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Kiss Me Deadly [DVD] [1955] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]
 
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Kiss Me Deadly [DVD] [1955] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

DVD ~ Ralph Meeker
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Region 1 encoding (requires a North American or multi-region DVD player and NTSC compatible TV. More about DVD formats.)

Note: you may purchase only one copy of this product. New Region 1 DVDs are dispatched from the USA or Canada and you may be required to pay import duties and taxes on them (click here for details). Please expect a delivery time of 5-7 days.


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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Kiss Me Deadly [DVD] [1955] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]
85% buy the item featured on this page:
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Product details

  • Actors: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Wesley Addy
  • Directors: Robert Aldrich
  • Writers: A.I. Bezzerides
  • Producers: Robert Aldrich, Victor Saville
  • Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
  • Language English
  • Subtitles: Spanish, French
  • Region: Region 1 (US and Canada DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: Unrated (US MPAA rating. See details.)
  • Studio: MGM
  • DVD Release Date: 19 Jun 2001
  • Run Time: 106 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00005AUK9
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 105,999 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
A terrific film noir full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots, Kiss Me Deadly is about as dark and exciting as noir gets. A young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat throws herself into the traffic to flag down help and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. Not even 15 minutes into the film and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer and, of course, a warning to stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go.

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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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
 (4)
4 star:
 (4)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A lot more to this than meets the eye..., 18 Mar 2007
By Mr. C. R. Martyr "Colin Martyr" (Midlands, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Kiss Me Deadly [DVD] [1955] (DVD)
Over thirty years ago, long, long before Sky had tied up new releases and the quality back catalogue, a film fan could educate him or herself through the simple expedient of watching terrestrial tv. Most nights from about 11 pm BBC2 was showing classics of British, world or US cinema. That's how I first stumbled on "Kiss Me Deadly" - a bored teenager flicking through the very limited range of channels available. That turned out to be one of the most memorable film experiences of my life. Its been called the best film noir ever. Its fair to say that's probably wrong, but misses the point. As a late example (1955) it represents the apogee of film noir and to my mind you really can't begin to understand it until you understand the US in the fifties - affluent and expansive but paranoid and terrified. That's assuming (and this is apparently a matter of debate) that this unique film, and in particular its conclusion, came about in the way the film makers intended.
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...

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Thriller, 25 Aug 2003
This review is from: Kiss Me Deadly [VHS] [1955] (VHS Tape)
On the surface this is a well paced thriller from the dangerous days of the cold war. The bad guys and the good guys all play hardball and there's plenty of action on the way to a truly apocalyptic ending.

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.

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36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Film Noir at it's Deadliest!!, 1 Nov 2003
By S. Notarangelo "red10devil" (Bedford, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Kiss Me Deadly [DVD] [1955] (DVD)
'Kiss Me Deadly' has to be one of the most exceptional film noirs of cinematic history. If ever there was a crime movie at its toughest, this is it!

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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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine low-budget thriller with great noir visual style. If only professional critics would stop talking about nuclear metaphors
When Nat Cole's smooth, melancholy delivery sends "Rather Have the Blues Than What I've Got" out of Mike Hammer's car radio late one night, we know nothing good is going to... Read more
Published 22 months ago by C. O. DeRiemer

5.0 out of 5 stars Top spot-low budget.
Micky Spillane was not Doestoyevski, so you'd expect films of his detective fiction to be far from Oscar-winning works.

In this case,Ralph Meeker is perfect. Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2006 by The BlackFerret

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal and the best Film Noir of them all
This film will stun you with how many immatations it has spawned. The stylised speech the scenes where the violence is just merely suggested now shown to you with popcorn dropping... Read more
Published on 25 Aug 2006 by Chaka Whyte

4.0 out of 5 stars a terrible beauty
A great artwork. Appears at first to be a piece of low budget exploitation, but the sharp dialogue, moral ambiguity and intriguing plot machinations rope you to something at once... Read more
Published on 16 Dec 2005 by digit

4.0 out of 5 stars Perfect intro to film noir
Not being altogether sure what noir was, I gave this a go and am glad I did. The black and white adds to the overall menace of a plot involving Mike Hammer, a girl named... Read more
Published on 26 Jul 2001

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