because of its failure to maintain the lofty, sociological tone of Kantor's work, or even the poetic realism of such movies as You Only Live Once and They Live by Night. Its very title is ambiguous, suggesting both shocked censure and gleeful exploitation, and several of its most enjoyable effects seem unintended. The dialogue, for example, contains lines such as 'Two people dead, just so we can live without working!' The two leading players, Peggy Cummins and John Dall, are slightly miscast, and a few of the early scenes are laughable. At one point we see the Dall character as a boy, shooting a chicken in a farmyard; when we cut to an insert of the dead bird, it looks like something that has been lying around the property department for weeks. And yet director. Joseph H. Lewis achieves one of the most celebrated sequence shots in the history of moviesa bank robbery in a southwestern town, photographed by Russell Harlan in documentary style from the back seat of the getaway car. This shot is refreshingly free of studioish mannerisms, and the robbery itself (which takes place offscreen) gains considerable tension from being represented as an urgent and partly improvised piece of 'real time.'' Elsewhere, Gun Crazy offers a superbly staged holdup of an Armour meat-packing plant, and (for the period) a delightfully forthright eroticism. Although it somewhat villainizes the female, denying her the point-of-view shots it gives to the male, it also inverts the usual sex roles, hinting at John Dall's 'feminine' qualities (he had recently played a homosexual for Hitchcock) and allowing Peggy Cummins to play a kind of murderous Annie Oakley. As Alain Silver and Carl Macek point out, most of the film is 'atavistic,' providing few social or psychological motivations for the outlaw couple; instead, it appears to celebrate their passionate attachment and 'basic lawlessness.'
Because Gun Crazy's lack of cinematic polish was homologous with the outlaw couple's disregard of bourgeois morality, viewers were given an opportunity to feel irresponsible and discriminating at the same time. The surrealists loved the film, Godard alluded to it several times in Breathless, and cinephiles everywhere used it as a weapon against middlebrow critics and major Hollywood studios. However, despite its 'underground' appeal, Gun Crazy was not a B movie in the same sense as Detour. An intermediate production, it was typical of a period when the studio system was undergoing reorganization. Looked at today, what makes it strikingly different from its many big-budget successorsincluding not only Bonnie and Clyde but also Wild at Heart (1990), True Romance (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994)is not so much its cheapness but its relative innocence. It belongs to a time before Elvis, before Vietnam, before the collapse of the classic censorship code, before music videos, before the widespread popularity of old movies like The Wizard of Oz, and before film noir itself became an idea in the minds of producers. It has no need to allude to most of these things (as its imitators do), nor to devise increasingly spectacular scenes of sex and violence. It simply waivers between entertainment and art, creating a somewhat naive, 'good-bad' effect.
A less innocent and slightly more expensive balancing act between pulp formulas and artistic ambition lies behind Robert Aldrich's independent production of Kiss Me Deadly (1955)which, as we have seen in chapter 1, was a crucial event for the French auteurists, signaling the end of Hollywood noir. On one level, Aldrich clearly designed this picture to capitalize on the extraordinary success of lowbrow novelist Mickey Spillane. In the years between 1948 and 1955, Spillane wrote seven of the ten best-selling books of all time and almost single-handedly established a mass readership for the American paperback industry. Despite his worldwide fame, however, Spillane was considered too vulgar and controversial for the major Hollywood producers, and films based on his work were made without A-picture stars or budgets. Meanwhile, intellectuals and cultural critics regularly attacked his private-eye hero, Mike Hammera misogynistic, racist, avenging proletarian who deals out brutal punishment to commie traitors and voluptuous dames. Hammer's frankly pornographic adventures involve many of the same formulas that Hammett and Chandler used, but they are devoid of any redeeming social content. Pure masculine fantasy, they resemble an archetypal film noir without the intervening control of the Breen Office or the artistic superego. Here, for example, is the famous conclusion to I, the Jury, which was probably inspired by the film adaptation of Double Indemnity:
Slowly, a sigh escaped her, making the hemispheres of her breasts quiver. She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck.
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in . . . 'How c-could you?' she gasped.
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
'It was easy,' I said.
The film version of Kiss Me Deadly has a similar atmosphere, although most writings on noir describe it as a critique of Spillane. No doubt it had to be critical or revisionist to a degree if it wanted to achieve acceptance among reviewers and mainstream exhibitors; but within the limits of movie censorship in 1955, it also tried to give Mike Hammer's fans a good deal of what they expected. 'We kept faith with 60 million Mickey Spillane readers,' Aldrich claimed in The New York Herald Tribune, where he defended the picture as a work of 'action, violence, and suspense in good taste.' Scriptwriter A. I. Bezzerides more or less agreed, although he later confessed to cynicism: 'I wrote it fast, because I had contempt for it. It was automatic writing. Things were in the air at the time and I put them in.' 21
Bezzerides and Aldrich were in fact liberals, and for that reason, their film has a divided attitude toward the hero, who can be viewed as a conventional tough guy or as a kind of monster. Aldrich himself acknowledged this effect in a 1956 interview: 'When I asked my American friends to tell me whether they felt my disgust for the whole mess, they said that between the fights and the kissing scenes they hadn't noticed anything of the sort.'22 The adaptation nevertheless puts an ironic twist on the novel's politics, dispensing with Spillane's first-person narration and right-wing rhetoric and giving the women characters plenty of opportunity to criticize the phallic, self-absorbed private eye (despite the fact that they all find him sexually irresistible). Ralph Meeker, a method-style actor, plays Mike Hammer in Neanderthal fashion, and the film as a whole makes him seem vaguely repellent. A specialist in divorce cases and illegal investigations, he looks rather like a cross between Spillane's character and a Playboy male: thus he drives a foreign sports car, he employs a secretary who dresses in tights and does ballet exercises in his office, and he lives in a modernistic apartment with a fancy answering machine built into the wall. In keeping with this proto-Bond ambience, his sphere of operation has been changed from New York to Los Angeles, and he is sent in pursuit of a MacGuffin called 'the great whatsit,' which turns out to be an atomic bomb stolen by a criminal mastermind named Dr. Soberin. (The criminals in the novel are drug dealers; Aldrich and Bezzerides introduced the mad-scientist cliche because of censorship restrictions against drugs in movies.)
Throughout, Kiss Me Deadly alternates between social-realist scenes of urban decay and visions of a souped-up, hypermodern Americaa consumerist world of fast cars, pinup girls, monosyllabic tough guys, Bel Air swimming pools, Malibu beach houses, and nuclear fission. The pace and tone are perfectly described by Nick (Nick Dennis), Mike Hammer's auto-mechanic pal (and an alter-ego for scriptwriter Bezzerides), who keeps shouting 'Va-va-voom!' In the end, as if to provide an ironic climax to all the explosiveness, Aldrich uses a device worthy of Dr. Strangelove (1964): Soberin's hideout at Malibu goes up in an atomic blast, wiping out both Hammer and the villains. (Some prints show Hammer and his secretary, Velda, escaping into the Pacific; their survival is doubtful, however, because they move only a few yards from ground zero.) The final, spectacular shots are brief but stunning, pushing the 'lone wolf1' myth of private-eye fiction to its self-destructive limit and reducing an entire genre to nuclear waste.
Even before the outrageous, apocalyptic ending, Aldrich and Bezzerides distance themselves from Spillane by filling the movie with signifiers of art, thereby establishing a counterpoint between the callous and the sensitive, the crude and the cultivated. For example, an important clue to the mystery is a couplet from Christina Rossetti's poem 'Remember Me.' ('But when the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once we had.') Elsewhere, the film contains allusions to Cerberus, Pandora, and the Medusa, along with fragments of music by Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky and Friedrich Flotow. (One of Mike Hammer's more brutal acts is to destroy a recording by Enrico Caruso; he himself listens to jazz singers like Nat Cole and Madi Comfort.) An even more obvious sign of the film's allegiance to critical modernism is its some-what commercially retrograde visual style. At a time when low- budget movies were increasingly turning to color and wide screens, Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo remained faithful to Hollywood's semi-documentary, left-wing thrillers of the late 1940s: they used a grainy, black-
