KISS ME DEADLY

   Film (1955). Parklane. Prod and dir Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Maxine Cooper, Gaby Rogers, Chloris Leachman. Screenplay A.I. Bezzerides, based remotely on Kiss Me Deadly (1952) by Mickey Spillane. 105 mins. B/w.

   This extraordinary film noir, now recognized as one of the greatest of its period, substitutes a boxful of radioactivity - a kind of surrogate atom bomb - for the packet of narcotics everyone seeks control of in Spillane's original. In a sadly tarnished world, the lethal Pandora's Box takes on a glamour which literally shines out - destroying the world - at the apocalyptic climax. Painful and furious, KMD gives an extraordinarily abrasive quality to thestereotypes of the private-eye genre, but it is the box itself that dominates the movie, growing from an apparent MCGUFFIN into an icon of a menacing future, the object of worship in an impoverished present which, by implication, yearns for the hard white light that abolishes all shadows.

   PN

   See also: CINEMA.