Kiss Me Deadly. 1955. USA. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Screenplay by A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides. With Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Maxine Cooper. DCP. In English. 106 min.
Obsessive even by cinephile standards, Richard Schwarz revived the Thalia as a repertory theater in 1976, taking a 10-year lease after it had closed. Omnivorous in his taste, Schwarz programmed an exhilarating mix of international classics, American B-movies, cartoon programs, first-run premieres of films no other New York theaters would exhibit (such as Jerry Lewis’s Smorgasbord), and his favorite genre, film noir, which became a Thalia staple. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, adapted from the Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane, is a high-octane, hard-boiled thriller that opens with the detective (Ralph Meeker) stopping his sports car to pick up a woman escapee from a psychiatric hospital wearing only a trench coat; the convoluted plot involves the search for a mysterious box known as “the great whatsit,” but it is the film’s beautifully histrionic style, its vivid Los Angeles location photography, and the way it captures mid-century nuclear paranoia that have made it a definitive late-era noir. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby praised the Thalia for “maintaining one of the most original, unusual, and, sometimes, odd programming policies of any theater in New York.”