silver nitrate notes

Kiss Me Deadly and the Great Whatsit

7 sep 2021

Robert Aldrich (1918-1983) directed Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for his own production company on United Artists money. The budget was low. The source was a Mickey Spillane novel nobody at the studio thought was filmable. The cinematographer was Ernest Laszlo (1898-1984), who had shot Not as a Stranger (1955) for Kramer earlier the same year and who, in Kiss Me Deadly, makes one of the most visually aggressive American films of its decade.

The plot is a Mike Hammer private-eye story. A woman Hammer picks up on a country road is tortured to death by men who want something she knew about. Hammer spends the rest of the film trying to find out what that something was. The answer is the Great Whatsit, a leather box containing what is either atomic material or something sufficiently like it that opening it kills the person who opens it. The ending, where the box is opened, was originally a more conventional thriller denouement; Aldrich re-cut it in post-production to be ambiguous, apocalyptic, and all but incoherent.

Laszlo's photography is the reason the film has survived. He lights in extremes. Los Angeles interiors are either flat daylight through uncovered windows or single-source low-key compositions that leave most of the frame black. The film has almost no middle register. Hammer (Ralph Meeker) moves through this binary world without ever, visually, belonging to either pole; he is lit somewhere between, which is the film's moral argument about him. He is neither in the light nor in the dark; he is the agent that moves between them.

The sequence at the boxing gym, where Hammer interviews a trainer, is lit by a single overhead worklight. The ring takes up the centre of the frame. The light hangs directly above the ring. Everything else in the gym is in shadow. Hammer and the trainer walk around the outside of the ring, ducking in and out of the single pool of light. Laszlo photographs this at a slightly wider lens than convention would prefer, so that we can see the dark extent of the room. The gym is not one room; it is a pool of light surrounded by darkness that has a gym somewhere in it.

The famous final shot, of the box exploding in an oceanfront cottage, was shot with a magnesium charge inside a lit interior. Laszlo photographed it at a higher frame rate than normal and slowed the action in post. What we see is a white light emerging from the box, a woman screaming, flames engulfing the cottage, and a cut to a wider shot of the cottage burning at the edge of the ocean. The ambiguity is whether the light is atomic or supernatural. The ambiguity is the point. Five years before the French New Wave would adopt Spillane as a saint of American noir, Aldrich and Laszlo had already done the work.

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sources
[1] Silver, Alain. What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich? His Life and His Films. Limelight, 1995.
[2] Arnold, Edwin T. and Eugene L. Miller. The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. University of Tennessee, 1986.
[3] Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.
[4] Bezzerides, A.I. Screenplay (Rutgers Films in Print, 1983).