Kiss Snatcher

Here's a hardboiled double bill for you: Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Picture Snatcher (1933).

This was Ms. Beveridge's first look at Kiss. It stars Ralph Meeker, and directed with noir panache by Robert Aldrich. The opening is a real grabber - a bare-foot woman wearing a trenchcoat and probably nothing else (Cloris Leachman) is running down a road at night, trying to flag down cars. She jumps out in front of Mike Hammer's (Meeker) Jaguar, nearly causing a crash. He picks her up, but isn't happy about it. They quarrel, and he drops her off at the bus station. Of course, she turns up dead.

Then everyone else turns up, looking for something she had - Mike's secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it the Great Whatsit. He searches for it mainly by bumbling around and sometimes beating people up. At some point I was convinced that the whole mystery thing thing didn’t make any sense, but that might just be me. Maybe I was just to busy wallowing in the great LA scenery - especially the scenes set in Bunker Hill, including Angel’s Flight. But the greatest shot in the movie is Meeker in his apartment, next to his modernistic wall-mounted reel-to-reel answering machine, looking out the window at the cars on the freeway. Really says it all.

Then it becomes a sci-fi horror flick, and you know the rest. Wild movie, Aldrich’s best.

As a palate cleanser, let’s go back to the days of the Depression for a James Cagney film, Picture Snatcher (pronounced pitcher-snatcher). Will it be a musical, a comedy, a gangster film? The jaunty music over the credits hints at the first two, but it lies.  Cagney is a gangster who wants to go straight when he gets out of jail. He wants to be a reporter, working for Ralph Bellamy, the drunk city editor of a trashy tabloid. Since he has no scruples, he does pretty well. He gets into and out of scrapes with girls, the law, and the managing editor. He is the only reporter to get a picture of a woman getting the electric chair - while the other observers are throwing up, he’s snapping a picture with a camera on his shoe. (This part was based on a true ripped-from-the-headlines story.)

Both movies feature charming, utterly amoral, and self-centered men. It only comes out well in Picture Snatcher. I guess it might have been a comedy after all.