Spillane was a conservative and virulent anticommunist, and his character, Hammer, has been rightfully criticized as a “right wing vigilante” (Gallafent 240), a symbolic celebration of violence, nationalistic jingoism, and misogyny.Ĭonsidering the pedigree of these films, it is easy to understand their initial reception as examples of the kind of pro-government media that was pervasive between the end of the Second World War and the middle 1950s.
Based on the popular Mickey Spillane novel of nearly the same name, Kiss Me Deadly is a part of Spillane’s critically reviled Mike Hammer series. The plot of 1954’s Kiss Me Deadly likewise involves faceless but boundlessly evil communists bent on taking over the world. The agent threatens her, and Moe tells him that she is not going to sell Skip’s location to a bunch of “commies.” The man asks her what she knows about “commies,” and she replies with the most famous line of the film: “What do I know about commies? Nothing! I know one thing, I just don’t like them.”
Moe, who had sold out Skip for fifty dollars earlier in the film, refuses to give the agent Skip’s location even after he offers her five hundred dollars. She knows it, too she had been warned that the man who just forced his way into her room is a communist agent who is willing to kill in order to find the whereabouts of a pickpocket named Skip. About halfway through Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), a stool pigeon named Moe (Thelma Ritter) is about to get shot.
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