The Cinematheque

“It’s in some ways the apotheosis of film noir—it’s certainly one of the most extreme examples of the genre, brimming with barely suppressed hysteria and set in a world totally without moral order.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Kiss Me Deadly, masterfully directed by Hollywood subversive Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), is a nihilistic, nuclear-age noir of legendary repute. Adapted from one of Mickey Spillane’s sex-and-violence-filled Mike Hammer novels, it stars Ralph Meeker as the thuggish private eye bungling his way from brutality to brutality as he investigates why the half-naked hitchhiker he picked up in the film’s nocturnal opening was tortured to death—in front of his own semiconscious eyes. As Hammer stumbles his way into a sinister Cold War conspiracy, Aldrich and cameraman Ernest Laszlo keep things dizzyingly off-kilter with a host of disorienting devices. The film’s Pandora’s box MacGuffin is now a pop-culture touchstone, homaged in everything from Indiana Jones to Atlanta (Pulp Fiction too, of course). François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard claimed Kiss Me Deadly was a catalyst for the French New Wave.

“Enter the thriller of tomorrow, freed from everything and especially from itself, illuminating with its overpowering sunlights the depths of the unspeakable.”

Claude Chabrol, Cahiers du cinéma

“The most flamboyant and hectic work of the [film noir] genre … [A] blend of sexual voracity, sadism, found poetry, sharp-edged performances, and visual invention.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker