Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a typically depraved hardboiled noir story, with an uncaring and sleazy anti-hero.  There are complex plot threads that form an overall labyrinth that has to be ignored if you are to enjoy the story, and Cold War and nuclear paranoia grow like weeds through this, eventually and dramatically engulfing everything.  Kiss Me Deadly has many of the elements of film noir — a stark opening sequence, several destructive femme fatales, a clutch of low-life gangsters, and many expressionistically-lit night-time scenes. 

There is also within this mess of noir, a vengeful quest, and a constant dark mood of hopelessness, which shows that the patterns of noir had by this late stage been refined into a high art in themselves.  It is also the closing point of the canon, the last ever film noir — so everything after May 18, 1955 — the day that Kiss Me Deadly was released — can officially be known as ‘neo-noir’.

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The opening of Kiss Me Deadly is striking, to say the least.  It's one of these instances in which you are hooked from the off, as it's just so compelling, bleak and mysterious.  The woman Mike Hammer gives a lift to at the start of the film stops him by blocking the road and forcing him to almost wreck his car.

Hammer: Thumb isn't good enough for you. You've got to use your whole body.
Woman: Why sir, would you have stopped if I'd used my thumb?
Hammer: No!  What's this all about? I'll make a quick guess. You were out with some guy who thought 'no' was a three-letter word. I should have thrown you off that cliff back there. I might still do it. Where are ya headed?
Woman: Los Angeles. Drop me off at the first bus stop.
Hammer: Do you always go around with no clothes on?

Women are abused in Kiss Me Deadly from the naked trench-coat-wearing Christina who is tortured to death with a pair of pliers, in something that does not appear to belong in the 1950s at all — it is exceptionally uncomfortable seeing her legs dangle there — to the faithful Velda who Hammer abuses every time he sees her  Then there’s Lily, abused by Dr. Soberin, and all, we tell ourselves, in the name of entertainment.

In Kiss Me Deadly the apocalypse signals the end of the noir cycle.  When the suitcase is opened with horrific results, Velda becomes a shrieking human torch, a perverse inferno, and the latest in a line of tortured girls.  It's not actually an image typical to the noir canon, which always tended to focus on low key cruelty and humiliation, rather than grand destructive gestures and the explosions which have come to be our cinematic staples.

Noir - Mike Hammer Thinks It Out

The trailer for Kiss Me Deadly gives away so much of the action, and doesn't truly express the confusion of the finished product.  Having said that you can't blame the makers of the trailer for trying to impose some coherence on this classic of all curiosities.   If you've seen Kiss Me Deadly to the end, you may want to see the alternative ending which isn't that different, but you do miss Mike and Zelda up to their knees in the sea.  Who dies?  This ending says that it's the heroes who peg it, but I was half expecting the screen to go white (it doesn't) to express the idea that the whole world had blown up.