Kiss Me Deadly

Saw Kiss Me Deadly, a fairly chilly 50s noir. It's a rare film that clearly has influenced both David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. It opens with a woman, nude except for a trenchcoat, wandering a highway, desperately flagging down cars. She finally stops a man in a fancy car who snarls at her that she nearly made him crash. "Well get in!" he barks as he revs the engine. As she does, the ice-cool voice of the female DJ comes on the radio and coos "And now fellas, we'll hear that fine new platter by Nat. King. Cole." The opening credits run over the sound of the woman in the trenchcoat crying. The situation is eerie, cool, cruel. It's a dynamite opening scene. It has the jangling, fever dream quality of Lynch but with the polish and cool of Tarantino.

This film felt closest to Lost Highway for Lynch and Pulp Fiction for Tarantino. It's a tricky combination. The man in the car is our protagonist and is established in that first scene as something of a brute. This is reinforced as the film goes on. At one point he must torture a man to get information out of him. The camera closes up on our hero's face, teeth bared so wide he appears to be manically grinning. He ignores or exploits all women in the film, sometimes shutting them up but mostly blatantly ignoring them, giving them the cold shoulder as they vie for his attention. This is the Tarantino gene shining through.

On the flip side, the Lynch side, there's the rest of the world which ignores the protagonist and spins him about. Most of the film is the protagonist struggling to recover from some unexpected movement from the cops or the gangsters. The protagonist, for all of his standoffish silences, comes off looking like a stooge more often than not. There's a mysterious, calm, omnipotent quality to his enemies. At one point, an antagonistic cop threatens the protagonist. The cop starts his monologue with "Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I'm going to pronounce a few words. They're harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important." He leaves a full two seconds of silence between each sentence.

I loved the film. It starts out jangling and evolves into squirming uncertainty and tension. The climax, when it comes, is hysterically terrible and amazing, almost descending into camp. It was an amazing noir. See it.