Kiss me deadly movie#
There is an extremely disturbing lack of resolution: Do they escape? What about Hammer's bullet wound? Or the possibly fatal dose of radiation from the burn on his wrist? And what is that crazy box, anyway? Just as the movie is about to wind upthe movie explodes. Instead we see the beach house burning and exploding (in a rather dreamlike waythe structure boils with fire, but seems to remain intact) and the film just ENDS at peak tension. Hammer and Velda are never actually shown to escape the burning building. On the screen, one of the most distinctive aspects of Kiss Me Deadly was the outrageousness of its final few seconds: the movie didn't concludeit detonated. Instead they escape to the relative safety of the beach, from where they observe the house as it continues to burn. On the script page, Bezzerides clearly specified that Mike Hammer and Velda (played by Ralph Meeker and Maxine Cooper) do not perish in the fatal Malibu beach house. Print, he had noticed that shots he remembered seeing in a 35mm
Just finished a piece on the visual style of Kiss Me Deadly for FilmĬomment, but in making frame enlargements from a United Artists 16mm
Theater Arts Reading Room, where I worked with Alain's writingĬollaborator James Ursini, and it was he who showed me the copy of A.I.īezzerides' Kiss Me Deadly screenplay. The setting for our theorizing was UCLA's This was back in 1972 at UCLA, while he was conceivingĮncyclopedic Reference to the American Style. It was Alain who first got me thinking about the possibility that the ending had been altered. As has been pointed out by Alain Silver both in his books and here in Images, this widely screened, discussed, and imitated film noir has been predominantly exhibited with a false ending, one that markedly distorts its makers' intentions. Kiss Me Deadly - The Kiss Me Mangled Mystery: Refurbishing a Film Noir - by Glenn EricksonĪfter decades of showings in a mutilated version, the true conclusion to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly has just recently been located.