Category: Articles

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – Is Mike Hammer Really Such a Bad Guy?

The conventional wisdom is that Mike Hammer as portrayed in Kiss Me Deadly is irredeemably bad.

For instance, we have Glenn Erickson in a recent article for the blog, Noir Of The Week :

Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides’ film was heralded as an extreme expression of protest against 1950s conformist complacency. It subverted Spillane by criticizing his brutal avenger Mike Hammer as greedy, narcissistic and infantile.

And from the IMDB page for the movie:

Kiss Me Deadly is the definitive sleazy detective movie… Mickey Spillane’s sadistic private eye Mike Hammer, turned from successful private eye to sleazy bedroom dick, is the quintessential anti-hero, doing just about anything and everything wrong to get a piece of the pie that the characters call ‘The Big What’s-it’.

Have you ever you had the feeling after reading a review or critique of a film you have seen, that the writer has seen a different movie? This is how I feel about these commentaries.

The Ralph Meeker character, was a sleazy PI, but after his encounter with Christina, and his near-death at the hands of her killers, he is a changed man. Is it so strange that he wants to hunt down those who tried to kill him? Is he driven solely by his need to track down the The Big What’s-it? Or maybe he is haunted by Christina’s admonition to not forget her? So he slaps around a couple of guys, snaps a vinyl record, and crushes the hand of the creep at the morgue? Is he any more immoral than the Feds? Gimme a break.

The Killers (1946) – Siodmak and The Death of Humanism

The Killers (1946)

Jim Groom of the BavaTuesday Blog has written an interesting post on Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, featuring a chilling clip from the opening scene of this classic noir.

… The first 10 minutes of The Killers is noir at its meanest and most brutal, particularly because it is framed by a historical moment in which the is world reeling from the realization of the violent extremes that humanity is all too capable of. Film Noir in many ways marks the end of humanism through the filmic language and ushers in the rise of our modern era…

Kiss Me Deadly (1955): Hollywood Dada

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Watched Kiss Me Deadly last night. This cult classic from Robert Aldrich owes more to surrealism than to film noir: it is a totally weird yet compelling exploration of urban paranoia from the pen of Micky Spillane.

While she only appears briefly at the start of the film, the performance of Cloris Leachman as the doomed Christina, pervades the film until the cataclysmic finale. A must-see movie!

I love this Italian poster, which has taken some liberties – unless I missed the nude scene…

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Criss-Cross (1949)


I watched the Robert Siodmak noir, Criss Cross, last night again after many years: while not a great film, certainly a worthy effort.

The exotic Rumba dance sequence at the beginning of the movie is really fun, and signals that it is the director’s skill that saves this film from mediocrity.

As far as noirs go, Criss-Cross is is atypical. It is more a cautionary tale of besotted love. There is a fatalistic element, but the male lead, Steve Thompson, played with just the right degree of bewilderment by Burt Lancaster, is not so much dealt a raw deal by fate but by his own naivety. The femme, Anna, the Yvonne de Carlo role, is not really a fatale, but the obscure object of desire – the Bunuel pun is intentional – that is Steve’s undoing. Dan Duryea, as always, delivers a solid performance as the bad guy, and veteran character actor, Percy Hilton, is engaging as the wily but sincere bartender.

But it is the cinematic composition by Siodmak and cameraman, and fellow German, Franz Planer, that remains in the memory.

The aerial opening credits where the camera swoops down into the dance-club parking lot onto a passing car, which in its wake exposes the doomed lovers to the spotlight.

The narrow bar to which Steve inexorably returns to find Anna, and the dark and sordid back-alley, where Steve washes off a drunken stupor.

The no-turning back one-way ramp out of the armored car HO.
Criss-Cross (1949)Criss-Cross (1949)Criss-Cross (1949)

The hawk’s-eye panning shot as Steve drives the armored car between the giant silos of an industrial plant, which by pinning the car to a must-follow root presages the claustrophobic ambush ahead.

Criss-Cross (1949) Criss-Cross (1949)

New Noir DVD Reviews

Two new film noir reviews based on new DVD releases have just been published:

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley (1947) by Tom Huddleston of NotComing.com:

Nightmare Alley is an obscure post-war thriller, a noirish tale of circus fakes and con men every bit as crafty and exploitative as the characters it depicts, and just as much fun. Full Review

The Wrong Man (1956) by Dan Schneider of Blog Critics:

Perhaps [Alfred Hitchcok’s] most successful such ‘oddball’ film was 1956’s black and white social realism film The Wrong Man, starring Henry Fonda. It was manifestly influenced by the spate of European films that indulged in the Neo-Realistic style of such masters as Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini. It was also based upon a real life case of mistaken identity in 1953 which nearly put an innocent man in prison. Full Review

The Wrong Man

Out Of The Past (1947) – Tourneur’s Mise En Scene Revisited

Near the end of Jacques Tourneur’s classic noir, Out of the Past (1947), there is a scene that must be one of the greatest compositions in American cinema:

Out Of The Past

The lighting, and the placement of the central elements, from the sofa on which Robert Mitchum rests his hand to the archway that frames Jane Greer, is brilliant. The femme fatale, Kathie Moffat, is framed in the dark background, while Jeff Bailey is highlighted in the foreground. The elemental contrast between good and evil is perfectly balanced, with the natural perspective of the lens emphasising the distance between the two protagonists. The window lattice shadow falling across the floor in the background behind Kathie enforces the perspective established by the lighting and placement of the actors. To complete the tension Kathie is clothed in saintly garb and presents a demure demeanour.

Film Noir Interviews: Billy Wilder and Samuel Fuller

The Images Journal web site features interviews with these stellar noir directors:

Billy Wilder – A really fun interview from July 1975.

Sunset Blvd.
SunsetBlvd. (1950)

Wilder On Double Indemnity (1944):

Well, he was just kind of a middle-class insurance guy who works an angle. If he is that tough, then there is nothing left for Stanwyck to work on. He has to be seduced and sucked in on that thing. He is the average man who suddenly becomes a murderer. That’s the dark aspect of the middle-class, how ordinary guys can come to commit murder.

Wilder’s noirs:

Double Indemnity (1944)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Ace in the Hole (1951)

Samuel Fuller – 1972 to 1976 composite of several interviews.

Pickup On South Street
Pickup on South Street (1953)

Fuller on his noir movies:

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir… To me it’s the emotion, the lies, the double-cross… that defines what kind of drama it is.

Fuller’s noirs:

Pickup on South Street (1953)
House of Bamboo (1955)
The Crimson Kimono (1959)
Underworld USA (1961)
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Naked Kiss (1964)

Male Anxiety and Film Noir

By Lloydville on the mardecortesbaja.com blog Friday 29 Jun 2007: Male Anxiety and Film Noir.

…The male anxiety embodied in the [noir] tradition clearly derives from a deeper source — the moral discombobulation of war itself, the spiritual exhaustion this particular conflict induced, and the inconceivable fact of the atomic bomb which raised moral issues and created fears that the human psyche was ill-prepared to engage… The ravaged psyches of Americans in the aftermath of a “good war”, a good war they won, so vividly explored in film noir, in some ways says more about the nature of all wars than any works of art which dealt with the conflict itself.

Lloydville is as always provocative, but in film noir, it is the narrative and existential angst rather than anxiety that drives the male protagonist. The post-war anxiety of film audiences can help explain the popularity of the genre, but I think Ann Douglas in her piece in the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair takes us further:

Noir is premised on the audience’s need to see failure risked, courted, and sometimes won; the American dream becomes a nightmare, one strangely more seductive and euphoric than the optimism it repudiates… Noir provided losing with a mystique.

In America it is the anxiety of being a “loser” that underlies male existence more than the experience of war.

The male archetype in film noir is an outsider. The great noir novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, for example, that were brought to the screen, were written before WW2 in the 1930’s, and cannot be understood by reference to post-war trauma.

Consider two noirs recently featured in filmsnoir.net posts: Out Of The Past (1947) and The Big Heat (1953). In both movies, the male protagonists are clearly outsiders. Jeffy Bailey in Out of the Past tries to be rid of his past in a small town but his outsider status is firmly established from the outset before he even appears on the screen, and in The Big Heat, honest cop, Dave Bannion, is not helped by fellow cops in his fight against corruption and moral turpitude. These men are outsiders also in the fuller European sense, and it is no coincidence that the directors, Tournier and Lang, were emigres from Europe.

Out Of The Past

The Big Heat

The Narrow Margin (1952): Opening Credits

The Narrow Margin (1952)
It is a shame the brilliant shot used for the opening credits of The Narrow Margin (1952), by great noir director, Richard Fleischer, is obscured by the credits. In a single elegantly paced panning shot, cinematographer, George E. Diskant, establishes the noir atmosphere of the movie.

Fleischer’s major noirs:

Bodyguard (1948)
Follow Me Quietly (1949)
Trapped (1949)
The Clay Pigeon (1949)
Armored Car Robbery (1950)
The Narrow Margin (1952)

Diskant’s noir credits include:

Kansas City Confidential (1952)
On Dangerous Ground (1952)
The Racket (1951)
They Live by Night (1948)
Riffraff (1947)

The Narrow Margin (1952)

Dark Art: What Makes a Film Noir?

A post today on the Monochrom.Blog lead me to an excellent article by Chris Fujiwara on this topic in his review, in the Boston Globe on 15 January 2006, of the book, The Philosophy of Film Noir (2006), a collection of essays from the University of Kentucky Press that explores the philosophical underpinnings of movies from the classic noir period and after.

Chris Fujiwara, a writer living in Chelsea, is the author of, Jacques Tourneau: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press), and was working on a critical biography of Otto Preminger at the time he wrote the article.

I have not read The Philosophy of Film Noir, and my post of June 20, The Big Heat: Film Noir As Social Criticism, is purely coincidental, but Fujiwara’s discussion of the influence of Eureopean extistentialism on American noir in the the 40s and 50s is supportive of the views expressed in my post. I recommend the full article to you, and offer these highlights:

The philosophy of noir has also been linked to the European literary and philosophical movement known as Existentialism, though frequently when commentators use that term, it’s less with the writings of Sartre and Camus in mind than as a stand-in for ideas like ”absurdity” and ”alienation.” In an essay portentously called ”Film Noir and the Meaning of Life,” his contribution to ”The Philosophy of Film Noir,” Steven M. Sanders, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, claims that ”the thread running through the design of film noir is the sense that life is meaningless.” Noir, Conard writes, is nothing less than ”a sensibility or worldview that results from the death of God.”…

This kind of analysis isn’t new, but it highlights something that isn’t always discussed about noir: That the genre, which evokes such quintessentially American icons as Bogart and a shadow-filled Los Angeles, actually finds its roots in Europe… [my emphasis]

As ”The Philosophy of Noir” reminds us, during its peak era, noir was the form that imported ”European” alienation, doubt, and dread into the framework of the American crime film.

I should also acknowledge in this post the comment from Lloydville of mardecortesbaja.com to my June 20 post:

You make a good point…  film noir definitely derived in part from European existentialism . . . but existentialism itself was influenced by Poe, via Baudelaire, so the lines of connection are complex.

We can’t see film noir as simply a European product, an import, because it was so wildly popular with the American public, which must reflect an existential malaise that did reach North America after WWII, aroused by the horrific spectacle of the conflict and by the atomic bomb. It reflected a subconscious dread deeply rooted in the American psyche.

Appropriately, Fujiwara concludes his article by saying: As always, however, the definition of noir itself remains in the shadows.