About

Few noir films come as brutal and mean as Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. An adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel, Kiss Me Deadly finds Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, a sleazy private eye who stumbles into an apocalyptic conspiracy tinged with Cold War paranoia. Aldrich strips off all the fat from the story and keeps it barreling along faster than its characters can keep up with. He also strips any easy heroism away from the film's protagonist; Hammer is no arbiter of justice, he is just another perpetrator of violence in a scheme much bigger than he could have ever imagined.