Kiss Me Deadly: The Noir That Opens Pandora's Box

Some films end a genre by exhausting it and some end it by detonating it. Kiss Me Deadly is the detonation. Robert Aldrich took the cheapest, nastiest material available to a 1955 director — a Mickey Spillane paperback about a thug of a private eye — and turned it into a delirious, apocalyptic fever dream that critics at the time found repellent and the French, correctly, found visionary. It runs like classic noir for an hour, then reaches into a locked box and pulls out the atomic age, and the genre never fully recovered its innocence. If you want to watch American film noir eat itself and glow in the dark, this is the picture.

Spillane’s brute, rebuilt as a monster

The hero, if you can call him that, is Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker as a slab of self-interested muscle. In Spillane’s novels Hammer is a fist wrapped around a moral certainty; Aldrich and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides kept the fist and quietly threw the certainty away. This Hammer is a “bedroom dick” who runs cheap divorce cases by pimping out his own secretary as bait, a man who solves problems by slamming them in car doors, incurious and greedy and vain. The film’s contempt for its protagonist is the first sign that something new is happening. Noir had always had compromised heroes, the doomed insurance man of Double Indemnity among them, but those men knew they were damned. Hammer has no such self-knowledge. He blunders through a conspiracy far larger than his grubby appetites, chasing a payday, and the film watches him do it with cold, clinical disgust.

That disgust is aimed outward too. Aldrich shoots 1955 Los Angeles as a city of dread — night streets, bare bulbs, sweating faces in cramped rooms — and lets the paranoia of the early Cold War seep into every frame. This is a world where a stranger flags down a car and dies for what she knows, where science and the state and organised crime have braided together into a single unseen threat. The grubby border-town moral rot Welles would stage three years later in Touch of Evil is anticipated here; both films sense that the noir city had curdled into something bigger and more toxic than any single crime.

The great whatsit

The engine of the plot is a mystery object, a container everyone is willing to kill for, which Hammer’s own secretary Velda nicknames “the great whatsit.” Aldrich withholds it for most of the running time, and the withholding is the genius, because it lets the audience pour its own dread into the empty space. When the box is finally cracked open a fraction, it hisses and roars and burns whoever looks inside, a light that has no business being in a crime film. The MacGuffin has stopped being a bag of money or a jewelled bird; it has become the age’s central terror, the bomb itself, packed into a valise a man can carry.

This is the single most influential object in noir’s afterlife. The glowing case in Pulp Fiction is a direct homage, its contents never shown, its glow lifted straight from Aldrich. Alex Cox built Repo Man around the same joke of a lethal, luminous trunk. The whole lineage of the crime film in which the prize turns out to be poison — the deal that damns everyone who touches it — runs back to this valise. You can feel its influence in the way later neon-drenched crime films treat their scores as curses, the doomed transaction at the heart of To Live and Die in L.A. carrying the same sense that the money is radioactive in a moral sense before anyone dies for it.

Why it works

The craft is what elevates the pulp. Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo shoot the film with a restless, disorienting energy that was years ahead of its moment: canted angles, staircases shot from impossible heights, a famous opening under the credits that scrolls in reverse over a woman running barefoot down a highway at night, gasping. The editing is jagged, the compositions crowd the actors into corners, and the whole picture feels like it is coming apart under a pressure it cannot name. That pressure is the bomb, of course, humming under every scene long before the plot admits what the whatsit is.

Bezzerides’s script does something sly with structure, too. It sends Hammer down the standard noir path — beatings, dead informants, a trail of clues through a corrupt city — and lets him think he is in an ordinary crime story about ordinary crime money. His own venality blinds him to the scale of what he is chasing. The audience, watching from 1955 with the mushroom cloud fresh in memory, is always a step ahead of the detective, and the dramatic irony is unbearable: we can smell what is in the box, and the hero is too small and too greedy to imagine it. When the detective finally becomes the last person in the film to understand his own story, the effect is genuinely frightening. Aldrich has quietly inverted the entire promise of the private-eye picture, where the detective is meant to be the one man who sees clearly through the murk; here the man paid to know things is the last to grasp the thing that matters, and his ignorance nearly ends the world.

There is also the film’s astonishing texture of cruelty. Aldrich makes violence ugly rather than kinetic; Hammer’s beatings land with a sadist’s relish that the film clearly finds sickening in him. This is a picture that refuses to let you enjoy its tough-guy hero, and that refusal is decades ahead of its time — the anti-heroic revisionism of 1970s crime cinema starts, in embryo, right here.

The end of an era

Kiss Me Deadly arrived at the tail of the classic noir cycle and functioned as its full stop, a film that took the genre’s shadows and lit them with fission. Everything noir had gestured at — corruption, fatalism, the sense that the modern city was rotten at the root — is here dragged into literal apocalypse. After you have opened Pandora’s box, there is nowhere darker to go, and much of what came next in American crime was a reckoning with what Aldrich unleashed.

Where to see it: the Criterion Collection release restores Bezzerides’s original ending, which had circulated for years in a badly truncated print that made the finale even more nihilistic than intended; seek out the full version. If it grips you, the doom-soaked fatalism of Out of the Past is the classical noir this film incinerates, and the acid dialogue of Sweet Smell of Success shows the same mid-fifties American self-loathing in a different key. The verdict argues itself: this is the most radical film noir Hollywood ever produced, a genre picture that reached its hand into the future and came back holding the end of the world.

Spoilers below

The whatsit is a lead-lined case containing radioactive material — a stolen piece of the bomb, humming with lethal light. The plot’s femme fatale, a treacherous woman going by Gabrielle, understands nothing about what she has fought and murdered to obtain except that it is valuable and secret. Her curiosity is the trap. In the finale, having double-crossed everyone including the sinister Dr Soberin who was orchestrating the theft, she demands to know what is inside, and against every warning she opens the box.

The light pours out and consumes her; she catches fire, screaming, as the case blazes like a small sun. Aldrich stages the eruption as literal Pandora imagery — Soberin, before he is shot, warns her against it in exactly those terms, invoking the myth by name. The theft artist opens the forbidden container out of pure greed and unleashes the age’s ultimate horror on herself, and the fire spreads. Hammer and Velda stagger out of the beach house as it detonates behind them, the structure engulfed, the atomic reaction climbing into the night sky.

For decades American prints ended on a wider, more total conflagration that seemed to imply the whole coast, perhaps the whole world, going up — a cut so bleak it read as the annihilation of everyone. The restored version pulls back a little, showing the two staggering into the surf as the house burns, alive but obliterated by what they have witnessed. Either way the meaning holds. The private eye who spent the film chasing a payday has personally, through his own blundering greed, helped loose a nuclear fire on the world, and the last image is a house burning like a bomb because in every sense that matters it is one. Noir’s small crimes have become the crime of the century, and Aldrich lets the genre end in the only light bright enough to finish it.