A blonde woman wearing nothing but a trench coat (Cloris Leachman, in her film debut) stumbles barefoot over a road surrounded by darkness. She flags down a Jaguar driven by Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and he grudgingly agrees to transport her to the nearest bus stop.

The blonde looks around the car and sizes Hammer up as a narcissist, but makes him promise that if she doesn’t make it to that bus stop, not to forget her. Almost on cue, cars cut off their escape. Hammer wakes up to hear the woman being worked over in the next room before he blacks out again. His captors place him and the blonde in the Jag and force it down a hill.

Once he wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, we learn the blonde is dead and that Hammer is a private investigator. His hot blooded secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) is frequently used to entrap married men, but holds a flame for her boss. A laid back LAPD lieutenant (Wesley Addy) warns Hammer not to muck around in their investigation and revokes his gun license.

The temperamental “bedroom dick” doesn’t give a damn and starts looking for the killers himself. Aided by his fast talking Italian mechanic (Nick Dennis) and a reel-t0-reel answering machine built into the wall of his pad on Wilshire, Hammer discovers that the blonde held the key to locating a “great whatsit,” a container of weapons grade uranium that everyone wants, but is so powerful, tends to combust those who open the box to take a peek at it.

Directed by Robert Aldrich from a screenplay A.I. Bezzerides adapted from the novel by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly is a bleak film noir most regard as the best adaptation of Spillane’s work ever put on film. The filmmakers actually threw out most of the book, relocating Hammer from New York to L.A. and introducing the atomic Pandora’s Box, while remaining true to the brutal behavior of Spillane’s anti-hero that frequently borders on sadism.

The best part of the movie is the pre-title sequence and opening credits, two areas that Aldrich usually excels in better than any director I can think of. After the stark opening image of a near naked blonde scampering barefoot down a dark road, Hammer’s sports car spins off the asphalt in a swirl of dust. He gives her a lift, and Nat King Cole’s “Rather Have The Blues” fills the soundtrack as the credits scroll backwards down the screen, setting us up for pulp fiction at its finest.

Despite the adoration showered on this flick, it’s a real hit and miss type deal. If The Big Sleep is grade-A pulp entertainment, Meeker and Cooper are several letters of the alphabet down from Bogart and Bacall. They’re okay, but the picture’s villain, a renegade scientist played by Albert Dekker, is shown only as a pair of suede shoes for almost the entire picture. Nick Dennis is over the top as Hammer’s sidekick, but just when he starts getting fun, gets knocked off.

Hammer’s investigative techniques include slamming a drawer on the fingers of a greedy mortician, breaking an opera lover’s vinyl record, and throwing a knife wielding hoodlum down a stairwell. This was apparently dark, edgy stuff at the time, but even as Hammer pimp slaps a host of informants at the slightest provocation, it doesn’t have much of a lasting effect because the characters and story are all cardboard.

Aldrich and director of photography Ernest Laszlo hold things together by giving the film a raw, hard look. The apocalyptic feel of the movie was neutered however, when in 1997, Aldrich’s cut was donated to the UCLA archives and several newly discovered frames were restored to the film’s mysteriously abrupt ending. The new version shows that Hammer and Velda in fact survive the whatisit and in typical Hollywood fashion, L.A. is not vaporized. Darn.