“Kiss Me Deadly”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Kiss Me Deadly is an independently made 1955 American black-and-white film noir, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, that stars Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides, based on Mickey Spillane's crime novel Kiss Me, Deadly.^[3] The film was released by United Artists.

Kiss Me Deadly grossed $726,000 in the United States and a total of $226,000 overseas. The film also withstood scrutiny from the Kefauver Commission, which called it a film "designed to ruin young viewers", leading director Aldrich to protest the Commission's conclusions.

In 1999 Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

Mike Hammer is a tough, Los Angeles-based private investigator who is almost as brutal as the crooks he chases. Mike and his assistant/secretary/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) usually work on "penny-ante divorce cases".

One evening on a lonely country road, Hammer gives a ride to Christina (Cloris Leachman), an attractive hitchhiker wearing nothing but a trench coat. She has escaped from a mental institution. Thugs waylay them, and Hammer awakens in some unknown location where he hears Christina's screaming and being tortured to death. The thugs then push Hammer's car off a cliff with Christina's body and an unconscious Hammer inside. Hammer next awakens in a hospital with Velda by his bedside. He decides to pursue the case, for vengeance, a sense of guilt (as Christina had asked him to "remember me" if she got killed), and because "she (Christina) must be connected with something big" behind it all.

The twisting plot takes Hammer to the apartment of Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), a sexy, waif-like woman who says she is Christina's ex-roommate. Lily tells Hammer she has gone into hiding and asks Hammer to protect her. It turns out that she is after a mysterious box that, she believes, has contents worth a fortune. Later, at an isolated beach house, Hammer finds "Lily", who is revealed to be an imposter named Gabrielle, with her boss Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker). Velda is their hostage, tied up in a bedroom. Soberin and Gabrielle discuss splitting the value of the box, but instead, Gabrielle shoots Soberin. Soberin's dying words urge Gabrielle to not open the box.

When Hammer comes into the room, she shoots and badly wounds Hammer. Gabrielle then opens the box, which emits a blinding light. The highly unstable radionuclide material inside reaches explosive criticality as it becomes fully exposed, and Gabrielle is shown bursting into flames, with the room and eventually the entire house becoming engulfed. Hammer, wounded, struggles to his feet, then searches for Velda. Together, the pair flee the flaming room and house, helping each other along the beach, away from the house, to the ocean.

Alternative ending

The original American release of the film shows Hammer and Velda escaping from the burning house at the end, staggering into the ocean as the words "The End" come over them on the screen. Sometime after its first release, the ending was altered on the film's original negative, removing more than a minute's worth of shots where Hammer and Velda escape and superimposing the words "The End" over the burning house. This implied that Hammer and Velda perished in the atomic blaze, and was often interpreted to represent the apocalypse. In 1997, the original conclusion was restored, where Velda and Mike survive. The DVD release has the original ending, and offers the truncated ending as an extra.

Cast

Production

Development

In October 1954 Robert Aldrich announced he would produce and direct two Mickey Spillane stories the following year, for Parklane Productions, an independent company owned by Victor Saville. The stories would be "Kiss Me Deadly" and "My Gun is Quick". Saville turned over control to Aldrich because he was busy on The Silver Chalice.^[5]

Los Angeles locations

Kiss Me Deadly remains one of the great time capsules of Los Angeles. The Bunker Hill locations were all destroyed when the downtown neighborhood was razed in the late 1960s.

Influence

Homage is paid to the glowing suitcase MacGuffin in the 1984 cult film Repo Man, the film Ronin, and in Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction. The "shiny blue suitcase" is mentioned with other famous MacGuffins in Guardians of the Galaxy. When the Ark of the Covenant in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark is opened, the shot of Rene Belloq's face melting is directly inspired by that of Gabrielle opening the suitcase. In the film Southland Tales, Richard Kelly pays homage to the film, showing the main characters watching the beginning on their television and later the opening of the case is shown on screens on board the mega-Zeppelin.

Reception

Critical response

Critical commentary generally views it as a metaphor for the paranoia and nuclear fears of the Cold War in which it was filmed.^[6] "The great whatsit", as Velda refers to the small, mysterious valise at the center of Hammer's quest, is hot to the touch and contains a dangerous, glowing substance. It comes to represent the 1950s Cold War fear and paranoia about the atomic bomb. The film has been described as "the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period".^[7]

Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this metaphor in his script. About the topic, he said, "I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting."^[8]

Film critic Nick Schager wrote, "Never was Mike Hammer's name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane's legendary P.I. with brute force savager... The gumshoe's subsequent investigation into the woman's death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society's dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man's return to the primordial sea – with the director's knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre's romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. 'Remember me'? Aldrich's sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget".^[9]

Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on 37 reviews with an average rating of 8.1/10; its consensus states, "An intriguing, wonderfully subversive blend of art and commerce, Kiss Me Deadly is an influential noir classic."^[10]

Accolades

In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Differences from the novel

The original novel, while providing much of the plot, is about a mafia conspiracy and does not feature espionage and the mysterious nuclear suitcase, elements added to the film version by the scriptwriter A.I. Bezzerides.

It further subverted Spillane's book by portraying the already tough Hammer as a narcissistic bully, the darkest anti-hero private detective in film noir. He apparently makes most of his living by blackmailing adulterous husbands and wives, and he takes an obvious sadistic pleasure in violence, whether he's beating up thugs sent to kill him, breaking a contact's treasured record to get him to talk, or roughing up a coroner who's slow to part with a piece of information. He also apparently has no compunction about engaging in nefarious acts such as pimping his secretary. Bezzerides wrote of the script: "I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it... I tell you Spillane didn't like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn't like me".^[11]

Home media

A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in June 2011 and has the alternative ending as a bonus feature.^[12]

See also

References

Notes

1. ^Alain Silver and James Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, Limelight, 1995 p 238
2. ^French box office results for Robert Aldrich films at Box Office Story
3. ^Arnold and Miller, 1986. p. 38: “...screenplay by A. I. Bezzerides (with contributions from Aldrich) made no effort to follow the book’s convoluted plot [though] both are structured around [a] search for a mysterious box”
4. ^{{cite news |first=Valerie J.|last=Nelson|title=Maxine Cooper Gomberg dies at 84; actress in the film noir classic 'Kiss Me Deadly'|url=http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-maxine-cooper15-2009apr15,0,2025998.story|work=Los Angeles Times|publisher=|date=2009-04-15 |accessdate=2009-04-16}}
5. ^{{Cite news |title=TRACY AND CLIFT TO STAR IN FILM: Metro Will Team Actors in 'Bannon' Against Background of U. S. Labor Movement |last=Pryors |first=Thomas M |date=3 Sep 1954 |work=New York Times}}
6. ^Prince, Stephen, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film, Praeger/Greenwood, 1992, {{ISBN|0-275-93662-7}}.
7. ^{{cite web |url=http://www.filmsite.org/kiss.html |title=Kiss Me Deadly |last=Dirks |first=Tim |work=Filmsite.org}}
8. ^Vallance, Tom {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071001060100/http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2169227.ece |date=2007-10-01 }}. The Independent, Obituary, "A.I. Bezzerides. No-nonsense novelist/screenwriter," January 20, 2007. Last accessed: March 25, 2008.
9. ^Schager, Nick. Slant Magazine, film review, 2006. Last accessed: March 25, 2008.
10. ^Kiss Me Deadly at Rotten Tomatoes. Last accessed: February 22, 2013.
11. ^Bergan, Ronald The Guardian, Obituary, "A.I. Bezzerides: Screenwriter victim of the Hollywood blacklist, he is renowned for three classic American film noirs," February 6, 2007.
12. ^{{cite web|title=Kiss Me Deadly|url=http://www.criterion.com/films/27620-kiss-me-deadly?q=autocomplete|publisher=The Criterion Collection}}

Bibliography

External links