Today, Robert Aldrich is best known for the 1967 ensemble war film The Dirty Dozen. It’s easily his most ambitious film in terms of wrangling a broad audience. But the reason that the director was able to land that gig was in part due to his earlier successes – and probably specifically because of Kiss Me Deadly.

In any survey course dedicated to American noir stuff, Aldrich’s flick is invariably mentioned for a variety of reasons: it’s artistic bent, the plot and what it attempts to encompass as well as that miffed ending that’s been debated for just about thirty years now. But whatever the reason for Kiss Me Deadly remaining within the realm of interesting filmic discussion, it’s just an entertaining hour and forty minutes.

There’re obviously any number of ways to figure if a film works or not, but easiest (for me at least) is to gauge how long into a feature one gets before checking to see how long the things been running. That doesn’t ever become a problem in Aldrich’s film. The effort isn’t specifically split up into disparate parts, but comes off that way.

Beginning in the middle of the night on some California freeway, Ralph Meeker’s character, Mike Hammer, picks up a half naked hitchhiker. The pair is eventually kidnapped, with the women being tortured to death and Hammer eventually escaping. The next section of the film deals with Hammer’s practice as a private detective and maneuvering in the same circle as some cops that don’t particularly appreciate his company with the final portion of the film given over to the actual detective work.

The entire arc presents a series of interesting and surprisingly ethnically diverse characters – Hammer getting along with most of them when he needs to. But the character, not too surprisingly given his name, really represents a step beyond the traditional misogynistic private eye that populates so many other noir features from the era. Hammer’s as smooth as any Bogey character as evidenced by his retainer of a (kinda) floozy as a secretary and sometimes con artist who poses with married men allowing for Hammer to show disparaged wives proof of infidelity. The entire thing reeks of scummy business and crooked dealings, but Hammer’s made a decent living.

Along the way, the detective figures out the reason for his rode companion getting snuffed out, but only after being exposed to some poetry, again rendering the film in different terms than other efforts from the period. It’s more literary, shot just as peculiarly as German Expressionist films and even sports some sort of nuclear warning.

The end of Kiss Me Deadly has been cut up, re-issued, cleaned up and restored. The final result is that Hammer, after saving the life of his business partner and displaying some semblance of humanity, witnesses an explosion that’s been figured as everything from the apocalypse to a nuclear blowout. Whatever the case is, the film exhibits enough unique personality to remain vibrant regardless of what filmic movement it’s tied to.