Uploaded 30 June 2000

Hardboiled private eye meller from the Mickey Spillane pen, featuring blood, action and sex for exploitable b.o.[1] To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.[2]

In early November 1954, Robert Aldrich submitted a draft script of Kiss Me Deadly(USA 1955) to the Production Code Administration (PCA). In an accompanying letter to PCA official Albert Van Schmus, Aldrich described the changes he and scriptwriter A. I. Bezzerides had made in the script’s source material, the Mickey Spillane novel Kiss Me, Deadly, published the previous year. In particular, Aldrich drew attention to the script’s having removed “the narcotics complication” that the PCA had found most troublesome in their initial comments on the “problems inherent in the project in relation to securing Code approval.” [3]  “Being reasonably well aware of the Code and its interpretation,” Aldrich later wrote, “we have also avoided any direct conflict with the Code Administration.” Then he hesitated. “Of course,” he noted, “there is always the problem of interpretation.” [4]  Taken out of context, this comment seems prophetic: Kiss Me Deadly has been subject to multiple acts of interpretation since its critical discovery by writers for Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, who hailed Aldrich as the “first director of the atomic age,” and Kiss Me Deadly as “the crime film of tomorrow, free from all restraints and its own roots,” on its French release in late 1955.[5]  Regardless of the fluctuations in Aldrich’s status as an auteur, Kiss Me Deadly has become a canonic text of film noir, demonstrably responsive to critical attention. According to Jack Shadoian:

One could discuss forever the meanings and implications of Kiss Me Deadly‘s visual, verbal/aural detailing, and, given the immensity of its theme, what piece of wierdness, or tonal incongruity, or unexpected emphasis couldn’t in some way be accounted for? Chaos has no boundaries. In a world that is going off the deep end, everything can be made to fit and fall in as either cause, result, oblique argument, or appropriate mood.[6]  

As an object “constituted as much by its own fractures as by its cohesion and sense,” Kiss Me Deadly is now generally received as both a political allegory and as a subversive text; in particular, a conscious generic and ideological subversion, on the part of both Aldrich and scriptwriter A.I. Bezzerides, of its source text.[7]  Accounts of the movie describe Spillane’s novel as “thoroughly obnoxious,” “solipsistic and reactionary,” frequently citing Aldrich’s comments to Francois Truffaut in 1956 that its protagonist Mike Hammer represented an “anti-democratic spirit,” and his later statement that he saw Hammer as a “cynical and fascistic private eye,” whom he viewed with “utter contempt and loathing.”[8]

I wish to re-examine and complicate this critical location of the movie as subversive by providing a number of overlapping contexts for it. In doing so, I am not seeking to challenge the movie’s critical reputation, but rather engaging in a form of cultural history that tries to situate a complex artefact like Kiss Me Deadly more concretely within the culture in which it was formed and in which it initially functioned as both a cultural and an economic entity.[9]  In the final part of this essay, I also explore the circumstances of Kiss Me Deadly‘s subsequent separate existence as the apotheosis of noir.

In critical analyses of the movie, Aldrich’s statement in a 1974 interview that he and Bezzerides “took the title and threw the book away” has frequently been taken at face value.[10]  My interest is not so much in the accuracy of Aldrich’s claim, since discarding the entirety of a book’s plot certainly fell within the normal range of Hollywood’s practices of adaptation.[11]  I am, rather, concerned with the circumstance surrounding the commercial and cultural status of Spillane’s work-in industry parlance, its “exploitation value”-that might have permitted or encouraged such an action.

In his discussion of The Big Combo (USA) another film noir released in 1955, Chris Hugo seeks to demonstrate how the economic conditions governing that movie’s production provided the opportunity for it to “break with mainstream convention (even those of late 1940s film noir)” in a manner undertaken much more self-consciously by Kiss Me Deadly. Hugo suggests that “the particular conditions of production were in large part the determinants of the film’s ‘oppositional’ feel”: expensive action sequences beyond the scope of the production budget were replaced by “complicated, often long, speeches” setting out “positions designed to be intense and, perhaps, controversial,” while the plot was “convoluted and, at times, improbable, even by film noir standards.” Thus, Hugo argues, a movie made “with a thoroughly commercial outcome in mind can appear today as ‘ideas-led,’ ‘modern’ and ‘sophisticated’ (in the ‘art-house’ sense). … The reasons for The Big Combo looking as it does appear to be bound up with the particular way that a talented director … got the maximum impact out of a poorly conceived commercial production package.” [12] The Big Combo was, in the event, a commercial disappointment: while Hugo attributes this to its concentration on cast over other production values, James Naremore suggests that it would have appeared already dated at the time of its release, a studioish throwback to the kind of thing Hollywood was doing five years earlier.” [13] Kiss Me Deadly, by contrast, was a modest financial success.[14]  Released within three months of each other, the two movies catered to the same market. Positioned within the production-distribution system as programmers capable of occupying either half of a neighbourhood theatre’s double-bill, they were each budgeted at approximately $400,000. Kiss Me Deadly‘s distributor, United Artists, released around twenty-five programmers with production budgets between $100,000 and $400,000 in 1955. For UA, these movies served to spread the overhead costs of their distribution operation rather than to make profits in themselves: Tino Balio accurately describes them as “fodder for the distribution mill.” [15] The most obvious factor distinguishing the commercial conditions of the two movies’ production was that The Big Combo was an original screenplay by Philip Yordan, while Kiss Me Deadly was an adaptation of one of the most popular books in the United States.

In 1956, seven of the ten best-selling titles in American publishing were written by Mickey Spillane, at a time when he had written only seven books.[16]  Estimates of Spillane’s sales vary widely, but a reasonably conservative one is that twenty-four million copies of his books had been published by June 1954.[17] The popularity of Spillane’s books makes it quite remarkable that they had not attracted more attention from Hollywood. The absence of high-budget adaptations, featuring major stars, merits an explanation, particularly since the author seemed disinclined to preserve the sanctity of his work in the process of adaptation, declaring his motto to be: “You can keep all your awards. All I want is a big fat check.” [18]  The explanation does not lie in the content or even the presumed ideological position of the books, which was infinitely malleable in the mill of the industry’s procedures for adaptation. It lies, rather, in the awkward relationship between the film and paperback industries, in the cultural disrepute in which the paperback industry and its products were held during the first half of the 1950s, and in the specific audience for its products.

The paperback industry had its beginnings in the period immediately before the Second World War, and expanded considerably during the war with government support through the mass production of Armed Services Editions, distributed free to American troops.[19]  In the immediate postwar period, paperback publishers assumed that the majority readership for paperbacks were, as Lee Server puts it, “largely a mass of ex-G.I.s who had picked up a taste for portable fiction while in uniform.” [20] In the late 1940s, paperbacks effectively replaced pulp magazines, both physically on the news-stands which were their principal sales outlet, and as a point of publication for the writers of American popular fiction and the artists who illustrated them.[21]  Paperback publishers initially reprinted books already published in hardback, and published a considerable range of material, widening the market for writers and increasing literacy. Volume sales were, however, dominated by sales of popular fiction, especially mysteries, with much of the output-148 million books sold in 1948, 200 million in 1950-catering to what Server calls “the former soldiers’ supposed preference for sexy, violent stories, plainly written and not too long.”

The grim, sordid tone of so many postwar paperbacks could also be ascribed to the veterans’ tastes … new styles of commercial fiction full of a gritty realism, frankly erotic, lacking in sentiment or conventional morality, and with an iconoclastic eagerness to explore the controversial and the taboo. … Sociopathic heroes, unpunished crimes, and depressive endings were not only allowed in these paperbacks, they were encouraged. [22]

In 1949, Fawcett Gold Medal books began publishing paperback originals, a practice rapidly followed by the other major firms. Even when the books’ contents did not conform to Server’s descriptions, their covers-painted in the main by artists who had formerly worked on the pulps-suggested that they did.

In an editorial in Publisher’s Weekly in June 1949, Frederic Melcher argued that in the development of a mass paperback market for books of adventure and romance:

a vulgarity has sometimes appeared which, as at the end of the dime novel period, can spread an unhappy aura over the whole area of paper-covered series. This reaching out for more readers by following the earlier lead of the pulps as to covers and text is as unfortunate as would be a trend towards copying the comics in their experiments with the themes of crime and passion … The new market has been built up by the appeal of titles and jackets, and can be lost by copying the worst appeals of pulps and comics … It is important that quality be kept up [23]

Covers were, however, becoming increasingly suggestive: by 1950, Popular Library was trumpeting its revealing covers as a selling point to the trade: “Here are the bare facts! It’s the cover than reaches out and gets attention first &endash; and Popular Library covers are eye-dazzlers!” [24]  The paperbacks were thus “on the limit of the permissible, far beyond movies and television and radio,” occupying cultural as well as physical shelf space with the “flood of pornography” provided by “two-bit monthlies ‘glorifying the American girl,'” with titles like Beauty Parade, Wink, Cabaretand Eyeful, which “now overflow the back shelves of the racks in neighborhood drug and candy stores.” [25]

The paperback industry became a central object in the debates over mass culture in such journals as The Nation, New Republic, Harper‘s and Saturday Review. In The Nation in 1951, for example, Harvey Swados suggested that:

whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public means that we are being inundated by a flood of trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or that we shall now have available cheap editions of an ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of basic importance to our social and cultural environment.[26]

In June 1954, publisher Kurt Enoch, whose Signet imprint published Spillane, argued in Literary Quarterly that:

There has been a sort of law: the wider the audience, the less provocative or disturbing to established ideas and taboos the medium has to be. The fundamental problem … is thus to achieve a mass audience while preserving the special virtues of books. [27]

In his introductory essay to Mass Culture in 1957, Bernard Rosenberg declared that “mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism. And the interlocking media all conspire to that end.” [28]

The debate over mass culture was not, however, only the concern of liberal intellectuals. As James Gilbert argues in his book on the cultural crisis surrounding juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, debates over mass culture created “curious alliances” of left intellectuals and conservative traditionalists aligning themselves against the advertising and media industries.[2]  The loudest and most persistent denunciations of mass culture came from local and national groups: parent-teacher associations, civic, fraternal and church groups, and other voices of the respectable middlebrow opinion who held movies, paperbacks and crime comics responsible for rising delinquency figures. Crystallising arguments about the capacity of mass media to incite children to commit criminal acts, Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1953.[30] Wertham’s arguments featured prominently in the testimony presented to the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the mid 1950s. Under Senator Estes Kefauver’s chairmanship, the Subcommittee undertook a highly publicised investigation into the industries of mass culture and the effects of their products, advocating that stricter systems of self-regulation should run in parallel with state and local regulatory bodies, through which communities could determine local standards of decency and morality, and subject controversial movies, television programmes, and publications to bad publicity.[31]

Few positions within the debates over mass culture avoided contradiction. Wertham, for instance, opposed the broad cultural censorship that many of his supporters advocated, and shared Dwight Macdonald’s elitist cultural critique of modern American commercial civilization. While the debates over the effects of mass culture were partly framed within the widespread social anxieties over the perceived postwar growth in juvenile delinquency, those anxieties were themselves expressions of a pervasive perception that “society was coming apart, that pernicious outside influences could now breach the walls of community and family institutions.” [32] This perception also manifested itself in the anticommunist agitation of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the two phenomena were not infrequently linked. In her testimony to the Subcommittee, Lois Higgins, Director of the Chicago Crime Prevention Bureau, suggested that like delinquency, drugs and obscene materials were “secret weapons” in a “deadly war” being waged by the “Communist enemy … to destroy the decency and morality which are the bulwarks of society.” [33]  Expressing far more than it could logically explain, the allusive relationship between delinquency, Communism and mass culture transferred responsibility for delinquency away from the family home to outside forces guided from media centres in New York and Hollywood, permeating every home, affecting all classes of children, and promoting values contrary to those of many parents.[34] In such a matrix of contradictions, it is perhaps neither surprising nor even really ironic that the same perceptions of social disintegration instigated by outside forces that provoked anxieties over delinquency and mass culture’s representation of crime were extensively present within those representations themselves. Repeatedly in crime movies of the 1950s, society was disordered by external agencies, and anxious, uncomprehending protagonists sought, often with only limited success, to comprehend and overcome the agents of disorder. Had Lois Higgins, Fredric Wertham or Dwight Macdonald recognised the mass cultural artefacts they decried as being possessed of a noir sensibility, they might have viewed them as expressions of the alienation, isolation and brutalisation of contemporary culture, rather than as instances of these experiences. As it was, however, the strange bedfellows of 1950s cultural anxiety regarded the products of mass culture as so many emanations from Pandora’s box.

In May 1952 the House of Representatives authorised an investigation of the paperback, magazine and comic business to determine the extent of “immoral, obscene or otherwise offensive matter” or “improper emphasis on crime, violence and corruption.” The House Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, chaired by Kansas Democrat Ezekiel C. Gathings, opened hearings on 1 December 1952, with a statement attacking paperback reprinters for “the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy,” and assailed the “lurid and daring illustrations of voluptuous young women on the covers of the books.” The committee heard mainly from friendly witnesses, such as Rev. Thomas Fitzgerald, director of the Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature, who demanded an industry code, measures to prevent such material reaching children, laws prohibiting transportation of obscene material and the establishment of a permanent Congressional Committee. One friendly publisher urged an industry code modelled on the Production Code. Another submission, from John B. Keenan, director of public safety in Newark, New Jersey, suggested that “If the Communists are not behind this drive to flood the nation with obscenity, to weaken the moral fibre of our youth and debauch our adults, then it is only because the greedy business men are carrying the ball for them.” [35]  One of the two representatives of the industry who testified was treated in a manner similar to that of the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ dealings with “unfriendly” witnesses. While none of the committee’s proposals became law, one immediate result of the Gathings Committee was the toning down of cover designs. The hearings also gave encouragement to local groups and police censors’ actions in removing from the newstands paperback titles they found offensive. Catholic organisations frequently took the lead in these actions, and court victories by publishers in New Jersey and Ohio in 1953 did little to deter them.

Because of their extraordinary successes and excesses, Spillane’s books became central objects in debates over mass culture. To some extent his success had defined the paperback readership for the industry. Although his books were not banned anywhere-unlike those of Erskine Caldwell, his only rival in sales and popularity in the period-he was much more intensely the focal point of liberal elite anxiety over the fate of the published word. For critics such as Bernard Rosenberg, who called him the “latest lickspittle” of the publishing industry, Spillane served as “a symbol of the most terrifying aspects of American culture, and his fantastic success a vindication of their worst fears.” [36]  In a Saturday Review article called “Mickey Spillane and his bloody Hammer,” published on 6 November 1954, Christopher La Farge argued that Mike Hammer “is the logical conclusion, almost a sort of brutal apotheosis, of McCarthyism,” in the belief that the ends justify the means. According to La Farge, Spillane had succeeded in making acceptable to a huge public a character who mocks at and denies the efficacy of all law and decency, flouts all laws, statutory, ethical and moral, delights in assault and murder that is brutally executed, sets his personal judgement always above that of all other men but in particular above that of those to whom government delegates law enforcement (which he thereby constantly derogates), and makes the words soft and honourable synonymous. This is the philosophy, mutatis mutandis, that has permitted to Senator McCarthy his periods of extreme popularity throughout the nation: one man will, beyond the normal processes, unhampered by the normal and accepted restraints, bring the Bad to his own form of justice.[37]

La Farge’s article was published three days after the Kiss Me Deadly script was submitted to the PCA. It articulates, with some precision, the position Aldrich subsequently expressed about Hammer. It was not, of course, the only article to do so. La Farge’s-and Aldrich’s-position was the common currency of liberal intellectuals when looking at this material. It provides a context in which to examine what kind of movie could be made from a Spillane novel in 1955, and for whom such a movie would be made. Biff Eliott, star of the first Spillane adaptation,I the Jury (USA 1953), claimed that “women readers go for Mike Hammer because they like the way he handles his girls. He’d as soon hit them as kiss them, and somehow that sort of treatment appeals to the latent atavism in women.” [38] Histories of the paperback industry, however, maintain that the readership for tough crime thrillers emphasising sex and violence were men: predominantly blue-collar adult males, with a significant if more covert readership of adolescent males.[39] Critical writing on film noir frequently relates its preoccupations to those of its source material, but as yet little attention has been paid to the cultural status of that material, and even less to the socio-cultural position of its core readershi [40]   Clearly, an argument can be made (as an assumption commonly is made) that movies derived from such sources were bound by their origins to be regarded as “lurid,” “cheap and trashy pictures”-that is, as having the cultural capital of a B-movie, whatever their budget might have been.[41]  While much work remains to be done on the distribution and exhibition patterns of low- and mid-budget films noir in order to better establish where, and to what kinds of audiences, they played, the evidence provided both by their economic status and their publicity material strongly suggests that the primary target audience for tough crime movie thrillers emphasising sex and violence was closely related to the readership of their published equivalents. The trade reviews for the Spillane adaptations make clear that their exploitation values lay in their sources’ “reputation for hardboiled sex mellers”:

Such ingredients as brutal mob strong boys, effete art collectors with criminal tendencies, sexy femmes with more basic tendencies, and a series of unsolved killings, are mixed together in satisfactory quantities for the undiscriminating entertainment seeker.[42]

Variety‘s review of Kiss Me Deadly observed that the ingredients that sold Spillane’s novels:

are thoroughly worked over in this latest Parklane Pictures presentation built around the rock-and-sock character. The combo of blood, action and sex which has attracted exploitation b.o. in previous entries should repeat here for the situations that find this type of filmfare sells tickets.[43]

The “undiscriminating entertainment seekers” bought their tickets for this kind of filmfare in the inner-city grindhouses and “action” theatres catering to a predominantly male audience-“murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities”,[44]  as Manny Farber described them and also in the suburban neighbourhood theatres where double bills were deliberately constructed out of contrasting material, so that “a virile action picture” would be “mated with a sophisticated society play,” in the hope of broadening the audience for the programme as a whole.[45]  Identifying the target audience for these pictures was the responsibility of the personnel involved in their publicity, promotion, distribution and exhibition, not those involved in their production. The pictures’ commercial success would, however, largely depend on how successful that audience thought they were in delivering their predetermined exploitation values. The audience they identified was, clearly, not the majority movie audience, and its size and socio-economic circumstance may explain something about the budgets of these movies.

The combination of Spillane’s cultural disrepute and the anticipated audience dictated the status of movie adaptations of his works. Four of the seven novels were adapted in the 1950s, all by the same production company, Parklane Productions, headed by Victor Saville, a British producer-director who had directed several Jessie Matthews musicals in the 1930s, before working as an MGM producer on Goodbye Mr. Chips (US/Great Britain 1939) and Garbo’s last film, A Woman’s Face (USA 1941). Saville had bought the screen rights to Spillane’s novels. He produced I, the Jury in 1953, and directed The Long Wait (USA 1954) and My Gun is Quick (USA 1957). He was executive producer of Kiss Me Deadly. Spillane seems to have had some minor involvement in the production of several of these movies, possibly including Kiss Me Deadly;[46]  since the Spillane-Saville relationship survived Kiss Me Deadly, it might be assumed that neither of them were radically dissatisfied with the result.[47]

Kiss Me Deadly was marketed at the existing, urban, male, blue-collar audience for film noir and for Spillane’s novels. Advertising and promotional material consistently identified Spillane as the movie’s author, and featured his name far more prominently than those of any of the cast and crew: one tag-line used on a number of advertisements called the movie “Mickey Spillane’s latest H-bomb!” Another press book item conflated Spillane and Ralph Meeker’s Hammer. A photograph showing Meeker and the four most prominent female members of the cast was captioned:

Beautiful dames are the bane of Mickey Spillane’s life. Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s ace private eye is surrounded by four luscious ladies in this scene from Kiss Me Deadly, opening at the … theatre. They are Gaby Rodgers, Leigh Snowden, Cloris Leachman and Maxine Cooper.[48]

Kiss Me Deadly‘s commercial obligation to meet the expectations of its intended audience ensured that it would attract the hostile attention of those various cultural forces critical of its source material. The process of adaptation had, therefore, to find ways of anticipating and accommodating the likely objections of those “responsible citizens” decrying the effects of violence in the media and also, to a lesser extent, the criticisms of the liberal cultural elite. The movie’s encounter with the Production Code Administration was the principal site of these accommodations, in which the commercial value of adapting an unfilmable, best-selling, subversive book about law enforcement encountered the industry’s constraints on expression to emerge, through what I have elsewhere called the multiple logics of Hollywood production, as a culturally contradictory text.[49]

The Production Code had a determining influence on the narrative of Kiss Me Deadly, necessitating an alteration in what Aldrich called the “moving force of the story.” [50]  In a memo written ten days after Aldrich had begun discussions about the script in September 1954, Van Schmus reported:

Mr Aldrich was informed … that this story was basically unacceptable under the requirements of the Production Code and that a picture based upon this material could not be approved by this office. There were two basic reasons for the unacceptability of this story. First of all, the basic prop used as motivation for the overall murder melodrama was one of narcotics. This, of course, is in complete violation of present Code regulations and Mr Aldrich was informed that we could not approve any treatment whatsoever of the illegal drug traffic.[51]

The Production Code necessitated what both Aldrich and Van Schmus saw as a fundamental adjustment to the plot, by requiring that the central plot device be changed from drugs to something else. Van Schmus’ second basic objection to the plot of the novel was “its portrayal of Mike Hammer, private detective, as a cold blooded murderer whose numerous killings are completely justified. His taking of the law into his own hands and successfully bringing the criminals to ‘justice’ by killing them, is in complete violation of the Code.” While Aldrich seemed initially reluctant to abandon the drug plot, Van Schmus reported that he was confident that this problem could be overcome as easily as the “numerous items of brutality and sex-suggestiveness” which would have to be eliminated. The script that Aldrich submitted in early November had, indeed, eliminated the major problems, and simply needed attention to details of dialogue, action and costuming. Although the PCA appear to have required some minor alterations in the final picture, it was awarded a Seal relatively unproblematically, and the PCA synopsis describes the ending as “moral.”[52]  Aldrich was fulsome in his praise for the treatment he had received:

In the Spillane pictures we have a unique and difficult problem. The properties are of great commercial value and yet there is not morality, or integrity, or respect for American tradition, or the due process of law.

It is most gratifying to know that your office understood and agreed with what we have tried so hard to accomplish. Namely, to successfully marry the commercial value of the Spillane properties with a morality that states justice is not to be found in a self-appointed one man vigilante.[53]

At this point, however, things went a little off the rails. In the 20 February edition of the New York Herald Tribune there appeared an article signed by Aldrich entitled “You can’t hang up the meat hook,” in which he declared that the adaptation “kept faith with 60 million Mickey Spillane readers,” and defended the picture as a work of “action, violence, and suspense in good taste.”[54] Aldrich justified the portrayal of violence in his films by arguing that “such phases of human behavior can be neither ignored nor removed from any true pictorial account of the emotions of two-legged animals.” The article was, clearly, in part a promotional exercise for Kiss Me Deadly, and included a detailed description and justification of the scene in which Christina is tortured:

The camera focuses first on the helpless girl and her antagonists. The situation leading up to this moment of torture is well established and is a logical development of the plot. Hands are then laid on the victim, and from that moment the suspense is maintained, the violence high-keyed and the horror spotlighted through the sound effects, focusing the camera in a series of close shots, on her feet, her hands, shadows on the wall and similar devices.

Aldrich concluded that “60 per cent” of what people perceived in this scene “will be the product of their own thinking.” The article title was a direct provocation to the arbiters of public taste and morality, and it elicited an immediate response from the editors of America, the Jesuit-run Catholic weekly review most closely aligned with the Legion of Decency, which had also participated in the campaign against paperbacks. The America editorial described Aldrich’s argument as springing “from subhuman thinking. It defends depravity [and] tries to justify morbidity.” [55]

Given this exchange, it was hardly surprising that the Legion of Decency should subject the movie to close scrutiny, demanding over thirty changes, cuts and deletions if it was to avoid a condemned classification. On 18 April, Aldrich telegrammed Geoffrey Shurlock, director of the PCA, that:

This comes as a most rude and expensive surprise since it was my belief and understanding that there certainly could not be that wide a divergence between the opinions of the Legion and those of the Code Administration. The Legion has even failed to recognise any voice of moral righteousness which is particularly disturbing since so much time and effort was spent in finding and properly developing such a voice in the film and it was my understanding that the Code administrators both knew and appreciated this fact. To find the Legion at this point-two days before our general release date-in such basic disagreement with your office, is indeed disturbing and I am afraid extremely expensive. [56]

The dispute with the Legion took two weeks to resolve, and on 5 May Kiss Me Deadly was classified as B (suitable for adults), with the comment: “this film tends to glorify taking the law into one’s own hands, moreover, it contains excessive brutality and suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue and situations.” Its American release was delayed by a month through what was probably simply an ill-advised piece of promotional material. United Artists had difficulties advertising it in part of the South and the Midwest, and several foreign censor boards, including those in Britain and Australia, insisted on further cuts in its violence and brutality before allowing it to be exhibited. [57]

Within a month of the movie’s release, in June 1955, the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by Estes Kefauver, descended on Hollywood to interrogate the current state Code enforcement. Because of the notoriety of its source and its exchange with the Legion, Kiss Me Deadly was one of a couple of dozen movies cited during the hearings for its excessive violence and dubious morality. In these public forums, at least, Aldrich’s critique had not surfaced: the interpretation he proposed, which we now find so evident, was not legible through the interpretative predispositions created by the source material, and the contradictory forces operating on the movie’s production and promotion. The Kefauver Committee’s report was generally critical of Code enforcement, and proposed that the Code be revised to eliminate some of its archaic moralisms and then be firmly enforced. The 1956 Code revisions followed Kefauver’s suggestions; it is, perhaps, ironic to contemplate that one of them, which permitted the use of narcotics in plots, would have eliminated the need for the thermonuclear Maguffin and the interpretative chaos that ensues from the decision, as the script puts it in the final scene, to “let’s go fission.” [58]

While none of the argument in this paper seeks to contradict auteurist claims made on Aldrich’s behalf for his subversive intentions, it does suggest that the institutional framework within which these intentions may have surfaced determined their possibility. The PCA’s insistence on the movie’s anti-heroic treatment of its protagonist required the attitudinal shifts that are, by critical convention, attributed either to Aldrich and Bezzerides as authors or to noir as a sensibility. Unable to discard the commercial value of the source material in an overt and explicit rejection of its protagonist, the production was obliged to resort to strategies of incoherence, contradiction and allusion. The subsequent critical repositioning of the movie provided a framework in which this breakdown of convention could assume interpretative malleability.

If the conditions of its production determined that Kiss Me Deadly was conceived in contradiction, a related set of conditions ensured that, at the time of its release, it could not have been constructed as the object it would eventually become: a version of the American art film. The American art film was brought into possibility in the postwar decade through the development of an art house exhibition circuit and its nurturing of an audience that “embraced ‘art’ and considered films seriously.” [59] This exhibition circuit was, however, itself the site of discursive conflict in the 1950s. While several groups benefited from their investment in the cultural capital of the art cinema and its concomitant disavowal of the economic, the “exploitation value” of art cinema resided substantially in the association of art, particularly European art, with sex. In 1948 Variety reported that while most foreign films earned 60 percent of their American revenues in New York, “sexacious pix or those with a good exploitation angle garner 25% from Gotham and the balance from the hinterlands.”[60]  Thus, in the hands of exploitation distributor Kroger Babb, Ingmar Bergman’s ninety-five-minute-long Summer with Monika (Sweden 1953), for example, became the sixty-two minute Monika, The Story of a Bad Girl, advertised as “A picture for wide screens and broad minds.” [61]

If art films had exploitation value through their relative sexual explicitness, they also had discursive value for both sides in debates over censorship. The widespread press condemnation of the Production Code Administration’s refusal, in 1950, to grant its Seal of Approval to The Bicycle Thief(Italy 1949) emphasised the Code’s incompatibility with the representational ambitions of contemporary art. Neorealism, in particular, presented an example of artistic freedom unavailable to American filmmakers.[62]  The Supreme Court’s 1952 decision in Burstyn vs. Wilson established that motion pictures were “a significant medium for the communication of ideas,” and therefore protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the constitution. The decision was, however, made on the relatively narrow grounds that the New York censorship standard of “sacrilegious” was an unconstitutional abridgement of freedom of speech. In order to reach this decision, the Court declared that it was not necessary for it to decide “Whether a state may censor motion pictures under a clearly drawn statute designed and applied to prevent the showing of obscene films.”[63]  Subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court and lower courts ruled that other state and municipal censorship standards, proscribing films on the grounds that they were considered “immoral,” “indecent,” “harmful” or “of such character as to be prejudicial to the best interests of the people,” were unconstitutionally vague and indefinite. These decisions eventually restricted the operations of prior censorship to the sole acceptable grounds of obscenity or sexual immorality.[64]  As Richard Randall has argued, however, the Supreme Court’s decision not to examine the constitutionality of prior censorship per se “left unanswered the question of how the theory of free speech-essentially elitist in terms of the tolerance it assumes and requires-would be reconciled with a mass medium.” [65]

At least in the short term, this unanswered question maintained a distinction in public discourse and industry practice between a “mature” European art cinema enjoying limited circulation, and the American cinema’s provision of undifferentiated mass entertainment. Throughout the controversy surrounding the Supreme Court’s decision over The Miracle (episode of L’amore, Italy 1948) in Burstyn vs. Wilson, the press sided with the film’s distributor against the Catholic Church’s attempts to suppress what it regarded as blasphemy. In doing so, it maintained a clear-cut distinction between the censorship of art films and the censorship of mass entertainment. A 1955 Newsweek article entitled “How do you see the movies? As entertainment and offensive at times or as candid art?” suggested that “healthy-minded people” appreciating motion pictures as entertainment:

will naturally not wish to be plunged, or to have their children plunged, into violence and obscenity. On the other hand, people who care for them as art will insist that so long as they are art, dramatically strong, incisive representations of life, then violence and obscenity may be meaningful, bitter or tragic elements in the scheme of things.[66]

This distinction was enshrined in the 1957 Supreme Court decision in Roth v. United States, in which the Court held that “obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press,” but also took its “first significant step toward vesting literary and artistic expression in the abstractwith constitutional protection,” declaring that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance-unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion” were protected under the Constitution.[67] The Roth decision recognised the existence of a diversity of communities and standards, but, as Edward de Grazia argues, the struggle by American artists, writers and publishers to gain freedom from censorship on its premise that “artistic expression was meant to be protected as fully by the first Amendment as were religious and political expression” continued for several decades.[68]

Undoubtedly, the series of court decisions restricting prior censorship in the 1950s weakened the PCA’s position within the industry: in overturning a ban on The Moon is Blue (USA 1953), a Maryland court observed that “if the Production Code were law, it would be plainly unconstitutional” because its terminology was “absurd if literally enforced and … fatally vague as a legal standard.”[69] What emerged in the “factionalism, uncertainty, and inconclusiveness” of the debates about movie censorship in the 1950s was that the homogenous cultural standard enshrined in the Production Code was no longer tenable.[70] As Ellen Draper has argued, “when there was no longer a viable consensus on what movies were, or could be, or should be, there was also no longer a focus for the debate on the means and aims of censorshi “[71] While the Code’s continued existence ensured that the majority of the films involved in censorship cases were European films with evident claims to artistic status, the Miracle decision had established that entertainment was no longer per sedenied constitutional protection.[72]  In the wake of that decision, Draper argues, “Hollywood could not simply wait until the problem of adjusting the movies to a newly diverse audience was settled in the public and legal arena, but neither could it suddenly produce ‘foreign movies.'”[73]  The 1951, 1954 and 1956 Code revisions and the appearance of an “adult” category of Hollywood production represented attempts by the industry to adjust to shifting audiences and shifting cultural and economic circumstances.[74]  But whatever Hollywood movies were being held up in the 1950s as deserving constitutional protection on the basis of their artistry or expression of ideas of “redeeming social importance,” they were clearly not low-budget crime melodramas like Kiss Me Deadly lacking sufficient cultural capital to merit a New York Times review.[75]

The Kefauver delinquency hearings indicated that a cultural framework permitting Kiss Me Deadly to be interpreted as an act of aesthetic subversion did not exist at the time of the movie’s American release. In a 1956 interview with Francois Truffaut, Aldrich regretted “having accepted the job” of making the movie:

When I asked my American friends to tell me whether they felt my disgust for that whole mess, they said that between the fights and the kissing scenes they hadn’t noticed anything of the sort.[76]

Subsequently, his attitude toward the movie’s original audience seems to have hardened: in 1973 he commented that:

Most people in America put it down as a Spillane movie done with a little more energy, a little more compression … they didn’t understand at all the political implications. [77]

While he declared that it was not as deep “a piece of piercing philosophy as the French thought it was,” he did claim that it had “a basic significance in our political framework that we thought rather important in those McCarthy times: that the ends did not justify the means.”[78]  While such an interpretation was not incompatible with the one he had offered the PCA, it was inflected somewhat differently.

If the cultural climate of the United States in the 1950s did not facilitate an interpretation of Kiss Me Deadly as an exercise in aesthetic subversion, the conditions of its European reception were significantly different. In his recent examination of the contexts of noir, James Naremore suggests that a plausible case could be made that “noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern culture,” a belated act of re-interpretation and appropriation creating an art of negation in Hollywood’s otherwise remorseless atmosphee of cultural affirmation.[79] Naremore describes the initial identification of a noir sensibility in American cinema in postwar Paris as involving the recognition of the “tense, contradictory assimilation” of high modernism into the American culture industry’s melodramatic formulas.[80] For European critics, part of the contradiction they discerned lay in their ambivalent relationship to American culture; part of its resolution lay in the confirmation by an authentically low cultural form that the America of their imagination existed.[81] For the elite gatekeepers of American culture, struggling to preserve “intellectual and aesthetic values traditional to Western civilization” from homogenisation by “the lords of kitsch,” however, this elevation of the junior branch was a deplorable error.[82] In 1951, Mary McCarthy recorded the incompatibility of her critical position with that of her Parisian visitor, Simone de Beauvoir: “She did not believe us when we said there were no good Hollywood movies … she was merely confirmed in her impression that American intellectuals were ‘negative.'” McCarthy and her colleagues, on the other hand,admired and liked our country; we preferred it to that imaginary country, land of the peaux rouges of Caldwell and Steinbeck, dumb paradise of violence and the detective story, which had excited the sensibilities of our visitor and of the up-to-date French literary world.[83]

A more self-consciously avant-garde American critical position, however, pursued a strategy closer to that of the Europeans. Manny Farber shared Macdonald’s fear that that “Midcult”-what Robert Warshow called the “mass culture of the educated classes”-might overwhelm high culture through the circulation of commodified art imitating “the forms of culture without understanding its essence.”[84]  But Farber’s response to the threat that middlebrow culture might successfully market aesthetic value to the masses, and thereby deliver a version of Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light” through the Book-of-the-month club differed from Macdonald’s pessimistic call to reinforce cultural class hierarchies. In a prematurely postmodern gesture of inversion, he constructed a vanguardist aesthetic out of Hollywood’s cultural detritus. The movies provided the raw material for Farber’s “termite art” precisely because Hollywood was itself incapable of aesthetic integrity, and its products had not been commodified into “art.”[85] The aesthetic that he articulated in his 1957 Commentary essay, “Underground films: a bit of male truth,” explicitly rehabilitated discredited objects: the “faceless movies, taken from a type of half-polished trash writing” that resulted in “tight, cliché-ridden melodramas about stock musclemen,” produced in “the most neutral, humdrum, monotonous corner of the movie lot”.[86]  For Farber, Aldrich’s “viciously anti-Something movies” made him “the most exciting” newcomer in the group of underground artists who “are able to spring the leanest, shrewdest, sprightliest notes from material that looks like junk, and from a creative position that, on the surface, seems totally uncommitted and disinterested”:

These artists are liberated from such burdens as having to recoup a large investment, or keeping a star’s personality intact before the public; they can experiment with inventive new ideas instead of hewing to the old sure-fire box-office formula.[87]

Their “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art” was as ephemeral as it was unpretentious, concentrating on:

nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.[88]

Farber’s criticism remade the movies into the source of a resistant, vanguard vision of popular art, not by elevating the aesthetic intentions of their directors but by constructing the critic as a resistant, artistic spectator, “a sort of agent provocateur for a culture of negation”[89]  in the diverse aesthetic and ideological positions of academic film criticism since its emergence, representing, as Greg Taylor has argued, the means by which “individuals can stake a claim to artistic authority within a commodified cultural marketplace; when we reconstruct the culture that constructs us, we hope to transcend consumption by aestheticizing it.” [90]

Farber occupied a critical position that could have read Kiss Me Deadly as subversive; his influence was more indirect and delayed. Farber’s concept of “termite art” overlapped with subsequent definitions of noir, but Farber’s position privileged the critic rather than the author of a work. More importantly, Farber’s eclectic attention to performance and to fragments of movies-“the small detail which has arisen from a stormy competition between lively color and creativity” [91]  -preserved his own critical autonomy and inhibited the commodification of his critical position. As Greg Taylor suggests, such a stance articulated the “vanguard desire to lead but not be followed”; although the criticism of Hollywood has depended on the elevation of lowbrow art to a status above the middlebrow, it has done so through more predictable systems of evaluation and classification.[92]

Kiss Me Deadly‘s critical history began in Paris, where its creation of art from trash was celebrated by the younger critics at Cahiers du cinéma, who were then taking possession of the term noir from its surrealist originators. For them, noir described “a collective style operating within and against the Hollywood system,” and thus complemented the figure of the auteur as “an individual stylist who achieved freedom over the studio through existential choice.” [93]  Kiss Me Deadly provided the pretext for an influential instance of this definition, in Claude Chabrol’s 1955 Cahiers essay “The evolution of the crime film,” which lauded the movie’s creating itself:

…out of the worst material to be found, the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: a Mickey Spillane story. Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides have taken this threadbare and lacklustre fabric and woven it into rich patterns of the most enigmatic arabesques.[94]

In their passage across the Atlantic, both auteurism and noir came to operate as middlebrow versions of Farber’s vanguardist expression, giving their adherents the opportunity to feel “irresponsible and discriminating at the same time.”[95] Both auteurism (in the shape of Andrew Sarris’ “systematic reappraisal of the American cinema”) and genre criticism set out to classify and thus critically manage Hollywood at the same time as they redeemed “the great art in our midst” from “undeserved anonymity.”[96]  Of all these critical strategies, it is arguable that noir has been the most effective in elevating a junior branch to what Naremore has called “one of the dominant intellectual categories of the late twentieth century,” and in commodifying a style into countless repackaged variants.[97]  In these processes by which cultural detritus was aestheticised, Kiss Me Deadly occupied a position of double privilege. Itself located at a pivotal moment in noir’s becoming and thus part of a critically-created American art cinema, it was also seen to enact the postmodern critical turn by transforming commodified trash into vanguardist art through critique: a postmodern art of negation, it turns out, was released from Pandora’s Box. It was a neat trick, if one several times removed from the circumstances of its own production. As Aldrich observed when Truffaut, Chabrol and “all those guys … at Cahiers … read many, many things into Kiss Me Deadly … I appreciated their enthusiasm, but I just couldn’t take a bow for it.”[98]

Footnotes:

[1] Review of Kiss Me Deadly, Variety, 27 April, 1955.
[2] Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in The Portable Oscar Wilde, rev. ed., eds Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub (New York: Viking Penguin, 1981), 87.
[3] Letter, Robert Aldrich to Geoffrey Shurlock, 10 September 1954, Kiss Me Deadly file, Production Code Administration archive, Department of Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter PCA).
[4] Aldrich to Albert Van Schmus, 3 November 1954, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.
[5] Charles Bitsch, “Surmultipliée,” Cahiers du cinéma, No. 51 (October 1955), 3; Claude Chabrol, “Evolution du film policier,” Cahiers du cinéma No. 54 (1955), translated as “The Evolution of the Crime Film,” (trans. Alain Silver) in Film Noir Reader 2, eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), 32.
[6] Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 283.
[7] Adrian Miles, review of Kiss Me Deadly, CTEQ Vol. 2, 1996 (http://cs.art.rmit.ed.au/projects/media/cteq/v2/kiss_me_deadly/htm). See, for example, Robin Wood’s description of the critique of the hero as “devastating and uncompromised.” Robin Wood, “Creativity and evaluation: two film noirs of the fifties, (CineAction 21/22, Summer/Fall 1990), reprinted in Film Noir Reader 2, 101.
[8] Wood, “Creativity and evaluation,” 100; Francois Truffaut, “Rencontre avec Robert Aldrich,” Cahiers du cinéma No. 64 (November 1956), 4; Aldrich interview in Film index, May 1971, quoted in Robert Aldrich, ed. Richard Combs, (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 54.
[9] For an alternative approach to the project of locating film noir in its historical and cultural context ; one which seeks to provide a logic for “the intuitive reading of film noir as “about its historical and cultural moment” ; see Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge time: postwar crises and the chronotope of film noir,” in Reconfiguring Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129-70.
[10] Charles Higham, “Robert Aldrich,” Action, November-December 1974, 19. See, for instance, Alain Silver’s analysis of the movie in which he notes that “Of the opening dialogue, only one line … is from the novel.” Alain Silver and James Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? (New York: Limelight Editions, 1995), 175. For a different view, see Edward Gallafent, “Kiss Me, Deadly,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 240-6.
[11] For an examination of Hollywood’s practices of adaptation, see Richard Maltby, “‘To prevent the prevalent type of book’: censorship and adaptation in Hollywood, 1924-1934,” American Quarterly, 44;4 (1992), 554-583; republished in Movie Censorship and American Culture, ed. Frank Couvares, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 97-128.
[12] Chris Hugo, “The Big Combo: production conditions and the film text,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 251-2.
[13] James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 156.
[14] Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, 14.
[15] Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 120.
[16] Alice Payne Hackett, Sixty Years of Best Sellers, quoted in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Random House, 1993), 60.
[17] Christopher La Farge, “Mickey Spillane and his bloody Hammer,” in Mass Culture, eds Rosenberg and White, 176. Originally published in The Saturday Review, 6 November 1954.
[18] Quoted in Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984), 180.
[19] During the war, the covers of Dell paperbacks carried the message, “BOOKS ARE WEAPONS-in a free democracy everyone may read what he likes. Books educate, inform, inspire; they also provide entertainment, bolster morale. This book has been manufactured in conformity with wartime restrictions-read it and pass it on.” Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (New York: Da Capo 1997), 25.
[20] Lee Server, Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1994), 12
[21] According to Francis Nevins, more than 1,200 writers supplied mainly male downmarket readership of the pulp magazines. Francis M. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), quoted in David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, “Strange pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the abandoned city of the forties,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 74.
[22] Server, Over My Dead Body, 12, 15.
[23] “A cycle that can end in vulgarity,” quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 134-5.
[24] Davis, Two-Biit Culture, 138.
[25] O’Brien, Hardboiled America, 105; Harold Orlans quoted in Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass culture in America,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Free Press, 1957), 8.
[26] Quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 146.
[27] Quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 178.
[28] Rosenberg, “Mass culture in America,” 9.
[29] James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7
[30] Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1953. For discussions of Wertham, see Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, p 91-108, and Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto, 1984) 56-70.
[31] Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 160-1.
[32] Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 76.
[33] Quoted in Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 75.
[34] Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 77.
[35] Quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 228.
[36] Rosenberg, “Mass culture in America,” 5; O’Brien, Hardboiled America, 105.
[37] Christopher La Farge, “Mickey Spillane and his bloody Hammer,” Saturday review, 6 November 1954, reprinted in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press 1957), 177, 184.
[38] Quoted in Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (London: Titan, 1998), 80.
[39] More poetically, David Reid and Jayne Walker suggest that the “ideal reader” of Cornell Woolrich’s fiction “had no immediate prospects and a hangover.” Reid and Walker, “Strange pursuit,” 75.
[40] As Deborah Thomas observes, “most critics and viewers share a sense … of the essential male-centredness of film noir,” but few have attributed this with any precision to specific target audience of these movies. Deborah Thomas, “How Hollywood deals with the deviant male,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 59.
[41] The terms come from sources cited in Lea Jacobs, “The B film and the problem of cultural distinction,” Screen Vol. 33: No. 1 (Spring 1992), p 1-13. See also Eric Schaefer, “Resisting refinement: the exploitation film and self-censorship,” Film History Vol. 6: No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 293-313.
[42] Review of I the Jury, Variety, 22 July 1953.
[43] Review of Kiss Me Deadly, Variety, 27 April 1955.
[44] “These theaters roll action films in what at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge.” Manny Farber, “Underground films” Commentary, 1957, reprinted in Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 15.
[45] Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 137; Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 119; Frank Ricketson Jr., The Management of Motion Picture Theatres (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), 83.
[46] The July 1955 issue of Male magazine published the script of a screen test that Spillane allegedly wrote, directed and produced in the hope of getting “real life tough-guy hometown cop” Jack Stang the role of Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. The script is reproduced athttp://www.interlog.com/~roco/screentest.html.
[47] Indeed, according to Aldrich, Spillane “never understood that this was the greatest Spillane put-down in a long time. He just thought that it was a marvellous picture.” John Calendo, “Robert Aldrich says, ‘Life is worth living,'” Andy Warhol’s Interview, III (August 1973), 30. Silver and Ursini list My Gun is Quick among projects on which Aldrich worked in 1954. Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, 332
[48] This production still is reproduced at http://www.neosoft.com/~meeker/thegirls.html.
[49] Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 30-5
[50] Letter, Aldrich to Shurlock, 10 September 1954 PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.
[51] September 20th, Memo for files, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.
[52] Aldrich’s letter to Shurlock of 11 February, quoted below, begins by expressing his “appreciation and gratitude for your office reconsidering their decision not to pass my picture Kiss Me Deadly.” The PCA file, however, contains no details of any changes required, which suggests that the matter was relatively minor and resolved informally through discussion. In a 1970 interview with Alain Silver, Aldrich reported having had some difficulty with the way that Madi Comfort, the bar singer, handles her microphone. “Appendix: interview with Robert Aldrich,” in Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, 351.
[53] Letter, Aldrich to Shurlock, 11 February 1955, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.
[54] Quoted in Naremore, More Than Night, 152.
[55] “Sex and violence ‘justified,'” America, 5 March 1955, 583-4.
[56] Telegram, Aldrich to Shurlock, 18 April 1955, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.
[57] PCA Kiss Me Deadly file; Naremore, More Than Night, 155.
[58] While this change in the Code is frequently attributed to the major studios’ acquisition of source material for “adult” movies involving drug use, such as The Man with the Golden Arm, it is worth noting parenthetically that Variety reported that Jack Webb, producer and star of the top-rating television series Dragnet, had the script for a spin-off feature film rejected by the PCA because of its drug references, despite the fact that thirteen episodes of the series had a drug theme and “nobody got aroused over them.” Variety, 18 January 1956, 17, quoted in Black, The Catholic Crusade, 154.
[59] Barbara Wilinsky, “‘A thinly disguised art veneer covering a filthy sex picture’: discourses in art houses in the 1950s,” Film History Vol. 8 (1996), 147.
[60] “Sexacious sellin best b.o. slant for foreign language films in U.S.,” Variety, 9 June 1948, 18, quoted in Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 335.
[61] Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 335-6.
[62] In 1950 the MPAA established an Advisory Unit to help foreign film producers adapt their films to the Production Code, but neither this strategy, nor the attempts of foreign filmmakers to use the status of art to evade the Code, succeeded in securing their films wider American distribution. Wilinsky, “‘A thinly disguised art veneer'” 147, 149.
[63] Joseph Burstyn v. Wilson,343 U.S. 495, 506 (1952), quoted in Mass Media and the Supreme Court: The Legacy of the Warren Years, ed. Kenneth S. Devol (Revised 2nd edn., New York: Hastings House, 1976), 165.
[64] Edward de Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment (New York: Bowker, 1982), 234-65.
[65] Richard Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass Medium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 31.
[66] “How do you see the movies? As entertainment and offensive at times or as candid art?,” Newsweek, 8 August 1955, 50. Quoted in Wilinsky, “A thinly disguised art veneer,” 155.
[67] Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius(New York: Random House, 1992), 319
[68] de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 321.
[69] Quoted in De Grazia and Newman, Banned films, 87; Gregory Black, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 132.
[70] Ellen Draper, “‘Controversy has probably destroyed forever the context’: The miracle and movie censorship in America in the fifties,”The Velvet Light Trap 25 (Spring 1990), 70.
[71] Draper, “‘Controversy has probably destroyed forever the context,’ 73.
[72] Of the American films, Baby Doll(USA 1956) could declare the artistic credentials of its writer Tennessee Williams and director Elia Kazan. Only Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue might have been considered as nothing more than entertainment, and the censorship controversy it provoked resulted from state and municipal censor boards banning it because it had been refused a Production Code Seal.
[73] Draper, “‘Controversy has probably destroyed forever the context,’ 76-7.
[74] Barbara Klinger, “‘Local’ genres: the Hollywood adult film in the 1950s,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, eds Jackie Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 134-46.
[75] In describing Spillane’s books in his discussion of Kiss Me Deadly, James Naremore declares them to be “devoid of any redeeming social content.” Naremore, More Than Night, 152.
[76] Edward Gallafent, “Kiss Me Deadly,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, 241.
[77] Calendo, “Robert Aldrich says,” 30.
[78] Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, 348.
[79] James Naremore, More Than Night, 10.
[80] Naremore, More Than Night, 7, 41.
[81] Marc Vernet describes film noir as “the synecdoche of a continent, a history and a civilization, or more precisely of their representation for non-natives.,” he suggests, “to the history of those who wanted to love the American cinema.” Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the edge of doom,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 1, 26.
[82] Symposium on “Our country and our culture, Partisan Review Vol. 19 no. 2-5 (1952), quoted in Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), 52; Dwight Macdonald, “A theory of mass culture,” in Mass Culture, 60.
[83] Mary McCarthy, “America the beautiful: the humanist in the bathtub,” in On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1951), p 6-7. Quoted in Reid and Walker, “Strange pursuit,” 57-8, 92.
[84] Robert Warshow, “The legacy of the 30’s,” in The Immediate Experience (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 34; Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and midcult: II,” Partisan Review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1960), 630; Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 27, 47.
[85] Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 37.
[86] Farber, “Underground films,” 14, 16.
[87] Farber, “Underground films,” 14; Farber, “Blame the audience,” (1952) in Negative Space, 55
[88] Farber, “White elephant art vs. termite art (1962)”, in Negative Space, 135, 144.
[89] Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 15.
[90] Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 15.
[91] Farber, “Underground films,” 16.
[92] Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 58.
[93] Naremore, More Than Night, 151.
[94] Chabrol, “The evolution of the crime film,” 32.
[95] )Naremore, More Than Night, 151.
[96] Andrew Sarris, “The high forties revisited,” Film Culture 24 (Spring 1962), 70; Sarris, “The American cinema,” Film Culture 28 (Spring 1963), 1.
[97] Naremore, More Than Night, 2.
[98] Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, 347