One of my favorite movies (like desert-island-disc favorite), and TOUCH OF EVIL's only competition as most subversive late-noir film. Beautifully photographed and composed. Aldrich viewed Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective hero Mike Hammer as the embodiment of brutal, anti-intellectual red-scare America, and cruelly dissects him without straying from the form of a driving detective thriller. Ralph Meeker plays Hammer like a cornered animal, embodying a type of bitter violent misogynist whose life peaked in high school, and hits mid-life crisis in his 20s - fighting to keep his hair and waistline, dressing too sharply, driving sports cars, living in a bachelor pad full of high tech gadgets.The Plot: Sleazy divorce detective Hammer picks up a woman wearing nothing but a raincoat (Cloris Leachman) who intimates that her life is in danger. She's right! They're kidnapped, and goons torture the girl to death, then send she and Hammer over a cliff in his car. He miraculously survives, and now he's committed to the case despite dire warnings from the FBI, the cops, and the crooks. He finds himself protector to the dead girl's room-mate; a very short-haired blonde (Gaby Rodgers) whose spacey voice emanates sex in a way we can't describe. Aldrich intended her to be carnal and alluring, but not beautiful, because no one in the film is beautiful. The entire cast is intentionally freakish (think Bruegel), with not enough make-up, and usually bathed in sweat.
The clues lead to a circle of suspiciously sophisticated people seeking a mysterious radioactive carton that may spell the end of existence. (Aldrich isn't subtle in identifying it as Pandora's box) The audience is always a step ahead of Hammer, who is cunning but stupid.
American critics were as clueless as Hammer, but the French avant-garde got it right away, with Cahiers du cinéma then-critic François Truffaut declaring Aldrich the revelation of 1955. The original ending sequence is restored here, and it's quite a different ending than older TV prints.
The best post WWII art substitutes ambiguity for subtlety; recoiling from propaganda while embracing the raw power of media. KISS is anything but subtle, yet can be read as right-wing or left-wing or no-wing, depending on one's initial assumptions - the world is so hostile to Hammer's individualism that perhaps he's right to be hostile and paranoid. From the opening frame every character he meets offers a scathing spoken critique of him, often as if he wasn't even there, like he's a lab rat.
This Greek chorus of condemnation is only one quirky classical evocation in a script crammed with literary and mythological allusions that lie outside Hammer's grasp. He cannot relate to women, to authority, or to educated people, but he's a hero to the many down-trodden foreigners he encounters, every one of whom is an outrageous insulting ethnic stereotype reminiscent of Chico Marx at his most tasteless. In this sense Hammer seems a colonial figure, unable to exist within his own culture and functional only when dealing with "inferiors."
Hammer considers himself to be the good guy, but is utterly amoral. He pimps his pathetic secretary (who loves him), delights in beating people much weaker than himself, and is ultimately at war with culture itself; destroying modern paintings and opera records, and hilariously suspecting that different people he's tailing are co-conspirators because they all listen to the classical music station. yet he's right, and the educated and cultured people are the ones flirting with destruction of the world! No easy answers.
Wide Screen; Features: Alternate ending; Original theatrical trailer; English: Dolby Digital mono; optional French & Spanish subs; 106 Minutes
