L.A. Noir: Kiss Me Deadly
September 10, 2025
L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise
Presented by Greg Olson Productions
Pulp novelist Mickey Spillane’s swaggering private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) likes his dames and drinks and cruising through life with the top down. He could do it half asleep, but one night he stops for a battered woman walking on a deserted highway, and starts waking up to a web of evil forces that could take down the world. Far from being a routine crime procedural, Kiss Me Deadly is a riff of noir jazz blowing hot, surreal, mysterious, scary. Hammer can sense that the stakes are sky high, but can he decipher the maze of question marks, discover who he can trust, or should suspect? There’s something that everyone’s dying to possess, “the big what’s-it?” Must be valuable as hell—or hell itself. The L.A. NOIR series explores the noir sensibility in terms of the post-World War II/Holocaust/Hiroshima Cold War era, when we wised up to the depths of human darkness. And the most resonant, expressive locale for our quest is the postwar-boom extended metropolis of L.A. and Southern California, where a counterculture of surfers, bikers, musicians, civil rights agitators, free-thinkers of all stripes stirred and questioned the American status quo. Kiss Me Deadly is a stylish panorama of new ways: monumental socio-political/existential problems in a pop mode, story as surges of visceral emotion, white man Hammer at home with Black friends and helpers, serious matters as absurd humor, all presented with full force cinematic power. A guy pounds his palm with his fist, “Pretty pow!”
Free Opening Night Top Pot Doughnuts (David Lynch’s favorite selection, old-fashioned glazed) thanks to Mark Klebeck.
Individual Tickets: $15
Passes: $125 | $85 SIFF, SAM, Swedish Club, UW Cinema Studies, NWFF, SFI, TheFilmSchool, Festa Italiana, Alliance Francaise de Seattle, Scarecrow Video, & KING FM members
SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.
Tickets
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Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- Director: Robert Aldrich
- Principal Cast: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Maxine Cooper, Cloris Leachman, Jack Elam
- Country: USA
- Year: 1955
- Running Time: 106 min.
- Producer: Robert Aldrich
- Screenplay: A. I. Bezzerides
- Cinematographers: Ernest Laszlo
- Editors: Michael Luciano
- Music: Frank DeVol
- Language: English