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"Put it in code." The slaughter of two spies at the French-Spanish border is followed by a pair of pins removed from a map halfway across the globe, just a condensed Fritz Lang class on signs and meanings. "How's work in nuclear physics these days?" The transformation from apple to doomsday device is indicative of the dry surrealism at play, it also informs the university professor's (Gary Cooper) enlistment as O.S.S. secret agent, a boyhood fantasy swiftly darkenened. Europe's old order is dying as their discoveries are used for modern evil, one elderly atomic researcher (Helene Thimig) is blasted by the Nazi in a Swiss chalet while another (Vladimir Sokoloff) is imprisoned in a manor under Mussolini's glaring portrait. Another rhyme has the glamorous American double-agent (Marjorie Hoshelle) replaced by the scrappy Italian partisan (Lilli Palmer) with camisole and machine-gun, hardened by struggle yet momentarily softened by a soldier's half-remembered ditty. "Are you writing me poetry?" "In a way, yes." A view of the war from the aftermath, formed by the knowledge that the horrors are merely beginning. The Liliom carousel is stalled and full of scrawled equations, the M bouncing ball punctuates the close of Cooper's remarkable scuffle with the fascist officer (Marc Lawrence). (Staged with broken limbs and scarring gouges and scored to a jolly street band, it's expanded by Hitchcock in Torn Curtain.) The faulty engine and the hungry cat, "the things we can't control" that are the stuff of nightmares for a perfectionist auteur. Above all the Pandora's Box reimagined in Kiss Me Deadly: Triumphant fanfare plays for "free science at the service of humanity," but Lang has seen Hiroshima. With Robert Alda, J. Edward Bromberg, Ludwig Stössel, and Dan Seymour. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |