris. With Wesley Addy, Paul Langton and Nick Dennis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |