For this month’s staff pick, we’re celebrating one of film’s great narrative devices — coined by screenwriter Angus MacPhail and popularized by Alfred Hitchcock — and we guarantee you won’t want to miss this nuclear-age Noir that’s so nasty and nihilistic it’s positively radioactive.
“I chose Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly”, released in film noir’s turbulent late period, because it’s a prime example of how the genre mutated into something harsher, stranger, and unmistakably modern. Starring Ralph Meeker as the self-interested Mike Hammer and Cloris Leachman in a haunting first film role as an enigmatic hitchhiker, the film follows a seemingly routine missing-person case that spirals into a nightmare of corruption, paranoia, and a mysterious object its pursuers would kill for.”
– Staff member Gabrielle Marceau, who picked this month’s screening!
