Kiss Me Deadly
Nightmare Alley
Evening, toots. What’s a fine dame like you doing at a shady blog like this? My favorite month may have ended, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped watching dark, mysterious, macabre cinema. It’s officially November, or Noirvember as my fellow cinephiles have dubbed it, so as per usual, I’m diving into some deep, dark noir at the start of this (in theory) chilly and thrilly month. As I’ve stated before, noir is more than just a genre, era, or style of film. I won’t attempt to actually define noir, though, because I’m already terrified of the incel-side of film nerds, and I’d hate to say the wrong thing. There’s a sleek, chic, effortless coolness to film noir. It’s in the clouds of cigarette smoke, the moan of jazz music, the strategic use of shadows and scandals and secrets. The stakes are always high, the men’s pants are even higher, and before the picture wraps up, someone almost always ends up dead. Some noir selections are definitely better than others, but they all have an undeniable charm and memorability that not every form of cinema can reach. Noir, perhaps more than any flavor of film, reflects the depravity of society and the seedy, selfish capabilities of man, which can make for some truly twisted, often bleak storytelling. As someone who tires of the saccharine, spoon-fed nature of modern day films that often lean on the same, stale IP, I feel invigorated watching a cynical, sometimes sadistic film noir, where the only ounce of fantasy is how sexy the gumshoes are. I am slowly but surely familiarizing myself with more noir, and the gargantuan pantheon of hardboiled, fast-talkin’, fatalistic films within this arena, so, on this dark, dark night, let’s explore two more nefarious, notorious noir classics.
Let’s begin with a film that—like most noir—made me feel profoundly confused and a bit insane until the full picture came into clear view, this is Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly. I’d heard that this film greatly inspired director Quentin Tarantino, and when the film opened on a woman’s bare feet, it all made sense. Kiss Me Deadly, based on Mickey Spillane’s novel of the same name, begins with a young Cloris Leachman (in her film debut), panicked, breathing heavily, wearing nothing but a trench coat as she sprints down a dark, desolate road at night. She desperately tries to flag down every car that passes by, but it’s not until she stands directly in front of an oncoming vehicle, that has to swerve out of the way to avoid her, that she finally gets picked up. Behind the wheel is Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker, who I think looks exactly like my paternal grandfather lol), private detective and general tough guy, who is annoyed but intrigued by this woman who is clearly in trouble. The woman sobs and Mike says, “Let me guess: you got left by some guy who thought ‘no’ was a three letter word.” But it is soon revealed that this woman, named Christina, has just escaped a psychiatric hospital, and Mike decides to protect her and play along as they go through a police checkpoint. Christina requests to be dropped off at the nearest bus stop, and though Mike tries to get more information out of her, she refuses. “If we don’t make it to that bus stop,” she says, “remember me.” Soon after, Mike and Christina are apprehended by a group of shady men, who send the two careening down a cliff, leaving only Mike alive. When he finally comes to in the hospital, his assistant/lover, Velda (Maxine Cooper), tells him he’ll have to spend a few more weeks recuperating, but as soon as he’s up on his feet, Mike is determined to figure out what happened. He suspects that this Christina woman was involved in something “big”, and even though his detective friends tell him to just stick to his regular “penny-ante divorce cases”, he is eager to solve this puzzling and increasingly sinister case. As he tracks down people who were connected to Christina, like her former roommate, Lily (Gaby Rodgers), and a mob boss named Carl Evello (Paul Stewart), Mike is tailed by more and more shady gentlemen, and he seems to understand the situation even less. And when Mike discovers a mysterious box with a white-hot light emanating from it, his detective friend Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), warns Mike with a few simple but loaded phrases like “The Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and Trinity.” With that coded but direct language, it seems as if Mike is going to finally drop this case, until Velda goes missing, and he makes it his mission to find her and put a stop to this madness. I may not have done the best job summarizing Kiss Me Deadly, because I found the experience of watching this film to be somewhat confusing and at times, monotonous. This happens to me sometimes when I watch noir, perhaps because my 2026 brain is trying to solve the case myself and read between lines that were never necessarily hiding any secrets. For the majority of the film, for example, I was certain that Wesley Addy’s character was the bad guy because his performance was so needlessly, egregiously creepy. I just found this particular story to be a bit too convoluted for its own good, with too many characters that wound up being irrelevant, and it only started to materialize into something really interesting in the last 5 or 10 minutes. The last 2 minutes, in particular, are more exciting and compelling than any other part of the film. It’s a shame, because the overarching themes of Kiss Me Deadly are pretty fascinating, and its particular brand of celluloid paranoia is clearly a product of Cold War anxiety. Kiss Me Deadly has been described as “the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fiction film noir of all time”, and it is also a time capsule of Los Angeles and the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill, before 1960s urban development changed everything. It’s not that I disliked Kiss Me Deadly, in fact I liked it better the more that it went on, but I wish I’d been as dazzled by it as so many others have been. I wish I felt the same way as François Truffaut, who said, “In this movie the inventiveness is such that we don’t know what to look at—the images are almost too full, too fertile. Watching a film like this is such an intense experience that we want it to last for hours. It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page. This is the film of a young director who is not yet worried about restraint.” Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard have touted Kiss Me Deadly as the “single American film most responsible for the French New Wave” and in the decades since its release, that mysterious, glowing box at the center of its narrative has inspired Repo Man, Pulp Fiction, Ronin, Southland Tales, Guardians of the Galaxy, Raiders of the Lost Arc, and probably a lot more. Dense with complexity and clunky eroticism, I can see why Kiss Me Deadly is so foundational, but it’s still far from my favorite noir.
Tonight’s next film, on the other hand, may become one of my favorite noir classics of all time, this is Edmund Goulding’s 1947 carnival noir: Nightmare Alley. This film immediately had more going for it, in my specific, narrow opinion, because the circus has always been a uniquely frightening place to me, and I was already a big fan of Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 remake (though I may be its only fan.) Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley follows a slick traveling carnival’s “barker”, Stanton “Stan” Carlisle (Tyrone Power), who is endlessly fascinated by the grotesqueries and curiosities of these attractions, though he seemingly thinks he’s above it all, saying to one of his fellow carnies, “To see those yokels out there gives you a superior feeling, as if you know something they don’t. I can’t describe it, but I like it.” Stan helps gather the crowd for Mademoiselle Zeena’s (Joan Blondell) once top-billed vaudeville act, and Zeena’s drunken husband, Pete, barely shows up on time. Their gimmick is simple yet complex—they speak in an undetectable code that allows Zeena to give the illusion that she is reading the minds of strangers in the crowd—and Stan is hoping he can get in on this particular grift. Stan’s opportunity finally comes one night in Texas, when Pete’s bottle of moonshine is “accidentally” swapped out for a bottle of wood alcohol, and the poor, old drunk drops dead. It takes no time for Stan to start making moves on Zeena, professionally and romantically, and whether she likes it or not, Zeena can admit that Stan has taken to this trick very well. Stan’s charm and engagement with the audience feels natural, and in no time, he has the code cracked perfectly. All the while, Stan is falling in love with Molly Carlisle (Coleen Gray), and when their romance is discovered, they are for some reason forced into a shotgun marriage, and must leave the carnival. Stan isn’t worried, though, for he now knows everything he needs to start his own show of deception, and now he’s got an even younger and hotter woman to assist him. And just like that, Stan becomes “The Great Stanton”, and along with Molly, he becomes a well-known and adept mentalist who performs to enraptured high-end crowds every night. Eventually, at one of these expensive nightclub shows, he catches the eye of psychologist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), who quickly figures out how Stan is fooling the crowd, and tries her best to trip him up. Stan doesn’t fall for her bait, but he is intrigued by Lilith, so he begins to use her psychiatric services. Soon enough, the two bond over their methods of mind-reading, if you will, and they begin to work together in a shockingly invasive, unethical way. And though Stan thinks he’s running the show, Lilith may be far more cunning than the clever Stan could even imagine. Nightmare Alley is gorgeous and tense and oh-so-dark. The dialogue is consistently compelling, not to mention gloriously modern, and every single player was thoroughly convincing in their portrayals. Coleen Gray, in particular, stood out to me, not only because she’s stunning and wears the prettiest dresses, but because she took what could’ve been a shallow role and turned it into something emotional and interesting. And Tyrone Power, who took this role because he was eager to stop playing good-guy romantic leads, is marvelously Machiavellian as the dangerously ambitious Stan, who, by the end of this film, experiences a kind of Greek tragedy. Ironically, this film was a bit of a flop upon its release for this exact reason, because audiences weren’t ready to see Tyrone Power be so devilish, and to be so good at it, but it has since found a devoted, cult-like audience. I found Nightmare Alley to be instantly-engrossing and consistently-exciting. It’s a trick mirror of a film that hooks you in then leaves you questioning everything by the end. Because I’d seen the remake, I knew exactly how this story was going to go, and I was still absolutely gob smacked by the ending. There’s just an entrancing eeriness to this story, and the fact that the author of the novel, William Lindsay Gresham, died by suicide in 1962, in the same room in the Hotel Carter where he wrote the first draft of Nightmare Alley, only adds to its creepy legacy. Clearly I’m still clinging on to the delightfully dark vibes of the month of Halloween, so I’m happy to embrace more noir and soak up all of its seedy, greedy goodness. Thanks for reading along, my femme and them fatales, and don’t let the ne’er-do-wells get ya down.
