Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film grossed $726,000 in the United States and a total of $226,000 overseas. It also withstood scrutiny from the Kefauver Commission as being a film said to be designed to ruin young viewers, leading director Aldrich to write against the Commission’s conclusions. Kiss Me Deadly marked the film debuts of both actresses Cloris Leachman and Maxine Cooper. Kiss Me Deadly remains one of the great time capsules of Los Angeles; the Bunker Hill locations were all destroyed when the downtown neighborhood was razed in the late 1960s.
   Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a tough Los Angeles private eye who is almost as brutal and corrupt as the crooks he chases. Mike, and his assistant/secretary/lover, Velda (Maxine Cooper), usually work on “penny-ante divorce cases”. One evening on a lonely country road, Hammer gives a ride to Christina (Cloris Leachman), an attractive hitchhiker wearing nothing but a trench coat. She has escaped from a nearby mental institution. Thugs waylay them and Hammer awakens in some unknown location where he hears Christina screaming and being tortured to death. The thugs then push Hammer’s car off a cliff with Christina’s body and an unconscious Hammer inside. Hammer next awakens in a hospital with Velda by his bedside. He decides to pursue the case, both for vengeance and because, “She (Christina) must be connected with something big” behind it all.
   Critical commentary generally views it as a metaphor for the paranoia and nuclear fears of the Cold War era in which it was filmed. Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this meaning in his script. About the topic, he said, “I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting.” Film critic Nick Schager wrote, “Never was Mike Hammer’s name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane’s legendary P.I. with brute force savagery…The gumshoe’s subsequent investigation into the woman’s death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society’s dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man’s return to the primordial sea – with the director’s knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre’s romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. ‘Remember me’? Aldrich’s sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget.”