Mike Hammer series

(On Cable TV, November 2020) If you stopped watching Kiss Me Deadly twenty minutes before the end, you’d probably be forgiven for thinking about the film as a well-done example of the muscular hard-boiled detective, and nothing more. Aside from the occasional odd mention of scientists being involved in the nebulous plot uncovered by our protagonist, little would prepare you for the right turn taken by the film minutes before the end, as the anxieties of the nuclear age crash dead into the foundations of film noir. Ralph Meeker plays legendary private detective character Mike Hammer with relish, especially as he slaps, punches, maims or otherwise brutalizes a long string of uncooperative witnesses. The story gets going with a chance meeting with a woman escaped from an asylum (played by no less than Cloris Leachman), but before long we’re zigzagging throughout mid-1950s low-rent Los Angeles in search of clues, revelations and occasional clashes with villains. One highlight is a lengthy shot set in a boxing ring, highlighting the film’s noir credentials. This being said, Kiss Me Deadly is late-period classic noir, right before it evolved into self-aware neo-noir: it’s very much playing according to specific aesthetics, and that’s probably why it felt empowered to take a radical turn into techno-thriller territory by the end of the third act. It’s an explosive choice, and one that does much to distinguish the film from many similar other films. Other than that, we can also see other examples of technology creeping into the traditionally conservative setting of film noir: Hammer has a reel-based wall-mounted telephone answering machine in his apartment, for instance, and you can almost feel the coming rush of the sexual revolution in the relationship he has with his secretary. You can read a lot of thematic richness in the film’s final minutes, and one wonders how much of the ending of the first Indiana Jones film comes from some of the most striking images from the penultimate sequence. Kiss Me Deadly is one of the most intriguing films to come out of the classic noir era, but you really have to watch it until the end to understand why.