Kiss Me Deadly

Screening on Film

Directed by Robert Aldrich.
With Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, Maxine Cooper.
US, 1955, 35mm, black & white, 105 min.
Print source: Park Circus

A beautiful woman materializes on a dark country road; a private investigator picks her up and conversation sparks; a freak ambush occurs; and the detective wakes to the woman’s larynx-shredding screams of agony. The pithy, visually withholding opening moments of Kiss Me Deadly establish the fury upon which revenge narratives run, but, for a director acutely attuned to the networks of power obfuscating individual action, promises of catharsis are just a mirage on the horizon. Aldrich’s unique perspective, the existential sophistication of screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, and the ambivalent persona of star Ralph Meeker thus converge, turning Kiss Me Deadly into one of the most modern and complex entries in the fifties noir canon—a jaundiced film that undoes the usual moral dichotomies of the genre, uncovering a more cosmic current of disorder and paranoia. As Meeker hobbles from one enigmatic false lead to the next, his director pinpoints an American wasteland driven to the brink of obsolescence by a desperate search for certainty amidst Cold War murk.