Kiss Me Deadly

Noir apocalypse and the Neanderthal detective, "let him go to hell." It kicks off in the highway at night with Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) nearly running over the mystery girl (Cloris Leachman), a naked runaway trembling under her trench coat and last glimpsed as a pair of lifeless, dangling legs. Divorce cases are his specialty, the strutting "bedroom dick" all too ready to pimp out his girl Friday (Maxine Cooper), Sam Spade adjusted to the seamy new epoch. His one gallant instinct is to honor the hitchhiker's plea ("Remember me"), which leads to a gallery of grotesqueries and a metal box containing a century's worth of radioactive anxieties. "Keep away from the window. Someone might... blow you a kiss." Robert Aldrich's wild derangement of Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled hero is the derangement of an entire genre, pulp and mythology mingled and detonated. The corkscrew world of disembodied screams and scarred mugs peeking through curtains, Hammer makes himself at home in it: When he crushes a morgue attendant's grasping hand, the camera is there to pick up his gloating smile. Hoods and molls around a pool like reptiles by the pond, obsessive long takes in boxing gyms and art galleries punctuated by shock cuts and canted angles. (Fortunio Bonanova supplies an aria for the Welles connection.) The past of Rossetti and Chopin collides with the present of the Manhattan Project, Mr. Big (Albert Dekker) namechecks Medusa and Cerberus and is readily silenced by the perversely neurasthenic femme fatale (Gaby Rodgers). A hundred bizarre, brilliant tremors building to the revelation that the coveted, enchanted glow is really a mushroom cloud, pushing humanity back into the ocean. Aldrich's annihilating masterpiece, a vast influence on the Godard who would revive deadly gamine and truculent sleuth in Breathless and Alphaville. Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. With Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Wesley Addy, Nick Dennis, Strother Martin, Jack Elam, Jack Lambert, and Percy Helton. In black and white.