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| Kiss Me Deadly (1955) | |
| Plot Synopsis (continued)
Typically, Hammer is more interested in Diker than Velda. He also suggests that she set up - with some of her familiar "sincerity" - another session with a 'lover boy'/adulterous husband since an incriminating audio tape of them was lost. While he lies on the couch and aloofly stares at the ceiling, his loyal aide, sexually-frustrated Velda describes her research findings about the mystery girl:
He cooly avoids her enticing, aggressively masculine sexual advances, either fearful of her or uninterested, and reminds her of other frame-up assignments that she must conduct with an adulterous 'Mr. Friendly' - he also amuses himself by listening to her seedy tapes:
That night (at about 2:10 am), Hammer drives his Corvette convertible to Ray Diker's residence at 121 Flower St. in downtown LA. He is followed from a newstand (that sells newspapers with portentious headlines about a earth-shaking quake in Eureka in N. California) by an unidentified, shadowy figure (Paul Richards). At a popcorn vendor's stand, Hammer purchases a dime bag of popcorn. [There are continuity errors in this scene. The clock behind Hammer changes time rapidly.] The camera follows the hood's footsteps down the sidewalk, and his reflection is cast in a cigarette vending-machine mirror. When the pursuer pulls out a switchblade, they engage in a hard-hitting fight. Hammer sprays the man's face with his popcorn, disarms the attacker, subdues him with his fists, repeatedly knocks the man's head against a concrete wall until he's senseless, and then mercilessly punches the man down a steep flight of stone steps. From the bottom of the long row of stairs, the camera catches the attacker as he catapults down. After the pummeling, Hammer smiles. Later, Hammer finds the Ray Diker residence and climbs the stairs of the Victorian house to the man's door. A closeup of Diker's frightened, bleeding, ulcerated, battered face appears in the window - the reason, apparently, why he "dropped out of sight." Fearless of consequences, Hammer learns Christina Bailey's address at the last place she lived - 325 Bunker Hill - and her mortal fear:
Hammer follows the trail to Christina's former home. He assists an old Italian furniture mover (Silvio Minciotti) to carry a trunk - who laments about death and mortality, and people's inconstancy and lack of roots:
He is told by Horace, the building's superintendent, that the police have already been through Christina's apartment. "Her lease still has a month to go," but the police said it could be rented again. Hammer looks for posthumous clues - African masks hanging on the wall and built-in bookcases filled with books. Her radio is set to play classical music: Schubert's Unfinished Symphony ("She always had it tuned to that station"). Her bird cage is empty: "Her roommate let it die." Christina's room-mate, Lily Carver suddenly moved away, according to Horace:
In Christina's bedroom is an X-figured painting above the bed [recalling Christina's middle-of-the-road pose as she flagged down Hammer's car] and a book on the bedstand, Sonnets of Christina Georgina Rossetti - . As Hammer leaves, the furniture mover whom he had helped divulges a secret - the current whereabouts of Christina's former roommate: "The other girl, the roommate of Miss Christina, she tells me not to say. Afraid she is. Like somebody's afraid to die. I moved her. I'll tell you where." Following the lead and trail to Christina's roommate, he enters Lily's front hall corridor outside her room in the Jalisco Hotel - a high-angled, overhead shot envelopes him within the stairway, banisters and balustrades. In the residence of Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), the pixieish, waif-like blonde with closely cropped hair and a white, terry-cloth bathrobe with a sash reclines on a bed and has a gun pointed at his crotch. She is framed behind the bed post as she expresses her fear of the same men that pursued Christina. She assumes a vulnerable, high-pitched tone to her voice. [She has a striking resemblance to Christina in her trenchcoat. Although she is the alter-ego of Christina, she is a deceptive fraud - duping him with a false name, and by impersonating the dead woman's roommate - but Hammer doesn't know that until later.]
Back at his apartment, another screened phone call (an unidentified caller) tells Hammer about the course of his investigation:
If Hammer pretends, his life "will go on as serenely as before." As a "token" of his intentions - and if Hammer stops his investigation - the gangster [later identified as conspirator/gangster Carl Evello] promises to reward him with a car the next morning in front of his apartment. As promised, there's a black, shiny convertible on the curb the next day. Just in time, Nick is told to not start the ignition - the car has been planted with a rigged, explosive device ("torpedo") attached to the starter. And Hammer instinctively knows that the first "torpedo" is a precursor to a second, more deadly rigged mechanism. Back in the garage, Nick finds a trickier bomb device ("a sweet little kiss-off") set to explode at a high rate of speed. According to Nick, it explodes when they go "Va-va-Voom" - a portent of future disaster. Hammer strides through a door into Velda's apartment with a black-and-white checkered tile floor - metaphoric of the chess game being played within the film. In an adjoining room with mirrored walls, a confusingly-reflected Velda (in a black and white striped shirt and black leotards) exercises and glistens with sweat in a ballet studio with classical music playing on a phonograph. Next to an exercise bar, she stretches one limber leg and arm up and down. As he leans back languidly while smoking, he instructs her to cancel her latest errands that squeeze big payoffs from husbands and wives in messy divorce and infidelity cases. She figuratively warns of the possible consequences of his risky investigation - a little thread will lead to a string and then to a rope by which he will be hanged:
In the meantime, according to Velda, Ray Diker has phoned with additional names that Hammer might want to check up on:
Trying to inflame his passion, Velda purrs into Hammer's ear, but he non-chalantly pays no attention, takes in her warmth without reciprocating, and reacts with a non-sequitur. She looks at him with sexual dissatisfaction - her masquerading as a hooker has no effect on him, although it is paradoxically quite effective on adulterous husbands in their profession. According to Velda, two of the men, Kawolsky and Raymondo, were killed under suspicious circumstances, similar to Christina's death:
Subsequently as he drinks the man's beer and joins the family at dinner, Hammer briefly questions truck driver Harvey Wallace (Strother Martin) about the truck 'accident' that killed Kawolsky. Wallace concurs that "maybe he was pushed." In a second interview regarding Kawolsky's suspicious death, Hammer travels to a boxing gym - a sequence that opens with a man noisily punching a bag toward the camera. A tall, broad-shouldered black figure moves by and the camera follows him down the stairs - where it picks up Hammer climbing up the stairs as he saunters over to Eddie Yeager (Juano Hernandez), the black fight manager with an upwards-pointing cigar in his mouth. Hammer suspects that Yeager's next upcoming fighter Kid Nino will throw his next evening's bout "like you sold out all the others...wait until the odds build up until you can't resist." When Hammer asks a concluding question about Lee Kawolsky, Yeager's ex-fighter who "was killed in an accident but it wasn't really an accident," Yeager's cigar drops in his mouth as an expression of his fear. Even though Yeager was recently intimidated, threatened, and told to shut up or die: "They said they'd let me breathe," he gives Hammer the names of the two hoodlum strong-arms, Charlie and Sugar, who do dirty-work for a local gangster named Carl Evello. The next scene opens in blackness - until the pool-side, black-attired hostess walks away from the camera. Next to Carl Evello's (Paul Stewart) outdoor, elegant pool, Charlie Max (Jack Elam) and Sugar Smallhouse (Jack Lambert) are bickering with each other while playing gin rummy and listening to the horse races on the radio. [The poolside shot was deliberately created to frame together three top heavies in post-war Hollywood films - Elam, Lambert, and Stewart.] Hammer drives his sports car into the Doheny mansion driveway, followed closely by an amorous, nymphomaniac blonde named Friday (Marian Carr). After she is assured by the magnetic, alluring playboy that he doesn't bite, she kisses him on their first meeting and then compliments him: "You don't taste like anybody I know":
In the mobster's mansion, Hammer teaches an amorously-inviting Friday how to be unresponsive, cold and callous - like he is - by saying 'no':
He is only there for information and asks whether her brother Carl wears blue suede shoes - she replies: "Hardly. He's more the black moccasin type." In the pool bath house, Hammer snoops around and surveys the shoes on the floor - in a camera pan from right to left, he finds no blue suede shoes. When Evello's thugs try to put him out of action, Hammer subdues Sugar with a judo chop. The mobster decides he will talk to Hammer in the house, not exactly knowing what Hammer is searching for - so Hammer explains (using Velda's terminology):
Evello offers him a payoff: "What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?" Hammer bargains for a high fee: "I set my fee according to the case, and the longer I look at this one, the higher it gets." But then, the buy-off offer is withdrawn: "Suddenly, it's too late." Hammer realizes that Evello works for some higher-up. |
After a dissolve, Hammer is
in almost the same position, but in a dominating clench and kiss
with a lustful, forcefully aggressive Velda in the center of the
room. As his 'girl Friday'
- a woman who tolerates the pimping or prostituting she must commit
for him, she has brought a folder with information about science
reporter Ray Diker (Mort Marshall) who lives on Flower St. - "a reporter
on the news...who used to write a science column... dropped out of
sight," but
had called while Hammer was hospitalized.