Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina, an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.
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What critics compared Kiss Me Deadly to
In the movie, it's filled with a strange, glowing, possibly atomic device; Alex Cox's Repo Man and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction famously paid tribute to this device.
It introduced me to punk music, and it also referenced many cool older movies, the most obvious being Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
The chaotic result is a gonzo slab of 1980s underground grunge that also riffs on Kiss Me Deadly’s famous apocalypse briefcase, dangerous-youth films like Clockwork Orange, the West Coast hardcore scene, and the cults that have long bloomed in the Southland’s smoggy, deadening warmth.
The tangy preamble -- crumby flatlands, "Oh My Darling Clementine" warbled off-key, Kiss Me Deadly in the trunk of a Chevy Malibu, ominous surf-music thrumming -- sets the free-associational guerilla timbre.
There's a reason the Criterion edition of the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly includes a 4-minute tribute by Cox, considering he borrows that movie's visual of an otherworldly glow for his own uncompromising effort.
And while it pays subtle homage to films ranging from Kiss Me Deadly to A Clockwork Orange to E.T., and has itself influenced the disparate likes of Pulp Fiction, Napoleon Dynamite and Southland Tales , it remains entirely sui generis – which is why it seems as fresh and original today as it was in 1984 (the suitably Orwellian year of its release).
This is played out in Lost Highway, with Fred suspecting Renee of marital infidelity and Pete encountering Alice's lust in conjunction with Mr. Eddy as a father figure--a transgression that implicitly ushers in guns, violence, and porn movies--but it's also configured exclusively in terms of noir stereotypes, many of them seemingly borrowed from Kiss Me Deadly (the Robert Aldrich movie, not the Mickey Spillane novel) by way of Barry Gifford, a novelist and noir specialist who collaborated with Lynch on the Lost Highway script.
Find here, too, explication of Tarantino's casting choices, from Willis for his spiritual resemblance to Ralph Meeker's asshole hero of Kiss Me Deadly to Travolta for his quality of winsomeness, largely unseen since at least Blow Out if not Saturday Night Fever .
In the movie, it's filled with a strange, glowing, possibly atomic device; Alex Cox's Repo Man and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction famously paid tribute to this device.
Packed with extras, this new Criterion release sends novelist Mickey Spillane's knuckle-dragging private eye Mike Hammer (played by gruff lump Ralph Meeker) through a cesspool of tawdry twists, all of them hinging on a mysterious box containing a deadly light that fans of Pulp Fiction should find eerily familiar.
The glowing suitcase is a reference to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
Tarantino giddily incorporates references to seemingly countless pop-cultural texts (Kiss Me Deadly, Saturday Night Fever, and so on)…
Consider how, hidden somewhere in the subtext amid Jules’ recitation of his passage from Ezekiel and the briefcase containing an awe-inspiring sight of golden luminescence (a nod to Robert Aldrich’s noir Kiss Me Deadly ), there exist hints of a religious theme.
Find here, too, explication of Tarantino's casting choices, from Willis for his spiritual resemblance to Ralph Meeker's asshole hero of Kiss Me Deadly to Travolta for his quality of winsomeness, largely unseen since at least Blow Out if not Saturday Night Fever .
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There’s also a homage of sorts to Robert Aldrich’s classic noir nastiness Kiss Me Deadly , as well as a one-eyed seagull that could easily have joined the ranks of Hitchcock’s birds.
The female schemer is Wolfmann’s English wife (Serena Scott Thomas), whom Doc interviews briefly in a poolside scene lifted from the pulp masterpiece Robert Aldrich made of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly .
Back to basics in more ways than one: The first thing we're reminded of is that 007 (played by Daniel Craig) is a killer, less the soign playboy of the later, swanky blockbusters than Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, a thug in a tux.
Indeed, Brendan takes such a physical beating during the course of the film that even Ralph Meeker, who played the pulverized Mike Hammer in the classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955), would wince in pain.
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If Obsession is DePalma's Vertigo and Dressed to Kill is his Psycho, The Fury is his North by Northwest or The 39 Steps, eventually pairing a fugitive with an ironic femme fatale against power mongers in cross-country pursuit of a platonic symbol, though Robin comes to resemble nothing in Hitch so much as the lighted briefcase from Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
Though Under the Silver Lake is a better, more coherent movie, it shares Southland's fixation with alternative histories and vast conspiracies that becomes progressively less intriguing and more WTF tiresome; an affection for the nihilism, paranoia and arch suspense of canonical noir like Kiss Me Deadly; and a satirical perspective on Los Angeles that seldom translates into actual humor.
Silver Lake could be compared to the works of Hitchcock (of which many references are found), but I’d like to offer up two specific influences: Kiss Me Deadly and 8 ½.
More densely plotted than his two previous features, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” and “It Follows,” and accordingly far less disciplined, “Under the Silver Lake” is Mitchell’s shoot-the-moon passion project, his impudent spin on great L.A. noirs such as “Kiss Me Deadly,” “The Long Goodbye” and “Mulholland Dr.” It’s the puzzle as pastiche, at once an absurdist riff and an endearing, elephantine folly.
This is a version of L.A. that goes back to Hammett and Chandler, to “Chinatown” and Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” to “Mulholland Drive” and “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Inherent Vice.”