Los Angeles noirs don’t come much noirer than Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s adaptation of a Mickey Spillane bestseller that transplants the story from New York and boils it even harder by turning its private detective protagonist Mike Hammer into a sociopath as thuggish as the criminals around him. An ill-considered pickup of a hitchhiker on a lonely road outside of town turns into the pursuit of a nuclear threat in a briefcase, a story that puts the zeitgeist of the mid-1950s in a blender and sends Hammer all up and down Los Angeles, from the low city to the high, from Bunker Hill to Beverly Hills.
The video essays of “Los Angeles, the City in Cinema” examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the city itself.