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Hardboiled
private eye meller from the Mickey Spillane pen,
featuring blood, action and sex for exploitable
b.o.(1)
To
the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for
a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear
any obvious resemblance to the thing it
criticises.(2)
(1)
Review of Kiss me deadly, Variety, 27 April,
1955. (2)
Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," in The portable
Oscar Wilde, rev. ed., eds Richard Aldington and Stanley
Weintraub (New York: Viking Penguin, 1981), 87. In
early November 1954, Robert Aldrich submitted a draft script
of Kiss me deadly (USA 1955) to the Production Code
Administration (PCA). In an accompanying letter to PCA
official Albert Van Schmus, Aldrich described the changes he
and scriptwriter A. I. Bezzerides had made in the script's
source material, the Mickey Spillane novel Kiss me,
deadly, published the previous year. In particular,
Aldrich drew attention to the script's having removed "the
narcotics complication" that the PCA had found most
troublesome in their initial comments on the "problems
inherent in the project in relation to securing Code
approval."(3)
"Being reasonably well aware of the Code and its
interpretation," Aldrich later wrote, "we have also avoided
any direct conflict with the Code Administration." Then he
hesitated. "Of course," he noted, "there is always the
problem of interpretation."(4)
Taken out of context, this comment seems prophetic: Kiss
me deadly has been subject to multiple acts of
interpretation since its critical discovery by writers for
Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, who hailed
Aldrich as the "first director of the atomic age," and
Kiss me deadly as "the crime film of tomorrow, free
from all restraints and its own roots," on its French
release in late 1955.(5)
Regardless of the fluctuations in Aldrich's status as an
auteur, Kiss me deadly has become a canonic
text of film noir, demonstrably responsive to
critical attention. According to Jack Shadoian: (3)
Letter, Robert Aldrich to Geoffrey Shurlock, 10 September
1954, Kiss me deadly file, Production Code
Administration archive, Department of Special Collections,
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter PCA). (4)
Aldrich to Albert Van Schmus, 3 November 1954, PCA Kiss
me deadly file. (5)
Charles Bitsch, "Surmultipliée," Cahiers du
cinéma, No. 51 (October 1955), 3; Claude Chabrol,
"Evolution du film policier," Cahiers du
cinéma No. 54 (1955), translated as "The
Evolution of the Crime Film," (trans. Alain Silver) in
Film Noir Reader 2, eds. Alain Silver and James
Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), 32. (6)
Jack Shadoian, Dreams and dead ends: the American
gangster/crime film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979),
283. As an
object "constituted as much by its own fractures as by its
cohesion and sense," Kiss me deadly is now generally
received as both a political allegory and as a subversive
text; in particular, a conscious generic and ideological
subversion, on the part of both Aldrich and scriptwriter
A.I. Bezzerides, of its source
text.(7)
Accounts of the movie describe Spillane's novel as
"thoroughly obnoxious," "solipsistic and reactionary,"
frequently citing Aldrich's comments to Francois Truffaut in
1956 that its protagonist Mike Hammer represented an
"anti-democratic spirit," and his later statement that he
saw Hammer as a "cynical and fascistic private eye," whom he
viewed with "utter contempt and
loathing."(8) (7)
Adrian Miles, review of Kiss me deadly, CTEQ Vol. 2,
1996 (http://cs.art.rmit.ed.au/projects/media/cteq/v2/kiss_me_deadly/htm).
See, for example, Robin Wood's description of the critique
of the hero as "devastating and uncompromised." Robin Wood,
"Creativity and evaluation: two film noirs of the
fifties, (CineAction 21/22, Summer/Fall 1990), reprinted in
Film noir reader 2, 101. (8)
Wood, "Creativity and evaluation," 100; Francois Truffaut,
"Rencontre avec Robert Aldrich," Cahiers du
cinéma No. 64 (November 1956), 4; Aldrich
interview in Film index, May 1971, quoted in
Robert Aldrich, ed. Richard Combs, (London: British
Film Institute, 1978), 54. I wish
to re-examine and complicate this critical location of the
movie as subversive by providing a number of overlapping
contexts for it. In doing so, I am not seeking to challenge
the movie's critical reputation, but rather engaging in a
form of cultural history that tries to situate a complex
artefact like Kiss me deadly more concretely within
the culture in which it was formed and in which it initially
functioned as both a cultural and an economic
entity.(9)
In the final part of this essay, I also explore the
circumstances of Kiss me deadly's subsequent separate
existence as the apotheosis of noir. In
critical analyses of the movie, Aldrich's statement in a
1974 interview that he and Bezzerides "took the title and
threw the book away" has frequently been taken at face
value.(10)
My interest is not so much in the accuracy of Aldrich's
claim, since discarding the entirety of a book's plot
certainly fell within the normal range of Hollywood's
practices of adaptation.(11)
I am, rather, concerned with the circumstance surrounding
the commercial and cultural status of Spillane's work-in
industry parlance, its "exploitation value"-that might have
permitted or encouraged such an action. (9)
For an alternative approach to the project of locating
film noir in its historical and cultural
context &endash; one which seeks to provide a logic for "the
intuitive reading of film noir as "about its historical and
cultural moment" &endash; see Vivian Sobchack, "Lounge time:
postwar crises and the chronotope of film noir," in
Reconfiguring film genres: theory and history, ed.
Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 129-70. (10)
Charles Higham, "Robert Aldrich," Action,
November-December 1974, 19. See, for instance, Alain
Silver's analysis of the movie in which he notes that "Of
the opening dialogue, only one line … is from the
novel." Alain Silver and James Ursini, Whatever happened
to Robert Aldrich? (New York: Limelight Editions, 1995),
175. For a different view, see Edward Gallafent, "Kiss
me, deadly," in The Movie book of film noir, ed.
Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 240-6. (11)
For an examination of Hollywood's practices of adaptation,
see Richard Maltby, "'To prevent the prevalent type of
book': censorship and adaptation in Hollywood, 1924-1934,"
American quarterly, 44;4 (1992), 554-583; republished
in Movie censorship and American culture, ed. Frank
Couvares, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1996), 97-128. In his
discussion of The big combo (USA) another film
noir released in 1955, Chris Hugo seeks to demonstrate
how the economic conditions governing that movie's
production provided the opportunity for it to "break with
mainstream convention (even those of late 1940s film
noir)" in a manner undertaken much more self-consciously
by Kiss me deadly. Hugo suggests that "the particular
conditions of production were in large part the determinants
of the film's 'oppositional' feel": expensive action
sequences beyond the scope of the production budget were
replaced by "complicated, often long, speeches" setting out
"positions designed to be intense and, perhaps,
controversial," while the plot was "convoluted and, at
times, improbable, even by film noir standards."
Thus, Hugo argues, a movie made "with a thoroughly
commercial outcome in mind can appear today as 'ideas-led,'
'modern' and 'sophisticated' (in the 'art-house' sense).
… The reasons for The big combo looking as it
does appear to be bound up with the particular way that a
talented director … got the maximum impact out of a
poorly conceived commercial production
package."(12)The
big combo was, in the event, a commercial
disappointment: while Hugo attributes this to its
concentration on cast over other production values, James
Naremore suggests that it would have appeared already dated
at the time of its release, a studioish throwback to the
kind of thing Hollywood was doing five years
earlier."(13)Kiss
me deadly, by contrast, was a modest financial
success.(14)
Released within three months of each other, the two movies
catered to the same market. Positioned within the
production-distribution system as programmers capable of
occupying either half of a neighbourhood theatre's
double-bill, they were each budgeted at approximately
$400,000. Kiss me deadly's distributor, United
Artists, released around twenty-five programmers with
production budgets between $100,000 and $400,000 in 1955.
For UA, these movies served to spread the overhead costs of
their distribution operation rather than to make profits in
themselves: Tino Balio accurately describes them as "fodder
for the distribution mill."(15)
The most obvious factor distinguishing the commercial
conditions of the two movies' production was that The big
combo was an original screenplay by Philip Yordan, while
Kiss me deadly was an adaptation of one of the most
popular books in the United States. (12)
Chris Hugo, "The big combo: production conditions and
the film text," in The Movie book of film noir, ed.
Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 251-2. (13)
James Naremore, More than night: film noir in its
contexts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1998), 156. (14)
Silver and Ursini, Whatever happened to Robert Aldrich?,
14. (15)
Tino Balio, United Artists: the company that changed the
film industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987), 120. In
1956, seven of the ten best-selling titles in American
publishing were written by Mickey Spillane, at a time when
he had written only seven
books.(16)
Estimates of Spillane's sales vary widely, but a reasonably
conservative one is that twenty-four million copies of his
books had been published by June
1954.(17)
The popularity of Spillane's books makes it quite remarkable
that they had not attracted more attention from Hollywood.
The absence of high-budget adaptations, featuring major
stars, merits an explanation, particularly since the author
seemed disinclined to preserve the sanctity of his work in
the process of adaptation, declaring his motto to be: "You
can keep all your awards. All I want is a big fat
check."(18)
The explanation does not lie in the content or even the
presumed ideological position of the books, which was
infinitely malleable in the mill of the industry's
procedures for adaptation. It lies, rather, in the awkward
relationship between the film and paperback industries, in
the cultural disrepute in which the paperback industry and
its products were held during the first half of the 1950s,
and in the specific audience for its products. (16)
Alice Payne Hackett, Sixty years of best sellers,
quoted in David Halberstam, The fifties (New York:
Random House, 1993), 60. (17)
Christopher La Farge, "Mickey Spillane and his bloody
Hammer," in Mass culture, eds Rosenberg and White,
176. Originally published in The saturday review, 6
November 1954. (18)
Quoted in Kenneth C. Davis, Two-bit culture: the
paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1984), 180. The
paperback industry had its beginnings in the period
immediately before the Second World War, and expanded
considerably during the war with government support through
the mass production of Armed Services Editions, distributed
free to American troops.(19)
In the immediate postwar period, paperback publishers
assumed that the majority readership for paperbacks were, as
Lee Server puts it, "largely a mass of ex-G.I.s who had
picked up a taste for portable fiction while in
uniform."(20)
In the late 1940s, paperbacks effectively replaced pulp
magazines, both physically on the news-stands which were
their principal sales outlet, and as a point of publication
for the writers of American popular fiction and the artists
who illustrated them.(21)
Paperback publishers initially reprinted books already
published in hardback, and published a considerable range of
material, widening the market for writers and increasing
literacy. Volume sales were, however, dominated by sales of
popular fiction, especially mysteries, with much of the
output-148 million books sold in 1948, 200 million in
1950-catering to what Server calls "the former soldiers'
supposed preference for sexy, violent stories, plainly
written and not too long." (19)
During the war, the covers of Dell paperbacks carried the
message, "BOOKS ARE WEAPONS-in a free democracy everyone may
read what he likes. Books educate, inform, inspire; they
also provide entertainment, bolster morale. This book has
been manufactured in conformity with wartime
restrictions-read it and pass it on." Geoffrey O'Brien,
Hardboiled America: lurid paperbacks and the masters of
noir (New York: Da Capo 1997), 25. (20)
Lee Server, Over my dead body: the sensational age of the
American paperback (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books,
1994), 12 (21)
According to Francis Nevins, more than 1,200 writers
supplied mainly male downmarket readership of the pulp
magazines. Francis M. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich: first you
dream, then you die (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1988), quoted in David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, "Strange
pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the abandoned city of the
forties," in Shades of noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London:
Verso, 1993), 74. (22)
Server, Over my dead body, 12, 15. In
1949, Fawcett Gold Medal books began publishing paperback
originals, a practice rapidly followed by the other major
firms. Even when the books' contents did not conform to
Server's descriptions, their covers-painted in the main by
artists who had formerly worked on the pulps-suggested that
they did. In an
editorial in Publisher's weekly in June 1949,
Frederic Melcher argued that in the development of a mass
paperback market for books of adventure and romance:
(23)
"A cycle that can end in vulgarity," quoted in Davis,
Two-bit culture, 134-5. Covers
were, however, becoming increasingly suggestive: by 1950,
Popular Library was trumpeting its revealing covers as a
selling point to the trade: "Here are the bare facts! It's
the cover than reaches out and gets attention first &endash;
and Popular Library covers are
eye-dazzlers!"(24)
The paperbacks were thus "on the limit of the permissible,
far beyond movies and television and radio," occupying
cultural as well as physical shelf space with the "flood of
pornography" provided by "two-bit monthlies 'glorifying the
American girl,'" with titles like Beauty parade,
Wink, Cabaret and Eyeful, which "now
overflow the back shelves of the racks in neighborhood drug
and candy stores."(25)
(24)
Davis, Two-bit culture, 138. (25)
O'Brien, Hardboiled America, 105; Harold Orlans
quoted in Bernard Rosenberg, "Mass culture in America," in
Mass culture: the popular arts in America (New York:
Free Press, 1957), 8. The
paperback industry became a central object in the debates
over mass culture in such journals as The nation,
New republic, Harper's and Saturday
review. In The nation in 1951, for example,
Harvey Swados suggested that (26)
Quoted in Davis, Two-bit culture, 146. In June
1954, publisher Kurt Enoch, whose Signet imprint published
Spillane, argued in Literary quarterly that:
(27)
Quoted in Davis, Two-bit culture, 178. In his
introductory essay to Mass culture in 1957, Bernard
Rosenberg declared that "mass culture threatens not merely
to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while
paving the way to totalitarianism. And the interlocking
media all conspire to that
end."(28) (28)
Rosenberg, "Mass culture in America," 9. The
debate over mass culture was not, however, only the concern
of liberal intellectuals. As James Gilbert argues in his
book on the cultural crisis surrounding juvenile delinquency
in the 1950s, debates over mass culture created "curious
alliances" of left intellectuals and conservative
traditionalists aligning themselves against the advertising
and media industries.(29)
The loudest and most persistent denunciations of mass
culture came from local and national groups: parent-teacher
associations, civic, fraternal and church groups, and other
voices of the respectable middlebrow opinion who held
movies, paperbacks and crime comics responsible for rising
delinquency figures. Crystallising arguments about the
capacity of mass media to incite children to commit criminal
acts, Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the innocent was
published in 1953.(30)
Wertham's arguments featured prominently in the testimony
presented to the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile
Delinquency in the mid 1950s. Under Senator Estes Kefauver's
chairmanship, the Subcommittee undertook a highly publicised
investigation into the industries of mass culture and the
effects of their products, advocating that stricter systems
of self-regulation should run in parallel with state and
local regulatory bodies, through which communities could
determine local standards of decency and morality, and
subject controversial movies, television programmes, and
publications to bad publicity.(31)
(29)
James Gilbert, A cycle of outrage: America's reaction to
the juvenile delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 7 (30)Fredric
Wertham, Seduction of the innocent (Port Washington,
New York: Kennikat Press, 1953. For discussions of Wertham,
see Gilbert, A cycle of outrage, p 91-108, and Martin
Barker, A haunt of fears: the strange history of the
British horror comics campaign (London: Pluto, 1984)
56-70. (31)
Gilbert, A cycle of outrage, 160-1. Few
positions within the debates over mass culture avoided
contradiction. Wertham, for instance, opposed the broad
cultural censorship that many of his supporters advocated,
and shared Dwight Macdonald's elitist cultural critique of
modern American commercial civilization. While the debates
over the effects of mass culture were partly framed within
the widespread social anxieties over the perceived postwar
growth in juvenile delinquency, those anxieties were
themselves expressions of a pervasive perception that
"society was coming apart, that pernicious outside
influences could now breach the walls of community and
family institutions."(32)
This perception also manifested itself in the anticommunist
agitation of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the two
phenomena were not infrequently linked. In her testimony to
the Subcommittee, Lois Higgins, Director of the Chicago
Crime Prevention Bureau, suggested that like delinquency,
drugs and obscene materials were "secret weapons" in a
"deadly war" being waged by the "Communist enemy … to
destroy the decency and morality which are the bulwarks of
society."(33)
Expressing far more than it could logically explain, the
allusive relationship between delinquency, Communism and
mass culture transferred responsibility for delinquency away
from the family home to outside forces guided from media
centres in New York and Hollywood, permeating every home,
affecting all classes of children, and promoting values
contrary to those of many
parents.(34)
In such a matrix of contradictions, it is perhaps neither
surprising nor even really ironic that the same perceptions
of social disintegration instigated by outside forces that
provoked anxieties over delinquency and mass culture's
representation of crime were extensively present within
those representations themselves. Repeatedly in crime movies
of the 1950s, society was disordered by external agencies,
and anxious, uncomprehending protagonists sought, often with
only limited success, to comprehend and overcome the agents
of disorder. Had Lois Higgins, Fredric Wertham or Dwight
Macdonald recognised the mass cultural artefacts they
decried as being possessed of a noir sensibility,
they might have viewed them as expressions of the
alienation, isolation and brutalisation of contemporary
culture, rather than as instances of these experiences. As
it was, however, the strange bedfellows of 1950s cultural
anxiety regarded the products of mass culture as so many
emanations from Pandora's box. (32)
Gilbert, A cycle of outrage, 76. (33)
Quoted in Gilbert, A cycle of outrage, 75. (34)
Gilbert, A cycle of outrage, 77. In May
1952 the House of Representatives authorised an
investigation of the paperback, magazine and comic business
to determine the extent of "immoral, obscene or otherwise
offensive matter" or "improper emphasis on crime, violence
and corruption." The House Committee on Current Pornographic
Materials, chaired by Kansas Democrat Ezekiel C. Gathings,
opened hearings on 1 December 1952, with a statement
attacking paperback reprinters for "the dissemination of
artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion
and degeneracy," and assailed the "lurid and daring
illustrations of voluptuous young women on the covers of the
books." The committee heard mainly from friendly witnesses,
such as Rev. Thomas Fitzgerald, director of the Catholic
National Organization for Decent Literature, who demanded an
industry code, measures to prevent such material reaching
children, laws prohibiting transportation of obscene
material and the establishment of a permanent Congressional
Committee. One friendly publisher urged an industry code
modelled on the Production Code. Another submission, from
John B. Keenan, director of public safety in Newark, New
Jersey, suggested that "If the Communists are not behind
this drive to flood the nation with obscenity, to weaken the
moral fibre of our youth and debauch our adults, then it is
only because the greedy business men are carrying the ball
for them."(35)
One of the two representatives of the industry who testified
was treated in a manner similar to that of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities' dealings with
"unfriendly" witnesses. While none of the committee's
proposals became law, one immediate result of the Gathings
Committee was the toning down of cover designs. The hearings
also gave encouragement to local groups and police censors'
actions in removing from the newstands paperback titles they
found offensive. Catholic organisations frequently took the
lead in these actions, and court victories by publishers in
New Jersey and Ohio in 1953 did little to deter
them. (35)
Quoted in Davis, Two-bit culture, 228. Because
of their extraordinary successes and excesses, Spillane's
books became central objects in debates over mass culture.
To some extent his success had defined the paperback
readership for the industry. Although his books were not
banned anywhere-unlike those of Erskine Caldwell, his only
rival in sales and popularity in the period-he was much more
intensely the focal point of liberal elite anxiety over the
fate of the published word. For critics such as Bernard
Rosenberg, who called him the "latest lickspittle" of the
publishing industry, Spillane served as "a symbol of the
most terrifying aspects of American culture, and his
fantastic success a vindication of their worst
fears."(36)
In a Saturday review article called "Mickey Spillane
and his bloody Hammer," published on 6 November 1954,
Christopher La Farge argued that Mike Hammer "is the logical
conclusion, almost a sort of brutal apotheosis, of
McCarthyism," in the belief that the ends justify the means.
According to La Farge, Spillane had succeeded in making
acceptable to a huge public a character who (36)
Rosenberg, "Mass culture in America," 5; O'Brien,
Hardboiled America, 105. (37)
Christopher La Farge, "Mickey Spillane and his bloody
Hammer," Saturday review, 6 November 1954, reprinted in
Mass culture: the popular arts in America (New York:
The Free Press 1957), 177, 184. La
Farge's article was published three days after the Kiss
me deadly script was submitted to the PCA. It
articulates, with some precision, the position Aldrich
subsequently expressed about Hammer. It was not, of course,
the only article to do so. La Farge's-and Aldrich's-position
was the common currency of liberal intellectuals when
looking at this material. It provides a context in which to
examine what kind of movie could be made from a Spillane
novel in 1955, and for whom such a movie would be made. Biff
Eliott, star of the first Spillane adaptation, I the
jury (USA 1953), claimed that "women readers go for Mike
Hammer because they like the way he handles his girls. He'd
as soon hit them as kiss them, and somehow that sort of
treatment appeals to the latent atavism in
women."(38)
Histories of the paperback industry, however, maintain that
the readership for tough crime thrillers emphasising sex and
violence were men: predominantly blue-collar adult males,
with a significant if more covert readership of adolescent
males.(39)
Critical writing on film noir frequently relates its
preoccupations to those of its source material, but as yet
little attention has been paid to the cultural status of
that material, and even less to the socio-cultural position
of its core readershi (40)
Clearly, an argument can be made (as an assumption commonly
is made) that movies derived from such sources were bound by
their origins to be regarded as "lurid," "cheap and trashy
pictures"-that is, as having the cultural capital of a
B-movie, whatever their budget might have
been.(41)
While much work remains to be done on the distribution and
exhibition patterns of low- and mid-budget films noir
in order to better establish where, and to what kinds of
audiences, they played, the evidence provided both by their
economic status and their publicity material strongly
suggests that the primary target audience for tough crime
movie thrillers emphasising sex and violence was closely
related to the readership of their published equivalents.
The trade reviews for the Spillane adaptations make clear
that their exploitation values lay in their sources'
"reputation for hardboiled sex mellers": (38)
Quoted in Eddie Muller, Dark city: the lost world of film
noir (London: Titan, 1998), 80. (39)
More poetically, David Reid and Jayne Walker suggest that
the "ideal reader" of Cornell Woolrich's fiction "had no
immediate prospects and a hangover." Reid and Walker,
"Strange pursuit," 75. (40)
As Deborah Thomas observes, "most critics and viewers share
a sense … of the essential male-centredness of film
noir," but few have attributed this with any precision
to specific target audience of these movies. Deborah Thomas,
"How Hollywood deals with the deviant male," in The Movie
book of film noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio
Vista, 1992), 59. (41)
The terms come from sources cited in Lea Jacobs, "The B film
and the problem of cultural distinction," Screen Vol.
33: No. 1 (Spring 1992), p 1-13. See also Eric Schaefer,
"Resisting refinement: the exploitation film and
self-censorship," Film history Vol. 6: No. 3 (Autumn
1994), 293-313. (42)
Review of I the jury, Variety, 22 July
1953. Variety's
review of Kiss me deadly observed that the
ingredients that sold Spillane's novels: (43)
Review of Kiss me deadly, Variety, 27 April
1955. The
"undiscriminating entertainment seekers" bought their
tickets for this kind of filmfare in the inner-city
grindhouses and "action" theatres catering to a
predominantly male audience-"murky, congested theaters,
looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and
located near bus terminals in big
cities",(44)
as Manny Farber described them and also in the suburban
neighbourhood theatres where double bills were deliberately
constructed out of contrasting material, so that "a virile
action picture" would be "mated with a sophisticated society
play," in the hope of broadening the audience for the
programme as a whole.(45)
Identifying the target audience for these pictures was the
responsibility of the personnel involved in their publicity,
promotion, distribution and exhibition, not those involved
in their production. The pictures' commercial success would,
however, largely depend on how successful that audience
thought they were in delivering their predetermined
exploitation values. The audience they identified was,
clearly, not the majority movie audience, and its size and
socio-economic circumstance may explain something about the
budgets of these movies. (44)
"These theaters roll action films in what at first, seems
like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints
that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected
with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action
films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate
discharged from a giant sponge." Manny Farber, "Underground
films" Commentary, 1957, reprinted in Manny Farber,
Negative space: Manny Farber on the movies (London:
Studio Vista, 1971), 15. (45)
Douglas Gomery, Shared pleasures: a history of movie
presentation in the United States (London: British Film
Institute, 1992), 137; Eric Schaefer, "Bold! Daring!
Shocking! True!: a history of exploitation films,
1919-1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999),
119; Frank Ricketson Jr., The management of motion
picture theatres (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938),
83. The
combination of Spillane's cultural disrepute and the
anticipated audience dictated the status of movie
adaptations of his works. Four of the seven novels were
adapted in the 1950s, all by the same production company,
Parklane Productions, headed by Victor Saville, a British
producer-director who had directed several Jessie Matthews
musicals in the 1930s, before working as an MGM producer on
Goodbye Mr. Chips (US/Great Britain 1939)and Garbo's
last film, A woman's face (USA 1941). Saville had
bought the screen rights to Spillane's novels. He
produced I, the jury in 1953, and directed The
long wait (USA 1954) and My gun is quick (USA
1957). He was executive producer of Kiss me deadly.
Spillane seems to have had some minor involvement in the
production of several of these movies, possibly including
Kiss me deadly;(46)
since the Spillane-Saville relationship survived Kiss me
deadly, it might be assumed that neither of them were
radically dissatisfied with the
result.(47)
(46)
The July 1955 issue of Male magazine published the
script of a screen test that Spillane allegedly wrote,
directed and produced in the hope of getting "real life
tough-guy hometown cop" Jack Stang the role of Hammer in
Kiss me deadly. The script is reproduced at
http://www.interlog.com/~roco/screentest.html. (47)
Indeed, according to Aldrich, Spillane "never understood
that this was the greatest Spillane put-down in a long time.
He just thought that it was a marvellous picture." John
Calendo, "Robert Aldrich says, 'Life is worth living,'"
Andy Warhol's Interview, III (August 1973), 30.
Silver and Ursini list My gun is quick among projects
on which Aldrich worked in 1954. Silver and Ursini,
Whatever happened to Robert Aldrich?, 332 Kiss
me deadly was marketed at the existing, urban, male,
blue-collar audience for film noir and for Spillane's
novels. Advertising and promotional material consistently
identified Spillane as the movie's author, and featured his
name far more prominently than those of any of the cast and
crew: one tag-line used on a number of advertisements called
the movie "Mickey Spillane's latest H-bomb!" Another press
book item conflated Spillane and Ralph Meeker's Hammer. A
photograph showing Meeker and the four most prominent female
members of the cast was captioned: (48)
This production still is reproduced at http://www.neosoft.com/~meeker/thegirls.html. Kiss
me deadly's commercial obligation to meet the
expectations of its intended audience ensured that it would
attract the hostile attention of those various cultural
forces critical of its source material. The process of
adaptation had, therefore, to find ways of anticipating and
accommodating the likely objections of those "responsible
citizens" decrying the effects of violence in the media and
also, to a lesser extent, the criticisms of the liberal
cultural elite. The movie's encounter with the Production
Code Administration was the principal site of these
accommodations, in which the commercial value of adapting an
unfilmable, best-selling, subversive book about law
enforcement encountered the industry's constraints on
expression to emerge, through what I have elsewhere called
the multiple logics of Hollywood production, as a culturally
contradictory text.(49)
(49)
Richard Maltby, Hollywood cinema: an introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 30-5. The
Production Code had a determining influence on the narrative
of Kiss me deadly, necessitating an alteration in
what Aldrich called the "moving force of the
story."(50)
In a memo written ten days after Aldrich had begun
discussions about the script in September 1954, Van Schmus
reported: (50)
Letter, Aldrich to Shurlock, 10 September 1954 PCA Kiss
me deadly file. (51)
September 20th, Memo for files, PCA Kiss me deadly
file. The
Production Code necessitated what both Aldrich and Van
Schmus saw as a fundamental adjustment to the plot, by
requiring that the central plot device be changed from drugs
to something else. Van Schmus' second basic objection to the
plot of the novel was "its portrayal of Mike Hammer, private
detective, as a cold blooded murderer whose numerous
killings are completely justified. His taking of the law
into his own hands and successfully bringing the criminals
to 'justice' by killing them, is in complete violation of
the Code." While Aldrich seemed initially reluctant to
abandon the drug plot, Van Schmus reported that he was
confident that this problem could be overcome as easily as
the "numerous items of brutality and sex-suggestiveness"
which would have to be eliminated. The script that Aldrich
submitted in early November had, indeed, eliminated the
major problems, and simply needed attention to details of
dialogue, action and costuming. Although the PCA appear to
have required some minor alterations in the final picture,
it was awarded a Seal relatively unproblematically, and the
PCA synopsis describes the ending as
"moral."(52)
Aldrich was fulsome in his praise for the treatment he had
received: (52)
Aldrich's letter to Shurlock of 11 February, quoted below,
begins by expressing his "appreciation and gratitude for
your office reconsidering their decision not to pass my
picture Kiss me deadly." The PCA file, however,
contains no details of any changes required, which suggests
that the matter was relatively minor and resolved informally
through discussion. In a 1970 interview with Alain Silver,
Aldrich reported having had some difficulty with the way
that Madi Comfort, the bar singer, handles her microphone.
"Appendix: interview with Robert Aldrich," in Silver and
Ursini, Whatever happened to Robert Aldrich?,
351. It
is most gratifying to know that your office understood
and agreed with what we have tried so hard to
accomplish. Namely, to successfully marry the
commercial value of the Spillane properties with a
morality that states justice is not to be found in a
self-appointed one man
vigilante.(53)
(53)
Letter, Aldrich to Shurlock, 11 February 1955, PCA Kiss
me deadly file. At this
point, however, things went a little off the rails. In the
20 February edition of the New York herald tribune
there appeared an article signed by Aldrich entitled "You
can't hang up the meat hook," in which he declared that the
adaptation "kept faith with 60 million Mickey Spillane
readers," and defended the picture as a work of "action,
violence, and suspense in good
taste."(54)
Aldrich justified the portrayal of violence in his films by
arguing that "such phases of human behavior can be neither
ignored nor removed from any true pictorial account of the
emotions of two-legged animals." The article was, clearly,
in part a promotional exercise for Kiss me deadly,
and included a detailed description and justification of the
scene in which Christina is tortured: (54)
Quoted in Naremore, More than night, 152. Aldrich
concluded that "60 per cent" of what people perceived in
this scene "will be the product of their own thinking." The
article title was a direct provocation to the arbiters of
public taste and morality, and it elicited an immediate
response from the editors of America, the Jesuit-run
Catholic weekly review most closely aligned with the Legion
of Decency, which had also participated in the campaign
against paperbacks. The America editorial described
Aldrich's argument as springing "from subhuman thinking. It
defends depravity [and] tries to justify
morbidity."(55)
(55)
"Sex and violence 'justified,'" America, 5 March
1955, 583-4. Given
this exchange, it was hardly surprising that the Legion of
Decency should subject the movie to close scrutiny,
demanding over thirty changes, cuts and deletions if it was
to avoid a condemned classification. On 18 April, Aldrich
telegrammed Geoffrey Shurlock, director of the PCA,
that: (56)
Telegram, Aldrich to Shurlock, 18 April 1955, PCA Kiss me
deadly file. The
dispute with the Legion took two weeks to resolve, and on 5
May Kiss me deadly was classified as B (suitable for
adults), with the comment: "this film tends to glorify
taking the law into one's own hands, moreover, it contains
excessive brutality and suggestiveness in costuming,
dialogue and situations." Its American release was delayed
by a month through what was probably simply an ill-advised
piece of promotional material. United Artists had
difficulties advertising it in part of the South and the
Midwest, and several foreign censor boards, including those
in Britain and Australia, insisted on further cuts in its
violence and brutality before allowing it to be
exhibited.(57)
(57)
PCA Kiss me deadly file; Naremore, More than
night, 155. Within
a month of the movie's release, in June 1955, the Senate
Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by
Estes Kefauver, descended on Hollywood to interrogate the
current state Code enforcement. Because of the notoriety of
its source and its exchange with the Legion, Kiss me
deadly was one of a couple of dozen movies cited during
the hearings for its excessive violence and dubious
morality. In these public forums, at least, Aldrich's
critique had not surfaced: the interpretation he proposed,
which we now find so evident, was not legible through the
interpretative predispositions created by the source
material, and the contradictory forces operating on the
movie's production and promotion. The Kefauver Committee's
report was generally critical of Code enforcement, and
proposed that the Code be revised to eliminate some of its
archaic moralisms and then be firmly enforced. The 1956 Code
revisions followed Kefauver's suggestions; it is, perhaps,
ironic to contemplate that one of them, which permitted the
use of narcotics in plots, would have eliminated the need
for the thermonuclear Maguffin and the interpretative chaos
that ensues from the decision, as the script puts it in the
final scene, to "let's go
fission."(58)
(58)
While this change in the Code is frequently attributed to
the major studios' acquisition of source material for
"adult" movies involving drug use, such as The man with
the golden arm, it is worth noting parenthetically that
Variety reported that Jack Webb, producer and star of
the top-rating television series Dragnet, had the
script for a spin-off feature film rejected by the PCA
because of its drug references, despite the fact that
thirteen episodes of the series had a drug theme and "nobody
got aroused over them." Variety, 18 January 1956, 17,
quoted in Black, The Catholic crusade,
154. While
none of the argument in this paper seeks to contradict
auteurist claims made on Aldrich's behalf for his
subversive intentions, it does suggest that the
institutional framework within which these intentions may
have surfaced determined their possibility. The PCA's
insistence on the movie's anti-heroic treatment of its
protagonist required the attitudinal shifts that are, by
critical convention, attributed either to Aldrich and
Bezzerides as authors or to noir as a sensibility.
Unable to discard the commercial value of the source
material in an overt and explicit rejection of its
protagonist, the production was obliged to resort to
strategies of incoherence, contradiction and allusion. The
subsequent critical repositioning of the movie provided a
framework in which this breakdown of convention could assume
interpretative malleability. If the
conditions of its production determined that Kiss me
deadly was conceived in contradiction, a related set of
conditions ensured that, at the time of its release, it
could not have been constructed as the object it would
eventually become: a version of the American art film. The
American art film was brought into possibility in the
postwar decade through the development of an art house
exhibition circuit and its nurturing of an audience that
"embraced 'art' and considered films
seriously."(59)
This exhibition circuit was, however, itself the site of
discursive conflict in the 1950s. While several groups
benefited from their investment in the cultural capital of
the art cinema and its concomitant disavowal of the
economic, the "exploitation value" of art cinema resided
substantially in the association of art, particularly
European art, with sex. In 1948 Variety reported that
while most foreign films earned 60 percent of their American
revenues in New York, "sexacious pix or those with a good
exploitation angle garner 25% from Gotham and the balance
from the hinterlands."(60)
Thus, in the hands of exploitation distributor Kroger Babb,
Ingmar Bergman's ninety-five-minute-long Summer with
Monika (Sweden 1953), for example, became the sixty-two
minute Monika, the story of a bad girl, advertised as
"A picture for wide screens and broad
minds."(61)
(59)
Barbara Wilinsky, "'A thinly disguised art veneer covering a
filthy sex picture': discourses in art houses in the 1950s,"
Film history Vol. 8 (1996), 147. (60)
"Sexacious sellin best b.o. slant for foreign language films
in U.S.," Variety, 9 June 1948, 18, quoted in
Schaefer, "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 335. (61)
Schaefer, "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,
335-6. If art
films had exploitation value through their relative sexual
explicitness, they also had discursive value for both sides
in debates over censorshi The widespread press condemnation
of the Production Code Administration's refusal, in 1950, to
grant its Seal of Approval to The bicycle thief
(Italy 1949) emphasised the Code's incompatibility with the
representational ambitions of contemporary art. Neorealism,
in particular, presented an example of artistic freedom
unavailable to American
filmmakers.(62)
The Supreme Court's 1952 decision in Burstyn vs.
Wilson established that motion pictures were "a
significant medium for the communication of ideas," and
therefore protected under the First and Fourteenth
Amendments of the constitution. The decision was, however,
made on the relatively narrow grounds that the New York
censorship standard of "sacriligious" was an
unconstitutional abridgement of freedom of speech. In order
to reach this decision, the Court declared that it was not
necessary for it to decide "Whether a state may censor
motion pictures under a clearly drawn statute designed and
applied to prevent the showing of obscene
films."(63)
Subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court and lower courts
ruled that other state and municipal censorship standards,
proscribing films on the grounds that they were considered
"immoral," "indecent," "harmful" or "of such character as to
be prejudicial to the best interests of the people," were
unconstitutionally vague and indefinite. These decisions
eventually restricted the operations of prior censorship to
the sole acceptable grounds of obscenity or sexual
immorality.(64)
As Richard Randall has argued, however, the Supreme Court's
decision not to examine the constitutionality of prior
censorship per se "left unanswered the question of how the
theory of free speech-essentially elitist in terms of the
tolerance it assumes and requires-would be reconciled with a
mass medium."(65)
(62)
In 1950 the MPAA established an Advisory Unit to help
foreign film producers adapt their films to the Production
Code, but neither this strategy, nor the attempts of foreign
filmmakers to use the status of art to evade the Code,
succeeded in securing their films wider American
distribution. Wilinsky, "'A thinly disguised art veneer'"
147, 149. (63)
Joseph Burstyn v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 506 (1952),
quoted in Mass media and the Supreme Court: the legacy of
the Warren years, ed. Kenneth S. Devol (Revised 2nd
edn., New York: Hastings House, 1976), 165. (64)
Edward de Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned films:
movies, censors and the first amendment (New York:
Bowker, 1982), 234-65. (65)
Richard Randall, Censorship of the movies: the social and
political control of a mass medium (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 31. At
least in the short term, this unanswered question maintained
a distinction in public discourse and industry practice
between a "mature" European art cinema enjoying limited
circulation, and the American cinema's provision of
undifferentiated mass entertainment. Throughout the
controversy surrounding the Supreme Court's decision over
The miracle (episode of L'amore, Italy 1948)
in Burstyn vs. Wilson, the press sided with the
film's distributor against the Catholic Church's attempts to
suppress what it regarded as blasphemy. In doing so, it
maintained a clear-cut distinction between the censorship of
art films and the censorship of mass entertainment. A 1955
Newsweek article entitled "How do you see the movies?
As entertainment and offensive at times or as candid art?"
suggested that "healthy-minded people" appreciating motion
pictures as entertainment: (66)
"How do you see the movies? As entertainment and offensive
at times or as candid art?," Newsweek, 8 August 1955,
50. Quoted in Wilinsky, "A thinly disguised art veneer,"
155. This
distinction was enshrined in the 1957 Supreme Court decision
in Roth v. United States, in which the Court held
that "obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally
protected speech or press," but also took its "first
significant step toward vesting literary and artistic
expression in the abstract with constitutional
protection," declaring that "all ideas having even the
slightest redeeming social importance-unorthodox ideas,
controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing
climate of opinion" were protected under the
Constitution.(67)
The
Roth decision recognised the existence of a diversity
of communities and standards, but, as Edward de Grazia
argues, the struggle by American artists, writers and
publishers to gain freedom from censorship on its premise
that "artistic expression was meant to be protected as fully
by the first Amendment as were religious and political
expression" continued for several
decades.(68)
(67)
Edward de Grazia, Girls lean back everywhere: the law of
obscenity and the assault on genius (New York: Random
House, 1992), 319 (68)
de Grazia, Girls lean back everywhere,
321. Undoubtedly,
the series of court decisions restricting prior censorship
in the 1950s weakened the PCA's position within the
industry: in overturning a ban on The moon is blue
(USA 1953), a Maryland court observed that "if the
Production Code were law, it would be plainly
unconstitutional" because its terminology was "absurd if
literally enforced and … fatally vague as a legal
standard."(69)
What emerged in the "factionalism, uncertainty, and
inconclusiveness" of the debates about movie censorship in
the 1950s was that the homogenous cultural standard
enshrined in the Production Code was no longer
tenable.(70)
As Ellen Draper has argued, "when there was no longer a
viable consensus on what movies were, or could be, or should
be, there was also no longer a focus for the debate on the
means and aims of censorshi "(71)
While the Code's continued existence ensured that the
majority of the films involved in censorship cases were
European films with evident claims to artistic status, the
Miracle decision had established that entertainment
was no longer per se denied constitutional
protection.(72)
In the wake of that decision, Draper argues, "Hollywood
could not simply wait until the problem of adjusting the
movies to a newly diverse audience was settled in the public
and legal arena, but neither could it suddenly produce
'foreign movies.'"(73)
The 1951, 1954 and 1956 Code revisions and the appearance of
an "adult" category of Hollywood production represented
attempts by the industry to adjust to shifting audiences and
shifting cultural and economic
circumstances.(74)
But whatever Hollywood movies were being held up in the
1950s as deserving constitutional protection on the basis of
their artistry or expression of ideas of "redeeming social
importance," they were clearly not low-budget crime
melodramas like Kiss me deadly lacking sufficient
cultural capital to merit a New York times
review.(75)
(69)
Quoted in De Grazia and Newman, Banned films, 87; Gregory
Black, The Catholic crusade against the movies,
1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
132. (70)
Ellen Draper, "'Controversy has probably destroyed forever
the context': The miracle and movie censorship in America in
the fifties," The velvet light trap 25 (Spring 1990),
70. (71)
Draper, "'Controversy has probably destroyed forever the
context,' 73. (72)
Of the American films, Baby doll (USA 1956) could
declare the artistic credentials of its writer Tennessee
Williams and director Elia Kazan. Only Otto Preminger's
The moon is blue might have been considered as
nothing more than entertainment, and the censorship
controversy it provoked resulted from state and municipal
censor boards banning it because it had been refused a
Production Code Seal. (73)
Draper, "'Controversy has probably destroyed forever the
context,' 76-7. (74)
Barbara Klinger, "'Local' genres: the Hollywood adult film
in the 1950s," in Melodrama: stage picture screen,
eds Jackie Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London:
British Film Institute, 1992), 134-46. (75)
In describing Spillane's books in his discussion of Kiss
me deadly, James Naremore declares them to be "devoid of
any redeeming social content." Naremore, More than
night, 152. The
Kefauver delinquency hearings indicated that a cultural
framework permitting Kiss me deadly to be interpreted
as an act of aesthetic subversion did not exist at the time
of the movie's American release. In a 1956 interview with
Francois Truffaut, Aldrich regretted "having accepted the
job" of making the movie: (76)
Edward Gallafent, "Kiss me deadly," in The movie
book of film noir, 241. Subsequently,
his attitude toward the movie's original audience seems to
have hardened: in 1973 he commented that (77)
Calendo, "Robert Aldrich says," 30. While
he declared that it was not as deep "a piece of piercing
philosophy as the French thought it was," he did claim that
it had "a basic significance in our political framework that
we thought rather important in those McCarthy times: that
the ends did not justify the
means."(78)
While such an interpretation was not incompatible with the
one he had offered the PCA, it was inflected somewhat
differently. (78)
Silver and Ursini, Whatever happened to Robert
Aldrich?, 348. If the
cultural climate of the United States in the 1950s did not
facilitate an interpretation of Kiss me deadly as an
exercise in aesthetic subversion, the conditions of its
European reception were significantly different. In his
recent examination of the contexts of noir, James
Naremore suggests that a plausible case could be made that
"noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern
culture," a belated act of re-interpretation and
appropriation creating an art of negation in Hollywood's
otherwise remorseless atmosphee of cultural
affirmation.(79)
Naremore describes the initial identification of a
noir sensibility in American cinema in postwar Paris
as involving the recognition of the "tense, contradictory
assimilation" of high modernism into the American culture
industry's melodramatic
formulas.(80)
For European critics, part of the contradiction they
discerned lay in their ambivalent relationship to American
culture; part of its resolution lay in the confirmation by
an authentically low cultural form that the America of their
imagination existed.(81)
For the elite gatekeepers of American culture, struggling to
preserve "intellectual and aesthetic values traditional to
Western civilization" from homogenisation by "the lords of
kitsch," however, this elevation of the junior branch
was a deplorable error.(82)
In 1951, Mary McCarthy recorded the incompatibility of her
critical position with that of her Parisian visitor, Simone
de Beauvoir: "She did not believe us when we said there were
no good Hollywood movies … she was merely confirmed in
her impression that American intellectuals were 'negative.'"
McCarthy and her colleagues, on the other hand, (79)
James Naremore, More than night, 10. (80)
Naremore, More than night, 7, 41. (81)
Marc Vernet describes film noir as "the synecdoche of
a continent, a history and a civilization, or more precisely
of their representation for non-natives.," he suggests, "to
the history of those who wanted to love the American
cinema." Marc Vernet, ">Film noir on the edge of
doom," in Shades of noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London:
Verso, 1993), 1, 26. (82)
Symposium on "Our country and our culture, Partisan
review Vol. 19 no. 2-5 (1952), quoted in Andrew Ross,
No respect: intellectuals and popular culture
(London: Routledge, 1989), 52; Dwight Macdonald, "A
theory of mass culture," in Mass culture>,
60. (83)
Mary McCarthy, "America the beautiful: the humanist in the
bathtub," in On the contrary (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Cudahy, 1951), p 6-7. Quoted in Reid and Walker,
"Strange pursuit," 57-8, 92. A more
self-consciously avant-garde American critical position,
however, pursued a strategy closer to that of the Europeans.
Manny Farber shared Macdonald's fear that that
"Midcult"-what Robert Warshow called the "mass culture of
the educated classes"-might overwhelm high culture through
the circulation of commodified art imitating "the forms of
culture without understanding its
essence."(84)
But Farber's response to the threat that middlebrow culture
might successfully market aesthetic value to the masses, and
thereby deliver a version of Matthew Arnold's "sweetness and
light" through the Book-of-the-month club differed from
Macdonald's pessimistic call to reinforce cultural class
hierarchies. In a prematurely postmodern gesture of
inversion, he constructed a vanguardist aesthetic out of
Hollywood's cultural detritus. The movies provided the raw
material for Farber's "termite art" precisely because
Hollywood was itself incapable of aesthetic integrity, and
its products had not been commodified into
"art."(85)
The aesthetic that he articulated in his 1957
Commentary essay, "Underground films: a bit of male
truth," explicitly rehabilitated discredited objects: the
"faceless movies, taken from a type of half-polished trash
writing" that resulted in "tight, cliché-ridden
melodramas about stock musclemen," produced in "the most
neutral, humdrum, monotonous corner of the movie
lot".(86)
For Farber, Aldrich's "viciously anti-Something movies" made
him "the most exciting" newcomer in the group of underground
artists who "are able to spring the leanest, shrewdest,
sprightliest notes from material that looks like junk, and
from a creative position that, on the surface, seems totally
uncommitted and disinterested": (84)
Robert Warshow, "The legacy of the 30's," in The
immediate experience (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 34;
Dwight Macdonald, "Masscult and midcult: II," Partisan
review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1960), 630; Greg Taylor,
Artists in the audience: cults, camp, and American film
criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 27, 47. (85)
Taylor, Artists in the audience, 37. (86)
Farber, "Underground films," 14, 16. (87)
Farber, "Underground films," 14; Farber, "Blame the
audience," (1952) in Negative space, 55. Their
"termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art" was as ephemeral as it
was unpretentious, concentrating on: (88)
Farber, "White elephant art vs. termite art (1962)", in
Negative space, 135, 144. Farber's
criticism remade the movies into the source of a resistant,
vanguard vision of popular art, not by elevating the
aesthetic intentions of their directors but by constructing
the critic as a resistant, artistic spectator, "a sort of
agent provocateur for a culture of
negation"(89)
in the diverse aesthetic and ideological positions of
academic film criticism since its emergence, representing,
as Greg Taylor has argued, the means by which "individuals
can stake a claim to artistic authority within a commodified
cultural marketplace; when we reconstruct the culture that
constructs us, we hope to transcend consumption by
aestheticizing it."(90)
8035 words
One
could discuss forever the meanings and implications of
Kiss me deadly's visual, verbal/aural
detailing, and, given the immensity of its theme, what
piece of wierdness, or tonal incongruity, or
unexpected emphasis couldn't in some way be accounted
for? Chaos has no boundaries. In a world that is going
off the deep end, everything can be made to fit and
fall in as either cause, result, oblique argument, or
appropriate mood.(6)
The
grim, sordid tone of so many postwar paperbacks could
also be ascribed to the veterans' tastes … new
styles of commercial fiction full of a gritty realism,
frankly erotic, lacking in sentiment or conventional
morality, and with an iconoclastic eagerness to
explore the controversial and the taboo. …
Sociopathic heroes, unpunished crimes, and depressive
endings were not only allowed in these paperbacks,
they were encouraged.(22)
a
vulgarity has sometimes appeared which, as at the end
of the dime novel period, can spread an unhappy aura
over the whole area of paper-covered series. This
reaching out for more readers by following the earlier
lead of the pulps as to covers and text is as
unfortunate as would be a trend towards copying the
comics in their experiments with the themes of crime
and passion … The new market has been built up by
the appeal of titles and jackets, and can be lost by
copying the worst appeals of pulps and comics …
It is important that quality be kept u
(23)
whether
this revolution in the reading habits of the American
public means that we are being inundated by a flood of
trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or
that we shall now have available cheap editions of an
ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of
basic importance to our social and cultural
environment.(26)
There
has been a sort of law: the wider the audience, the
less provocative or disturbing to established ideas
and taboos the medium has to be. The fundamental
problem … is thus to achieve a mass audience
while preserving the special virtues of
books.(27)
mocks
at and denies the efficacy of all law and decency,
flouts all laws, statutory, ethical and moral,
delights in assault and murder that is brutally
executed, sets his personal judgement always above
that of all other men but in particular above that of
those to whom government delegates law enforcement
(which he thereby constantly derogates), and makes the
words soft and honourable synonymous.
This is the philosophy, mutatis mutandis, that
has permitted to Senator McCarthy his periods of
extreme popularity throughout the nation: one man
will, beyond the normal processes, unhampered by the
normal and accepted restraints, bring the Bad to his
own form of justice.(37)
Such
ingredients as brutal mob strong boys, effete art
collectors with criminal tendencies, sexy femmes with
more basic tendencies, and a series of unsolved
killings, are mixed together in satisfactory
quantities for the undiscriminating entertainment
seeker.(42)
are
thoroughly worked over in this latest Parklane
Pictures presentation built around the rock-and-sock
character. The combo of blood, action and sex which
has attracted exploitation b.o. in previous entries
should repeat here for the situations that find this
type of filmfare sells
tickets.(43)
Beautiful
dames are the bane of Mickey Spillane's life. Ralph
Meeker as Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane's ace private
eye is surrounded by four luscious ladies in this
scene from Kiss me deadly, opening at the
… theatre. They are Gaby Rodgers, Leigh Snowden,
Cloris Leachman and Maxine
Cooper.(48)
Mr
Aldrich was informed … that this story was
basically unacceptable under the requirements of the
Production Code and that a picture based upon this
material could not be approved by this office. There
were two basic reasons for the unacceptability of this
story. First of all, the basic prop used as motivation
for the overall murder melodrama was one of narcotics.
This, of course, is in complete violation of present
Code regulations and Mr Aldrich was informed that we
could not approve any treatment whatsoever of the
illegal drug traffic.(51)
In
the Spillane pictures we have a unique and difficult
problem. The properties are of great commercial value
and yet there is not morality, or integrity, or
respect for American tradition, or the due process of
law.
The
camera focuses first on the helpless girl and her
antagonists. The situation leading up to this moment
of torture is well established and is a logical
development of the plot. Hands are then laid on the
victim, and from that moment the suspense is
maintained, the violence high-keyed and the horror
spotlighted through the sound effects, focusing the
camera in a series of close shots, on her feet, her
hands, shadows on the wall and similar devices.
This
comes as a most rude and expensive surprise since it
was my belief and understanding that there certainly
could not be that wide a divergence between the
opinions of the Legion and those of the Code
Administration. The Legion has even failed to
recognise any voice of moral righteousness which is
particularly disturbing since so much time and effort
was spent in finding and properly developing such a
voice in the film and it was my understanding that the
Code administrators both knew and appreciated this
fact. To find the Legion at this point-two days before
our general release date-in such basic disagreement
with your office, is indeed disturbing and I am afraid
extremely expensive.(56)
will
naturally not wish to be plunged, or to have their
children plunged, into violence and obscenity. On the
other hand, people who care for them as art will
insist that so long as they are art, dramatically
strong, incisive representations of life, then
violence and obscenity may be meaningful, bitter or
tragic elements in the scheme of
things.(66)
When
I asked my American friends to tell me whether they
felt my disgust for that whole mess, they said that
between the fights and the kissing scenes they hadn't
noticed anything of the
sort.(76)
Most
people in America put it down as a Spillane movie done
with a little more energy, a little more compression
… they didn't understand at all the political
implications.(77)
admired
and liked our country; we preferred it to that
imaginary country, land of the peaux rouges of
Caldwell and Steinbeck, dumb paradise of violence and
the detective story, which had excited the
sensibilities of our visitor and of the up-to-date
French literary world.(83)
These
artists are liberated from such burdens as having to
recoup a large investment, or keeping a star's
personality intact before the public; they can
experiment with inventive new ideas instead of hewing
to the old sure-fire box-office
formula.(87)
nailing
down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting
this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the
feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped
up and flung down in a different arrangement without
ruin.(88)
