Rediscovered Classic: Kiss Me Deadly

The last great film noir, and probably the darkest, 'Kiss Me Deadly' returns to the big screen this month in a new 35mm print. Robert Aldrich's 1955 adaptation of the Micky Spillane novel sees detective Mike Hammer's life take a dramatic turn after he picks up a distressed female hitch-hiker late one night.

Playing on Cold War fears and nuclear paranoia surrounding the atomic bomb, events lead to a mysterious box and its glowing, unstable and ultimately explosive contents. Uniquely in the noir world, this is no "MacGuffin", or arbitrary plot device, but is in fact instrumental to the story's shocking climax.

Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo's disorienting camera angles and masterful compositions perfectly capture this underworld, while the film has all the trappings of great film noir: a stark opening sequence, destructive femme fatales, low-life gangsters, an anti-hero, expressionistically lit night-time scenes, a vengeful quest and a dark mood of hopelessness; women are also regularly abused. On it's release, Aldrich confessed "I regret having accepted the job of making 'Kiss Me Deadly'. Mickey Spillane is anti-democratic."

However, over fifty years on, with the world currently obsessing over WMD and nuclear power, 'Kiss Me Deadly' feels distinctly contemporary; the simultaneous fear and fascination of the powerfully destructive is as relevant today as it was then.