Mary Pickford plays Priscilla an unemployed maid who finds work at a farm. There she meets a no-good peddler who starts flirting with her and makes her fall in love with him. He runs up a gambling bill and asks her to help him pay his debts or he won’t be able to marry her.[1]
Cast: Mary Pickford, Charles Avery, Robert Harron, Arthur V Johnson, James Kirkwood, Owen Moore, Lottie Pickford, Mack Sennett, Billy Quirk, Anthony O’Sullivan
3 min
D W Griffith
The Little Darling is a 1909 short film directed by D. W. Griffith. Released in split-reel for with Griffith’s The Sealed Room.[1]
A police officer finds a baby in a trash can, and Mrs. Lippett, the cruel matron at an orphanage where children are made to work, names her “Jerusha Abbott” (she picks “Abbott” out of a phone book and gets “Jerusha” from a tombstone). The orphan, who comes to be called Judy, does what she can to stand up for the younger children, frequently clashing with both Mrs. Lippett and the cold hearted trustees. At one point she leads a rebellion against being served prunes with every meal and at another, steals a doll from a selfish rich girl to lend to a dying orphan.
Years later, wealthy Jervis Pendleton, a mysterious benefactor, pays to send Judy, now the oldest and most talented child in the orphanage, to college. He insists, however, that Judy must never try to contact him in person. Judy calls him “Daddy-Long-Legs,” and writes to him, however. Judy proves popular with her wealthier and more “aristocratic” classmates, and writes a successful book to repay “Daddy-Long-Legs” the money he spent on her. She is generally happy but misses not having any real family members to take pride in her accomplishments. Judy also finds herself caught up in a romantic triangle with the older brother of a classmate and an older man (who is, unknown to her, her mysterious benefactor). She eventually chooses the older suitor and is delighted to learn that he is her “Daddy-Long-Legs.”
Cast: Mary Pickford, Owen Moore, Frank Powell, Arthur V Johnson, James Kirkwood, Marion Leonard, Lottie Pickford, Mack Sennett
11 min
D W Griffith
An Indian comforts a dying prospector in his last moments. In exchange, the prospector tells him the location of his gold claim. A group of cowboys tries to get the information and go as far as kidnapping the Indian’s wife.
D W Griffith made this film in 1909 for Biograph Productions.
Cast: Mary Pickford, George Nichols, Grace Henderson, Mack Sennett, Edward Dillon, Anthony O’Sullivan, Alfred Paget, Kate Bruce, Henry B Walthall, Claire McDowell, Linda Arvidson, Florence Barker, Dorothy West
Griffith employs many of his favorite actors of that period: Linda Arvidson (wife of Griffith), George Nichols (in the title role), Jeanie Macpherson , who three years later will start a successful career as a screenwriter and the young Mary Pickford in a young girl invalid role.
A wealthy, callous moneylender finds a terrifying way to learn about money’s limitations.
Production
The short film was produced by the Biograph Company . It was shot – from 10 to 15 July 1910 – in New York, at the Biograph studios on Fourteenth Street [1] .
Distribution
Distributed by the Biograph Company , this film was released in US cinemas on August 15, 1910. A copy of the film is kept in the archives of the Library of Congress and Museum of Modern Art . The rights of the film are in the public domain [1] .
In 2002, Kino on Video published an anthology on DVD entitled Griffith Masterworks: Biograph Shorts (1908-1914) lasting 362 minutes which also contained this film in a version of 18 minutes [2] .
Kiss Me Deadly grossed $726,000 in the United States and a total of $226,000 overseas. The film also withstood scrutiny from the Kefauver Commission, which called it a film “designed to ruin young viewers”, leading director Aldrich to protest the Commission’s conclusions.
Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
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 mental institution, most probably the nearby Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Thugs waylay them and Hammer awakens in some unknown location where he hears Christina screaming and being tortured to death. The thugs then push Hammer’s car off a cliff with Christina’s 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.
The twisting plot takes Hammer to the apartment of Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), a sexy, waif-like woman who is posing as Christina’s ex-roommate. Lily tells Hammer she has gone into hiding and asks Hammer to protect her. It turns out that she is after a mysterious box that, she believes, has contents worth a fortune.
“The great whatsit”, as Velda calls it, at the center of Hammer’s quest is a small, mysterious valise that is hot to the touch and contains a dangerous, glowing substance. (It comes to represent the 1950s Cold War fear and paranoia about the atomic bomb that permeated American culture.)
Later, at an isolated beach house, Hammer finds “Lily”, who is revealed to be an imposter named Gabrielle, with her evil boss, Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker). Velda is their hostage, tied up in a bedroom. Soberin and Gabrielle are vying for the contents of the box. Gabrielle shoots Soberin, believing that she can keep the mysterious contents for herself. She also shoots and wounds Hammer, who manages to find Velda. As Gabrielle slyly opens the case, it is ultimately revealed to be stolen radionuclide material, which reaches explosive criticality when the box is fully opened. Horrifying sounds emanate from the nuclear material as Gabrielle and the house burst into flames, just as Hammer and Velda escape.
Alternative Ending
The original American release of the film shows Hammer and Velda escaping from the burning house at the end, staggering into the ocean as the words “The End” come over them on the screen. Sometime after its first release, the ending was altered on the film’s original negative, removing more than a minute’s worth of shots where Hammer and Velda escape and superimposing the words “The End” over the burning house. This implied that Hammer and Velda perished in the atomic blaze, and was often interpreted to represent the apocalypse. In 1997 the original conclusion was restored, where Velda and Mike survive. The DVD release has the original ending, and offers the truncated ending as an extra.
The film is described as “the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-fictionfilm noir of all time – at the close of the classic noir period”.[4]
Kiss Me Deadly remains one of the great time capsules of Los Angeles. The Bunker Hill locations were all destroyed when the downtown neighborhood was razed in the late 1960s.
Hill Crest Hotel, NE corner of Third and Olive Streets, Bunker Hill (Italian opera singer’s home)
The Donigan ‘Castle’, a Victorian mansion at 325 S. Bunker Hill Avenue (where Cloris Leachman’s character lived; it was used for interiors and exteriors).
Apartment Building, 10401 Wilshire Blvd, NW corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen (Hammer’s apartment building; still standing)
Carl Evello’s Mansion, 603 Doheny Road, Beverly Hills, California
Clay Street, an alley beneath Angels Flight incline railway, on Bunker Hill, where Hammer parks his Corvette and then takes the back steps up to the Hill Crest Hotel, but when we cut to him approaching the hotel’s large porch, he’s on the Third Street steps opposite Angels Flight.
Club Pigalle, 4800 block of Figueroa Avenue (the black jazz nightclub where Hammer hangs out)
Hollywood Athletic Club, 6525 W. Sunset Blvd. (where Hammer finds the radioactive box; still standing)
Reception
Critical response
Critical commentary generally views it as a metaphor for the paranoia and nuclear fears of the Cold War era in which it was filmed.[5]
Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this meaning in his script. About the topic, he said, “I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting.”[6]
Film critic Nick Schager wrote, “Never was Mike Hammer’s name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane’s legendary P.I. with brute force savagery… The gumshoe’s subsequent investigation into the woman’s death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society’s dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy – a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man’s return to the primordial sea – with the director’s knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre’s romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. ‘Remember me’? Aldrich’s sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget.”[7]
In 1999, Kiss Me Deadly was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
CHRISTINA: “Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don’t make that bus stop…” MIKE HAMMER: “We will.” CHRISTINA: “If we don’t, remember me.” – Nominated
Homage is paid to the glowing suitcase MacGuffin in the 1984 cult film Repo Man, the film Ronin, and in Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. The “shiny blue suitcase” is mentioned with other famous MacGuffins in Guardians of the Galaxy. In the film Southland Tales, Richard Kelly pays homage to the film, showing the main characters watching the beginning on their television and later the opening of the case is shown on screens on board the mega-Zeppelin.
Differences from the novel
The original novel, while providing much of the plot, is about a mafia conspiracy and does not feature espionage and the nuclear suitcase, elements added to the film version by the scriptwriter, A.I. Bezzerides.
It further subverted Spillane’s book by portraying the already tough Hammer as a narcissistic bully, the darkest anti-hero private detective in the film noir genre. He apparently makes most of his living by blackmailing adulterous husbands and wives, and he takes an obvious sadistic pleasure in violence, whether he’s beating up thugs sent to kill him, breaking a contact’s treasured record to get him to talk, or roughing up a coroner who’s slow to part with a piece of information. He also apparently has no compunction about engaging in nefarious acts such as pimping his secretary. Bezzerides wrote of the script: “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it … I tell you Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn’t like me”.[9]
Home media
A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in June 2011 and has the alternative ending as a bonus feature.[10]
Jump up^Prince, Stephen, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film, Praeger/Greenwood, 1992, ISBN 0-275-93662-7.
Jump up^Vallance, TomArchived 2007-10-01 at the Wayback Machine.. The Independent, Obituary, “A. I. Bezzerides. No-nonsense novelist/screenwriter,” January 20, 2007. Last accessed: March 25, 2008.
Jump up^Bergan, Ronald The Guardian, Obituary, “A.I. Bezzerides: Screenwriter victim of the Hollywood blacklist, he is renowned for three classic American film noirs,” February 6, 2007.
Parish, James Robert and Michael R. Pitts. The Great Science Fiction Pictures. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1977. ISBN 0-8108-1029-8.
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