There are a thousand noirs with the exact same characterizations. Femme fatales, fall men, cops on the take, gangsters, suckers, marks and the list goes on and on. I won't say Kiss Me Deadly began or even defined these types, but it made great use of all of them.
What Kiss Me Deadly did was add a sci-fi edge to the genre. The film was set at the height of the nuclear paranoia in this country. The story is about Mike Hammer who picks up a female hitch hiker with a secret. The car is then high jacked and the hitchhiker is killed. Hammer spends the rest of the film trying to figure out what secret the woman was hiding. This leads him down a dirty road of conspiracy, intrigue and suspense. This review is easy to write because all I have to do is write in the style of those pulpy movie ads where the words show up large against the screen while a woman screams or a man punches another man in the face.
The secret end up being a box with a ominous glow that is never truly explained. It seems to be nuclear of some nature. And it does lead to disastrous circumstances.
The movie is set in LA (as many noirs are). The landscapes and building and cinematography is excellent. That is another thing that raises the bar for these types of films. They style of photography is all the same in this genre, but Kiss Me Deadly really takes it to the next level.
As a whole I enjoyed Kiss Me Deadly. It does grow a little tiresome in the middle but that is more than made up for by the ending. I give Kiss Me Deadly ★★★.
No comments:
Post a Comment