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Amazon.co.uk Review
Mike Hammer is a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon; he knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prize-fighters and he makes the ladies swoon--but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?"). Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. --Ali Davis
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There's no real point in describing the plot - it's as unfathomable as most of the film noir genre - it's the style that counts. Then, three quarters of the way through, the film throws a real twist at you, leading inexorably to the final beachhouse scene. At that point, conventionality goes out of the window - along with the world and everything else...
That's reason enough for watching, but if you look just under the surface there's more. The traditional sex-roles are held up to the light - male "toughness" and female "gentleness" - and both are found wanting in a world that doesn't forgive any mistakes.
Ralp Meeker's Mike Hammer is as close as you'll get to the the nasty original that Mickey Spillane wrote. (You keep thinking "this guy's the hero?".) But the film belongs to Gaby Rodgers, who was never in anything else, but should have got an Oscar for this - wow.
It's in black and white - but so are many of the best movies.
Made in 1955 by director Robert Aldrich, this is, with the exception of 'Chinatown' and 'Double Indemnity', THE film noirs to end all film noirs (the film was actually made at the close of the film noir period in Hollywood). Starring a thuggish Ralph Meeker as private investigator Mike Hammer, the story is based on Mickey Spillane's pulp fiction story about a P.I who gets involved with a woman accidently and becomes caught up in events that spiral out of control. The thing that drives the story along is his hunt for the mysterious 'Pandora's Box', an ambiguous object that is only revealed at the end of the film, when Mike's search ends up further than he would have liked.
Shot with crazy, awkward camera angles, and a startlingly vivid opening to the movie, 'KMD' not only summed up what film noir movies were all about, it also influenced a whole generation after it. Even Quentin Tarantino has borrowed from the film, when the glowing briefcase John Travolta opens in 'Pulp Fiction' harks back to the glowing box Mike Hammer opens in this film. And this was a movie shot with a low budget and unrecognisable actors in under three weeks!!
If you're a fan of crime thrillers both old and new, you must purchase 'KMD'. From its beginning to its end (probably one of the best endings ever filmed), this has to be seen to be appreciated. This is one of my favourite films ever because of its striking realism and detail - A MUST BUY!!!
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