Craig J. Clark
Mike Hammer is not a nice guy and he knows it. He doesn’t care who else knows it, either, which is why he’s such a successful private detective, although that’s not what he’s called when he’s brought in for a grilling by the Interstate Crime Commission in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. “He’s a bedroom dick,” says one of the commissioners, and they launch into a detailed description of how he gets the goods in the divorce cases that are his bread and butter. A disdainful Hammer admits he’s a “stinker,” but he’s a stinker who’s free to go in spite of his refusal to cooperate with the feds. As he leaves, one says they need to “open a window,” but Hammer already has the scent of something else, something big. What he doesn’t realize until far too late is what he’s mixed up in reeks for a completely different reason.
Published in 1952, Kiss Me, Deadly was Mickey Spillane’s sixth Mike Hammer novel, and it was the second to make it to the screen after I, the Jury in 1953. When Kiss Me Deadly hit theaters – 70 years ago this week – it lost the comma in its title, but Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides preserved the rotten bastard at its core, even if they had to tone down some of the grisly violence he inflicted in print. They also shifted the setting from New York to Los Angeles and changed the “great whatsit” everybody is after from heroin to radioactive material. The latter in particular altered the story in ways that keep it arresting (and worthy of being referenced in films ranging from Repo Man to Pulp Fiction) while other Mike Hammer films (one of which Spillane himself starred in) slipped into obscurity.
The novel and film open the same way, with a barefoot woman in a trench coat running down a lonely stretch of highway, desperate to flag down a passing car, but having no luck until she plants herself in the path of the one driven by Hammer, who has to swerve to avoid her. As she approaches him in the film, the first words out of his mouth are an angry accusation: “You almost wrecked my car,” he whines. “Well?” When no explanation is forthcoming – she’s out of breath and in a state of near-panic – he spits out a petulant “get in” and turns up the radio so Nat King Cole’s haunting “Rather Have the Blues” can play under the credits. These, by the way, run in reverse order, clueing viewers in that all kinds of cinematic conventions are going to be turned upside down.
One of those conventions is that a film’s protagonist should be someone to root for. If Hammer’s motive was purely to avenge the brutal murder of Christina, the woman he picked up, that would be one thing, but he figures the people who killed her were after something hot and he wants to beat them to it – and beat up anyone who gets in his way or doesn’t come across with the information he wants fast enough. (He’s forced to use his fists when Pat, a no-nonsense cop he has a slightly more convivial relationship with in the novel, revokes his P.I. license and gun permit.)
The first to get the Hammer treatment is a low-level thug who tries tailing him and gets thrown down a flight of concrete steps for his troubles. As Hammer digs deeper, he winds up amongst some unsavory characters who are counterbalanced by two who call him “friend” and genuinely seem to like him. One is his mechanic, Nick, a boisterous Greek who comes to a bad end as a direct result of his association with Hammer. The other is a boxing promoter who’s savvier about keeping his lips buttoned. “You can’t top this,” the promoter tells Hammer when he offers to pay for information. “They said they’d let me breathe.” Then there’s his loyal secretary Velda, who loves him and is accustomed to putting herself in compromising positions. That she becomes a bargaining chip when the bad guys put the squeeze on Hammer is all part of the job.
In the final tally, Mike Hammer is responsible for the pain and suffering of no fewer than ten individuals, some of whom meet their maker shortly after making his acquaintance. (One, an out-of-work opera singer, gets off light as Hammer merely breaks one of his beloved records.) The only deaths for which he is entirely blameless are those of Christina, the puppet-master behind everything, and the requisite femme fatale, who meets the same fiery fate in the book and film, but by different means. As for Hammer himself, in both iterations it’s an open question how much longer he’ll be drawing breath. After surviving the death trap set for him in the first chapter, he’s been living on borrowed time anyway.
“Kiss Me Deadly” isn’t streaming, but it is available on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
