Personal blog #6 -KISS ME DEADLY

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

A few years ago, we had the great pleasure of chatting with Ben Burtt* about old films, especially noirs, when Burtt said “Dave, you’ve got to see Kiss Me Deadly!” Many months flew by before I had a chance to see it. This B movie has some strong direction by Robert Aldrich, and great noir-ish photographic composition by Ernest Laszlo, especially in the Los Angeles exterior scenes. Ralph Meeker was great as Mike Hammer, the tough-as-nails Mickey Spillane pulp fiction detective.

The payoff is the final scene, when the bad girl gives in to her morbid curiosity and opens the story’s McGuffin, unleashing disaster. The box everyone else has been chasing and shooting each other over contains some kind of mysterious radioactive substance.

Now for some cultural context: It is 1955, just a year after the American release of the original Gojira as “Godzilla”. Spillane’s pulp novel was published in 1952. The atomic bomb was first used in war in 1945, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What ended the active war between Japan and the U.S. began a period of great international anxiety over the deadly effects of nuclear radiation. In the popular culture, Gojira (1954) was the first great expression of the universal fear we humans had about The Bomb; and its success was able to spawn a decade of horror and sci-fi movies built upon dark fantasies of the atomic mutation of some erstwhile common animals. Them! (1954) were the giant ants which prowled through the American desert Southwest and made their reproductive nests in the tunnels of the L.A. River. There came a succession of “giant bug” movies, most often the result of atomic mutation.**

Japanese people who survived the war were rightly terrorized by the destructive unleashing of atomic power. By the end of World War II, surviving soldiers in the U.S., Russia, and all over Europe must have been traumatized by that war’s unthinkable scale and violence. This damage to millions of psyches found expression in a generation of post-war novels, plays, and dramatic films, just as had happened following World War I. The arts respond to the horror. In pulp novels and in films, men returning from war found themselves trying to adapt to a very different culture, often looking for different work post war, and at the same time having to wrangle the personal demons that followed them home. Violence came home with many of them, and both the popular fiction market (paperback book publishing was a brand-new idea) and the low budget “B” movie market would reflect that. We got noir novels in paperback and noir films on the screen (though the term itself was coined in a latter period.)

Mickey Spillane’s detective is said to be more of a vigilante than a thoughtful detective. Mike Hammer embodies out-of-control testosterone in a dark, criminal world. In a comprehensive IMDB mini biography, Jon C. Hopwood describes Mike Hammer as “a tough-talking, hard-drinking bruiser.” Hopwood also reveals that the writer had none of the violent, anti-social or self-destructive features of his fictional avatar. Hopwood wrote:

“Spillane hated the film (Kiss Me Deadly) which transmogrified the narcotics dealer plot of the novel into the theft of an atomic bomb (a true Cold War plot), which he found ludicrous.”

How about that? Spillane’s McGuffin was a shipment of dope. Here in the film it appears to be a box of atomic something-or-other, emanating some mysterious mystical powers. The box in question, in fact, is a kind of Pandora’s box.

Here is Wikipedia on Pandora’s box:

Pandora's box is an artifact in Greek mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod's “Works and Days”. He reported that curiosity led her to open a container left in care of her husband, thus releasing physical and emotional curses upon mankind. Later depictions of the story have been varied, while some literary and artistic treatments have focused more on the contents than on Pandora herself.

The container mentioned in the original account was actually a large storage jar, but the word was later mistranslated. In modern times an idiom has grown from the story meaning “Any source of great and unexpected troubles”, or alternatively “A present which seems valuable, but which in reality is a curse”.

Like the ingenious Japanese screenwriters of Gojira, A.I. Bezzerides*** and Robert Aldrich chose to depict the atomic power hiding in that box as invested with mysterious and supernatural powers (which is attributable to that new science we don’t understand) once unleashed on the world. But that is executed brilliantly on Parklane Pictures’ shoestring budget with simple lighting and sound effects, without reliance on special visual effects animation.

Here is what happens. While Mike Hammer is too injured to do anything about it, Marian Carr’s character, channeling Pandora, dramatically and slowly opens The Box. Immediately she is flooded with a bright light and some unearthly sound. The light and sound overwhelm her, causing fire to burn everywhere, like some medieval conflagration created to punish the greedy evildoers. It burns explosively through the Malibu beach house, from which Mike Hammer and his leading lady Velda (Maxine Cooper) struggle to escape. For years, most of the film’s prints ended without their escape to the safety of the beach, implying they die in the fire, but a late restoration includes the footage of their escape.

The light is an effective and handy surrogate for destructive power, just as it is often symbolic of a Cleansing Truth. But what of the sound? We have here an extraordinarily complex mix of sounds… an aboriginal example of sound design, a generation before sound design was a thing!

I supposed this piece of the work was the reason for Burtt’s recommendation, especially as we rarely connect films noir (many of which have extraordinarily beautiful black and white photographic compositions) with sound design in the modern sense.

Here is what I hear in the scene:

Some very broad-band windy elements, which imply heat and overwhelming power. There is an element of human breath blowing. Not as through the lips, but as straight out of the throat with an open mouth. This might have been performed by a sound worker, directly into a microphone. But the breath is modulated in an interesting way: If you blow compressed air (try this with a can of “dust-off” but protect your eyes!) into or past your mouth, you can modulate the resonance by changing your lips and tongue while the air is blowing steadily. Think of the way the mouth and tongue can modulate the notes of a Jew’s Harp. Some people will play notes by hitting spoons together on their cheek, and some by flicking their teeth with a fingernail. The great supervising sound designer Mark Mangini**** has a talent for flicking his finger against one cheek and making a complex and dynamic water-drip sound, which changes pitch as he modulates the resonance with his mouth. It is all the same technique, fundamentally. But here in the sounds of the Kiss Me Deadly atomic genie’s escape into the world, we hear someone modulating the enormous magical wind, in apparently similar fashion. Other sounds emerge upon examination: Human voices screaming. Wind sound effects blowing. Fire roaring. I don’t know, but all these recorded elements have been mixed with great skill, and they build and change as the scene progresses, becoming more powerful as the people and the house are destroyed.

For an iconic scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Dir. Steven Spielberg), Ben Burtt created a complex congregation of sounds, which assembled itself from a few simple elements that swirled themselves together first into a chain of similarly frightening bits of wind and fire, then became a giant sonic shroud, full of the moans and screams of hell’s denizens. The sounds build and swirl and compound themselves, much in the way that Disney animators built the swirling movement of ghosts and ghost horses in their rendition of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. Many elements, and probable pre-mixes, must have served Burtt’s imagination, and these layers were mixed to be best exhibited in Surround stereo, when the Ark was opened and its power began to melt the Nazi bad guys, much to our satisfaction. Could a prototype of modern sound design from 1955 have inspired a much-refined encore version in the powerful montage he built for Spielberg in 1981? I wondered if Burtt had seen Kiss Me Deadly on television as a kid, and that he’d made a mental note of that impressive sound of swirling evil power from that little box of light.

*Burtt is the four-time Academy Award-winning Senior Sound Designer at LucasFilm, one of the Founding Fathers of the art of designing modern multichannel movie soundtracks since the late 1970’s, and an incomparable historian of sound effects from the old studio system.

**Most of these were ridiculous productions, best suited for scaring young people snuggled up in cars at the drive-in theaters, but Them! is much better than that (if you will excuse the papier-maché ant heads in closeup). It is a smart, sometimes witty “police procedural” with a great cast, including James Arness, James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, and Joan Weldon. For fun, you can look for the bit parts played by Leonard Nimoy and Fess Parker.

*** Bezzerides wrote the novel that Raoul Walsh filmed as the excellent film noir They Drive by Night. He wrote Thieves’ Highway, (1949) an excellent Jules Dassin-directed noir, and much more, including Nicholas Ray-directed On Dangerous Ground (1951).

****Mad Max: Fury Road (2016, Dir. George Miller), Blade Runner 2049 (2017, Dir. Denis Villeneuve) and Dune (2021, Dir. Denis Villeneuve).