by Louis Williams

Created on: August 09, 2011

Kiss Me Deadly

What a fruitful movie. The box with the glow reappears as the Ark of the Covenant in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where it incenerates the Nazis, and, later as the box in “Pulp Fiction.” The midnight ride down the highway that begins “Kiss” is featured in “Lost Highway,” as is the burning house at the end. We’re given the lethel McGuffin which people kill for and are killed by, the unknown, unknowable object that everyone ought to stay clear of because it is the Secret of Secrets, the sanctuary that will not be violated.

And this in a Mike Hammer movie, Hammer being the least awable of any detective ever created. But there we have him in the High Noon of the cold war, finding a box full of — we never know what. Uranium? Plutonium? Something obviously valuable and deadly. Open the box and its contents will set you on fire, giving the viewers a hint of horrors to come or, perhaps, of horrors long imagined, perhaps of horrors built into the molecules of life itself.

Ralph Meeker, never a top drawer star, plays Hammer with gritty realism, here perhaps giving the definitive portrait of that character. He is surrounded by a first rate supporting cast, including, Paul Stewart, Jack Elam, and Albert Decker, all stalwarts of urban shootemups, here doing some of their finest work.

What’s it about? A woman (Cloris Leachman) is tortured, escapes, is picked up by Hammer as she’s running down the highway and then tortured again and murdered after Hammer’s car is run off the road and both of them made captive. Hammer, who isn’t Sherlock Holmes, simply wants to know why, wants to know what she knew that her killers wanted to know and, in time finds out. It’s the contents of the box, the box being hot to the touch, words tossed at him by Hammer’s policeman friend, Pat, about Manhatten Project, and Los Alamos providing the only information he actually gets. He sees plenty of collateral clues of a sort along the way in the number of people killed because of the box.

In “Raiders of The Lost Ark” Belloch calls the Ark “a transmitter” something, we see, communicating on restricted frequencies. If people without the right code or credentials try to communicate with the Ark, the Ark simply melts them. Thus the box here. When last seen, the woman, likened to Pandora, who opens it is turned into a pillar of fire while Hammer and Zelda, his secretary, made a captive, escape into the night. There’s no happy talk ending, no coda where everything is explained, just the flight into the sands of the beach, everything behind them burning.

Directed by Robert Aldrich in 1955.

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