Monogram pulls down the noir shades with jumeuax identiques, in this crime whodunit based on a Cornell Woolrich story. (His book, Black Alibi, became The Leopard Man, directed by Jacques Tourneur.) For a budget movie, the pressbook is in color and well presented. I’m not sure the twin sundae idea is a good promotion, but crime and pretty dames times two sells seats anyway.
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John Stanley, in his Creature Features Strikes Again movie guide, wrote: “Fuzzy, unadjusted Bela Lugosi whodunit in which two brothers…are involved with development of TV. There’s also a death ray…” Death rays were all the rage in the 1930s. Television must have been very mysterious and wondrous back then. Now, you can watch “television” on your cell phone, which kind of kills the wondrous aspect of it as we’re so over-saturated with streaming content. We’re spoiled rotten. Now, if my cell phone had a death ray…well, I’d be staring at it in wonder. I don’t think anyone’s written about putting death rays in cell phones yet, so you heard it here first. Then again, what if you pressed the death ray button instead of the camera button? On second thought, death rays on cell phones may prove disastrous for selfies. But I digress. There’s an interesting article in this pressbook, Lugosi Make-Up Filmland Wonder. My guess is it’s a fluff piece someone thought up, but I don’t recall reading about Lugosi’s talents with makeup. Usually, Lon Chaney was the one often mentioned, who puttied around with–oh, look, a pun!–the greasepaint and collodion.
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Mickey Spillane wasn’t too happy with how Richard Aldrich’s movie version of his book turned out. Mike Hammer wasn’t nice at all, the dangerous and deadly something in the car trunk proved too hot to handle, and the downbeat storyline spiralling into worse makes Kiss Me Deadly quite an unnerving, unsavory, and brutal experience, permeated with existential fear. Perfect! You want film noir? This is the darkest you’ll come across. Ralph Meeker is brutal. The pressbook may play up the dames angle for all it’s worth, but the movie’s not about dames. It’s about death, violence, and more death. The deadly macguffin in the car trunk would be purloined by Repo Man (1984) with a less violent and fatal wind up.
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Ah, the good old days, when promotion contests were all about the beautiful dames in movies. Well, maybe not so good with all that objectification of women in the movies of the time. They were either angels or devils, and the men on screen always had trouble telling the difference. At least in film noir the women usually gave as good (or bad) as they got. Are women more dangerous? You be the judge. As film noir goes, this one may be too much for you to handle. Are you hardboiled enough to take it?
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