Noir veers into apocalyptic sci-fi in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is an essential piece of Cold War paranoia, with as nervy an ending as has ever been seen in American cinema. Fear of nuclear annihilation fuses with fear of the femme fatale as multiple nefarious parties chase a mysterious, and possibly apocalyptic, “Great Whatsit.” Aldrich and ace writer A. I. Bezzerides adapt and mercilessly satirize Mickey Spillane’s wildly popular pulp detective novels—which made the author the most commercially successful American novelist during the Cold War. They transport this twisty tale from New York to a desolate L.A., downgrading Spillane’s “cynical fascist” (Aldrich’s words) antihero, Mike Hammer (played straight and brutish by Ralph Meeker), from a private eye to a disgraced divorce dick while upping his brainless vigilantism. Banned in Britain, and championed by the hip Frenchmen of Cahiers du Cinéma—who crowned Aldrich “the first director of the atomic age”—Kiss Me Deadly blows the good manners of the 1950s to smithereens.