Cold War Angst
I recently watched two old film-noirs, both recommended by my good friend Shane: Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street. If you ever want a double bill of original cold war angst from the 1950s, consider these two.
Pickup on South Street (1953) is a thrilling chase after a classified microfilm, stolen by communist spies and accidently pickpocketed by low-life Skip McCoy. Although the film can be considered anti-communist – the commies get their upcomence – J. Edgar Hoover personally complained with the director about the main character not being patriotic enough. More timeless is the great black-and-white cinematography of the streets of New York – the film was almost entirely shot on location – and the great oscar worthy performance by Thelma Ritter.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a wacky story which gets weirder near the end. Ralph Meeker swears revenge after a blonde he has set out to help gets brutally killed. He follows the perps in the underworld and stumbles on a suitcase with a mysterious but deadly content (supposedly the source of inspiration for the object of desire in Tarantino’s film-noir homage Pulp Fiction). The deadly glow of the suitcase taps into the new fear of radioactive atomic weapons, which I find prophetic, because in the mid-1950s atomic energy was all the rave and would lead to a brave new world as demonstrated in the 1958 World Fair in Brussels.
