Not too long ago I hosted a screening of this film in which the DVD being projected was delivered in an ominously glowing suitcase by two men in radiation suits. It was a silly way to start uch a serious film but then there's no denying how twonky Robert Aldrich's take on Mickey Spillane's novel is. Featuring a dynamite performance by Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, Kiss Me Deadly, is a rude sucker-punch of a movie combing cold war paranoia with all the noir genre mechanics a viewer could possibly ask for. It's also one of the creepiest films of the 1950's.
For those who think noir is defined simply by lighting or subject matter Kiss Me Deadly comes across as atypical. Yes it has gangsters, guns, femme fatales and lots of shadows but does all that nuclear suitcase stuff really belong in there? The genius of what Aldrich accomplished here is in the way he shows that noir has always been about the real world. True, it has a somewhat definable style, but it is a style that can be used to tell any kind of story and some of the best examples of the genre aren't gangster films at all. In A Lonely Place (1950) comes to mind. Kiss Me Deadly is hardly a subversion of noir. If anything it is THE noir film of it's decade, transplanting a raw edginess into noirs often hyper-stylized melodrama.
Criterion has outdone themselves here offering a new Hi-Def transfer that simply couldn't look or sound any better. Extras are huge here. An audio commentary from scholars Alain Silver and James Ursini, video tribute by director Alex Cox, a documentary excerpt from The Long Haul of A. I. Bezzerides, a 2005 documentary on the Kiss Me Deadly screenwriter as well as a full on 1998 doc; Mike Hammer's, Mickey Spillane, on the author, A look at the film's locations, an altered ending and the trailer are augmented by a thick booklet featuring both a a critical essay by J. Hoberman and reprint of one by Robert Aldrich.