For those interested, Ian Cameron's BOOK OF FILM NOIR also
has a few intelligent & sophisticated critical essays on
Kiss Me, Deadly; Chinatown; Out of the Past; & others.
Wish I still owned it.
----- Original Message ---- From: Mark R. Harris <
brokerharris@gmail.com> To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, December 7,
2007 9:44:11 PM Subject: RARA-AVIS: Kiss Me Deadly
Patrick
King wrote:
> Sure, OUT OF THE PAST, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS
TWICE,
> DOUBLE INDEMNITY, CASABLANCA, THE MALTESE FALCON
are
> better movies than KISS ME DEADLY, still not
many
> modern noir films come close to capturing KISS
ME
> DEADLY's essential persepctive even though
their
> stories may be better and their casts
more
> accomplished.
Debates over quality are never satisfactorily resolved, and
those are
all fine films. Nonetheless, I will say that to my taste,
which runs
to modernist complexity more than to classicism, Kiss Me
Deadly is the
most brilliant film in the list (with Out of the Past running
it very,
very close). There has been much excellent writing on the
film that
spells those modernist qualities out, but one could not do
better as a
starting point than Jack Shadoian's essay in Dreams and
Dead
Ends. "Clumsy" is one of the last words I would use; rather
it seems
to me that Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides are supremely
confident
in carrying out their artistic aims, and this results in a
panache
that is extraordinary. The ballsiness of the credits running
backward,
which Patrick rightly notes, announces to the audience that
this is
not going to be like any other film they have seen, and what
of it?
Little wonder that some folks have compared Kiss Me Deadly to
Citizen
Kane; a Wellesian bravura is in the film's DNA.
Best,
Mark
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