Kiss Me Deadly Selected Featurettes

Kiss Me Deadly Featurettes (2)
from the Criterion release of
Kiss Me Deadly directed by Robert Aldrich

Interview with Alex Cox on "Kiss Me Deadly" 6 min 43 sec.
"Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane" (2011) Featurette 40 mins

My Notes:

Kiss Me Deadly is featured prominently in Thom Andersen's documentary called "Los Angeles Plays Itself" (available on torrents exclusively.) I have sought out many of the films that Andersen cites in order to get a full appreciation of these most famous of noir films.

Here is a six minute featurette by Alex Cox from the dvd of "Kiss Me Deadly" produced by Criterion. Alex Cox is a current writer for Film Comment magazine which is produced at Lincoln Center. He is best known as the director of the film "Repo Man" (the original, which is beloved by punks, 1980's-style, everywhere.)

There is also a 40 minute featurette on Mickey Spillane featuring many of the mystery writers who were influenced by him as well as an interview with Spillane himself. This film which gives wonderful background on Mickey Spillane's career as a writer is well produced. It even has a reference to the dance routine by Fred Astaire for "The Bandwagon" in which the art and style of the detective story is set to an Astaire dance routine. The featurette is also (for me) a treasure trove of film titles which I have yet to find and see for myself.

Since my other torrent of the commentary audio of "Crime Wave" starring Sterling Hayden by James Ellroy has gotten some download attention, I provide these featurettes for film enthusiasts who do not have access to them in the Criterion edition.

As always, I encourage the use of my torrents to get libraries to archive these materials in their original form and that torrent viewers make those requests.

Notes written April 22 2012