Arsenevich: Robert Aldrich - Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

El beso mortal

Mientras conduce en plena noche, el detective privado Mike Hammer casi atropella a una joven aterrorizada que está siendo perseguida por unos gángsters. Caen en una emboscada, y Mike Hammer termina en el hospital y su pasajera es asesinada. El detective emprenderá entonces una investigación que le llevará a descubrir un secreto de Estado de los más explosivos.

El beso mortal posee el encanto del cine de los años cincuenta y es una de las primeras obras del cine estadounidense independiente. Todos los códigos del cine negro están presentes: el detective privado, la femme fatale, las escenas nocturnas y un final explosivo…

Kiss me Deadly arranca con una escena de una violencia poco común. Además, Mike Hammer es un detective egoísta, frío, calculador, alejado del héroe de buen corazón. La película, estrenada en plena guerra fría, también es un thriller político-social, una crítica del maccarthysmo centrada en torno a la cuestión de las armas nucleares.

In this atomic adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, the good manners of the 1950s are blown to smithereens. Ralph Meeker stars as snarling private dick Mike Hammer, whose decision one dark, lonely night to pick up a hitchhiking woman sends him down some terrifying byways. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is a film noir masterwork as well as an essential piece of cold war paranoia, and it features as nervy an ending as has ever been seen in American cinema.

Regarded by many critics as the ultimate film noir, and by many more as the finest movie adaptation of a book by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly stars Ralph Meeker as Spillane's anti-social private eye Mike Hammer. While driving down a lonely road late one evening, Hammer picks up a beautiful blonde hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman), dressed in nothing but a raincoat. At first, Hammer assumes that the incoherent girl is an escaped lunatic; his mind is changed for him when he and the girl are abducted by two thugs. The men torture the girl to death as the semiconscious Hammer watches helplessly. He himself escapes extermination when the murderers' car topples off a cliff and he is thrown clear. Seeking vengeance, Hammer tries to discover the secret behind the girl's murder. Among those who cross his path in the film's tense, tingling 105 minutes are a slimy gangster (Paul Stewart), a turncoat scientist (Albert Dekker), and the dead woman's sexy roommate (Gaby Rodgers).