I've been sending emails back and forth with my dad regarding the movie Kiss Me Deadly. Never mind its cruelty, possible misogyny, and ultra-sleazy characters. It's pretty much THE neo-noir, predating Chinatown by more than fifteen years - it was made in 19-freaking-55. How had I not seen this movie before? Stop reading this and watch it.
It's hard to gush about this one without spoiling it, but I'll try. For one thing, though there are one or two sympathetic characters, Mike Hammer is definitely not among them. He's a bastard and a sleaze. An interesting one, okay, but few film protagonists are this nasty. His big realization isn't that he needs to redeem himself; rather, it's that this case is indeed light-years beyond his paygrade.
The plot turns on the hunt for a box containing something so valuable that nearly everyone who falls into its path is marked for death. That makes it sound like a fairly standard detective-story plot, right? Think of the item as a blend of The Maltese Falcon itself...and Jaws. (Interestingly, the box's path seems to have influenced that of The Case from Pulp Fiction, and its moment of revelation is directly referenced (I'm not kidding) in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And I love that there are multiple loose ends. Little effort is made to explain what the item is doing there or what most of the major players have to do with it - it's exactly as the secretary says, a Great Whatsit that seems to turn people into a reflection of itself (as before, a destroying power). As such, the story exchanges the normally intellectual detective-story path for a visceral and even illogical one. It takes the pulp narrative to a surreal extreme.
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