Sexy Beast

Some unforgettable private dicks have graced cinema through the years, many of them played by remarkable actors with varied takes on their tough-talking, hard-drinking, darkly shaded PIs. From the star-studded stabs at Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, Elliott Gould) to Bogart’s iconic turn as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) to a wide gallery of gumshoes (Edward Arnold in Meet Nero Wolf, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, and the various incarnations of Charlie Chan), big-screen shamuses make for intriguing, complex and exciting entertainment — big-time.

But even with all of these terrific tailers to choose from, for my money (and money means a lot when dealing with such sleuths) the greatest hunk o’ hard-boiled heaviness was Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich’s super-stylized, brilliant Kiss Me Deadly (which I rhapsodized about, opening shots alone, here). With his sleazy cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, his swaggering, selfish, slaphappy demeanor, and his eye (though not heart) for the ladies, Meeker (so extraordinary and different in Something Wild – a movie I’ll discuss in the near future) was such a hard Hammer that he oozed single-minded contempt. And you kind of love the shit-heel. I do anyway.

Within Aldrich’s wild, fatalistic noir, a noir that becomes so apocalyptic that it borders on science fiction, Hammer should be a smug SOB, a self-indulgent man who, as the hysterial Cloris Leachman says to him, “thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.” And he’s not going to disagree. Meeker’s Hammer isn’t below threatening to chuck poor, tragic Leachman off a cliff, even if he just picked her up in his speedy little Jaguar for possibly something else. It’s that woman — a hitchhiking psychiatric-ward escapee — who leads Hammer to his craziest, deadliest mystery and when she’s murdered, Hammer’s off to investigate her death.

But he does a lot more. In the course of his investigation he will make out with his hot-to-trot secretary, slam a guy’s hand in a drawer, smash another man’s head in a wall and swap barbs with maybe the most important person in his life — his overly excitable car mechanic (“va va voom!”). And that’s just the half of it. When he’s dealing with a glowing, radioactive suitcase (hat-tipped in both Repo Man and Pulp Fiction), the cool, sordid “bedroom dick” turns out to be a man contending with the end of the world (with two endings). Which in Meeker’s hands means that…my lord, Robert Aldrich really was cynical. What a perfect pair.

Originally published at MSN Movies.

Comments

[Brian Miller]

Kiss Me Deadly gets my vote for the best film noir ruined by a tacked-on Mystery Science Theater 3000 ending. Absolute garbage ending. The screenwriter probably remembered reading part of the memoirs of a Los Alamos scientist when he came across the phrase "...can't keep the nuclear genie in the bottle." The moron then took an obvious metaphor and incorporated it into the screenplay as a literal concept. The screenwriter has no idea what's in the box so he has Lt. Pat Murphy unhelpfully explain it to Mike Hammer: "...I'm going to pronounce some words, they're harmless words...just try to understand what they mean: Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity."

The illicit contraband is a little nuclear something-or-another that is sort of kept under control by a flimsy metal box with a leather harness. Two of the characters in this movie are trying to "fence" this contraband but who would be the potential buyer of this dumbass device? Some idiot who wants to carry around a metal box and "flash" his enemies with the deadly rays? Or he could open the box all the way and release enough energy to destroy one beach house. Terrible. Just awful. Why was this crap glued onto the end of a great film noir?
Please tell me that Robert Aldrich was fired from Kiss Me Deadly with the last scene unfilmed so the producers just used leftover footage from Ed Wood's Bride Of The Monster to finish the movie.

[Erich K.]

Hurray for Josh Brolin! He was the only good thing in AMERICAN GANGSTER.