In the fourth speed

In the fourth speed ( KIS Me Deadly ) is a police Film American carried out by Robert Aldrich, left in 1955.

Synopsis

On a road in middle of the night, a woman runs, disabled, seeking to challenge the cars which pass. She obtains by forcing the passage that a driver takes it. The woman is required but the driver, more intrigued than suspicieux, agrees to cover it and take it along to destination.

They are unfortunately both intercepted. The man escapes from little with dead but its momentary does not have this chance. On its bed of hospital, its last words haunt it: Remember me .

Comment

In the history of black film, In the fourth speed arrives after the wave of the Scarface , the Big sleep or the Maltese Falcon . This cinema, progressively, established its marks, its codes and the public is now capable to recognize them. Robert Aldrich can thus allow himself to abuse them and place them from the original point of view. This step is announced by the credits of beginning which ravels with back (upwards). By doing this, the author warns the spectator of the atypism of his work and a disturbed linearity of account.

All starts on a road of night. A woman runs in the darkness, naked under impermeable, lit by the headlights of the vehicles. Through Heller without success these cars which run at full speed, it ends up being planted in front of one of them with the risk to be made crush. The driver makes a head with tail but agrees to embark it. With a stopping of police force, one learns that the woman is fugitive. The man covers it but they will be caught up with, kidnapped, struck and the tortured woman with death. The shadies will seek to make up their misdeed in a road accident.

The driver escapes with the accident. With its alarm clock, he is questioned by the police force. It is of a private detective but not about the hardening of a Philip Marlowe or a Sam Spade. Mike Hammer is a dead loss detective specialized in adultery - causing with the need. It realizes that it holds in the disappearance of the woman a mystery which will be able to precisely raise it with the stature of a true hero of black novel. He hopes to draw a string which will become a cord and which will flush out the murderers. Seeking to conform to the character awaited by the spectator, it will follow the codes of the kind blindly, exhausting its shelves: brawls, shots, beautiful cars, multiple seductions, corpses, loss of the expensive friend and his mourning with the counter of a bar of jazz… But what a black film detective in a hysterical universe?

An investigation is business of reason: facts, indices, a Cartesian reflection. However, the characters act only according to their fear, of their paranoia, their sadism. No precise fact orders their acts and nobody will even think of wondering about the place which it holds or that holds its interlocutors. One will never know who is fugitive Chistina Bailey, his role, the nature of his relations, the motivations of the Maffia, the role of the police force. All are handled, manipulators without one being able to disentangle in this hank neither the causes nor the stakes of the business. The detective, confronted with the improbability of his investigation and his incapacity to hold his role, ridicules himself in his obstinacy, it reveals his true nature of it: force, proud.

Robert Aldrich signs an apocalyptic parabola. The novel of which it is inspired has as an aim a drug trafficking, it substitutes a mysterious box to him. Little before being killed in its turn, one of the characters evokes the mythology of Pandore. The curiosity of its interlocutress will push it to reiterate the fable. It opens the box from where spouts out an irradiant light; all the decoration rocks in a flood of flame and explosions.

What contains the box? On this subject, the police officer murmurs with the hero three events: Project Manhattan, Los Alamos, Trinity. The film falls under one time, that of the cold war and that of the nuclear threat, that of the Maccarthisme especially: atmosphere of suspicion, denouncement, lawsuit ubuesques. America sinks like this black film in the arbitrary one whereas not faculty for the man to destroy planet. Returned to passion, there is to no more hardly forecast fate of humanity.

In the fourth speed mark durably the American cinema, its perdure influence in particular in the cinema of David Lynch - the drive box of Mulholland is an explicit reference. The National Film Registry the pupil with his selection in 1999.

Data sheet

Distribution

  • Ralph Meeker : Mike Hammer
  • Albert Dekker: Dr. Soberin
  • Paul Stewart: Carl Evello
  • Marian Carr: Friday
  • Maxine Cooper : Velda
  • Cloris Leachman : Christina Bailey
  • Gaby Rodgers : Gabrielle
  • Jack Lambert: Sugar Smallhouse
  • Jack Elam: Charlie max

Reward

National Film Registry 1999: selected and preserved at the Library of the American Congress.

External bond

'' In the fourth speed '' on Internet Movie Database

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