Kiss Me Deadly

In October 1954 Robert Aldrich announced he would produce and direct two Mickey Spillane stories the following year, for Parklane Productions, an independent company owned by Victor Saville. The stories would be Kiss Me, Deadly and My Gun Is Quick. Saville turned over control to Aldrich because he was busy on The Silver Chalice.[5]

The screenplay was loosely adapted by A. I. Bezzerides with contributions from Aldrich, though it "made no effort to follow the book’s convoluted plot, [though] both are structured around [a] search for a mysterious box."[6]

The original novel, while providing much of the plot, is about a mafia conspiracy and does not feature espionage and the mysterious nuclear suitcase, elements added to the film version by Bezzerides.

Another curiosity that differs from other Mike Hammer films is Hammer never carries a gun in Kiss Me Deadly. This is partially explained when the detective Lt. Murphy tells Hammer his PI license and gun permit have been revoked. While shot, pistol whipped and held at gunpoint the Mike Hammer in this film never picks up a gun and only uses his fists.

It further subverted Spillane's book by portraying Hammer as an amoral, narcissistic bully, perhaps the darkest anti-hero private detective in film noir. He apparently makes most of his living by blackmailing adulterous husbands and wives, and he takes an obvious sadistic pleasure in violence, whether he's beating up thugs sent to kill him, breaking a contact's treasured record to get him to talk, or roughing up a coroner who's slow to part with a piece of information. He also apparently has no compunction about engaging in acts such as pimping his secretary. Bezzerides wrote of the script: "I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it... I tell you Spillane didn't like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn't like me".[7]

Kiss Me Deadly remains one of the great time capsules of Los Angeles. The Bunker Hill locations were all destroyed when the downtown neighborhood was razed in the late 1960s.

• Hill Crest Hotel, NE corner of Third and Olive Streets, Bunker Hill (Italian opera singer's home)
• The Donigan 'Castle', a Victorian mansion at 325 S. Bunker Hill Avenue (where Cloris Leachman's character lived; it was used for interiors and exteriors).
• Apartment Building, 10401 Wilshire Boulevard, NW corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen (Hammer's apartment building; still standing)
• Carl Evello's Mansion, 603 Doheny Road, Beverly Hills, California
• Clay Street, an alley beneath Angels Flight incline railway, on Bunker Hill, where Hammer parks his Corvette and then takes the back steps up to the Hill Crest Hotel, but when we cut to him approaching the hotel's large porch, he's on the Third Street steps opposite Angels Flight.
• Club Pigalle, 4800 block of Figueroa Avenue (the black jazz nightclub where Hammer hangs out)
• Hollywood Athletic Club, 6525 W. Sunset Blvd. (where Hammer finds the radioactive box; still standing)

Critical commentary generally views it as a metaphor for the paranoia and nuclear fears of the Cold War in which it was filmed.[8] "The great whatsit", as Velda refers to the small, mysterious valise at the center of Hammer's quest, is hot to the touch and contains a dangerous, glowing substance. It comes to represent the 1950s Cold War fear and paranoia about the atomic bomb. The film has been described as "the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period".[9]

Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this metaphor in his script. About the topic, he said, "I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting."[10]

Film critic Nick Schager wrote, "Never was Mike Hammer's name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane's legendary P.I. with brute force savagery... The gumshoe's subsequent investigation into the woman's death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society's dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man's return to the primordial sea – with the director's knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre's romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. 'Remember me'? Aldrich's sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget".[11]

The film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of its critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 37 reviews; its consensus states, "An intriguing, wonderfully subversive blend of art and commerce, Kiss Me Deadly is an influential noir classic".[12]

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released the film on VHS as part of their "Vintage Classics" collection in 1999,[15] and on DVD in 2001, with the alternate ending as a Special Feature.[16] A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in June 2011, and also includes the alternate ending.[17]

The original ending as shown during the American release of the film shows Hammer and Velda escaping from the burning house at the end, staggering into the ocean as the words "The End" come over them on the screen. Sometime after its first release, the ending was altered on the film's original negative, removing 82 seconds of footage showing Hammer and Velda's escape, and instead superimposing "The End" over the burning house. This implied that Hammer and Velda perished in the atomic blaze, and has often been interpreted to represent an apocalypse.[18] In 1997, the original conclusion was restored after the remaining 82 seconds were uncovered in the vaults of the Directors Guild.[18]