Kiss Me Deadly

It would still prove to be the American Century, but now it was overshadowed by the threat of the atom’s power. Air raid shelters were built in public buildings. Families dug and poured concrete in their backyards to construct personal bomb shelters. Food was stocked, with water, batteries, Bibles, bunk beds and lawn chairs. The US government produced films on how to survive an atomic war, and what our duties as citizens were in that event. Don’t believe me? Find the documentary The Atomic Café and decide what the government and military were trying to sell us. I was one of the millions of kids who learned to survive (perhaps?) an atomic blast by ducking and covering under my desk at school. At least survive the initial blast. The radiation was a different story. It was all responsible for an underlying uneasiness at all times, a subtle terror. 

This coupled perfectly with the feelings of unseen threat and malaise that film noir captured. The style or genre was at the end of its first and classic cycle in the US by the mid 50s and the height of anti-Communist and atomic fear. But it had a final entry that pulled it all together with a director and cast that was little equaled, then or now --- Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me Deadly, a classic film noir and fundamental influence on the French New Wave and auteurs such as Godard and Truffaut, as well as extending into the modern era, as we shall see next month. Distributed by United Artists, it had a winding path to excellence, but it’s now widely acknowledged as a mainstay of noir, stuffed with talent.

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