#KISS ME DEADLY MOVIE#
#KISS ME DEADLY CODE#

#KISS ME DEADLY MOVIE#

Accounts of the movie describe Spillane’s novel as “thoroughly obnoxious,” “solipsistic and reactionary,” frequently citing Aldrich’s comments to Francois Truffaut in 1956 that its protagonist Mike Hammer represented an “anti-democratic spirit,” and his later statement that he saw Hammer as a “cynical and fascistic private eye,” whom he viewed with “utter contempt and loathing.” Īs an object “constituted as much by its own fractures as by its cohesion and sense,” Kiss Me Deadly is now generally received as both a political allegory and as a subversive text in particular, a conscious generic and ideological subversion, on the part of both Aldrich and scriptwriter A.I. In a world that is going off the deep end, everything can be made to fit and fall in as either cause, result, oblique argument, or appropriate mood. One could discuss forever the meanings and implications of Kiss Me Deadly‘s visual, verbal/aural detailing, and, given the immensity of its theme, what piece of wierdness, or tonal incongruity, or unexpected emphasis couldn’t in some way be accounted for? Chaos has no boundaries. Regardless of the fluctuations in Aldrich’s status as an auteur, Kiss Me Deadly has become a canonic text of film noir, demonstrably responsive to critical attention. “Of course,” he noted, “there is always the problem of interpretation.” Taken out of context, this comment seems prophetic: Kiss Me Deadly has been subject to multiple acts of interpretation since its critical discovery by writers for Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, who hailed Aldrich as the “first director of the atomic age,” and Kiss Me Deadly as “the crime film of tomorrow, free from all restraints and its own roots,” on its French release in late 1955.

#KISS ME DEADLY CODE#

In particular, Aldrich drew attention to the script’s having removed “the narcotics complication” that the PCA had found most troublesome in their initial comments on the “problems inherent in the project in relation to securing Code approval.” “Being reasonably well aware of the Code and its interpretation,” Aldrich later wrote, “we have also avoided any direct conflict with the Code Administration.” Then he hesitated. Bezzerides had made in the script’s source material, the Mickey Spillane novel Kiss Me, Deadly, published the previous year. In an accompanying letter to PCA official Albert Van Schmus, Aldrich described the changes he and scriptwriter A. In early November 1954, Robert Aldrich submitted a draft script of Kiss Me Deadly(USA 1955) to the Production Code Administration (PCA). To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. Hardboiled private eye meller from the Mickey Spillane pen, featuring blood, action and sex for exploitable b.o.

Kiss me deadly