Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film grossed 726,000 in the United States and a total of 226,000 overseas. It also withstood scrutiny from the Kefauver Commission, which called it a film designed to ruin young viewers, leading director Aldrich to protest the Commissions conclusions.

Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a tough Los Angeles private eye who is almost as brutal as the crooks he chases. Mike and his assistantsecretarylover, Velda Maxine Cooper, usually work on pennyante divorce cases.One evening on a lonely country road, Hammer gives a ride to Christina Cloris Leachman, an attractive hitchhiker wearing nothing but a trench coat. She has escaped from a nearby mental institution. Thugs waylay them and Hammer awakens in some unknown location where he hears Christina screaming and being tortured to death. The thugs then push Hammers car off a cliff with Christinas body and an unconscious Hammer inside. Hammer next awakens in a hospital with Velda by his bedside. He decides to pursue the case, for vengeance, a sense of guilt as Christina had asked him to remember me if she got killed, and because she Christina must be connected with something big behind it all. ........

Source: Wikipedia