Kiss Me Deadly - Region 2 DVD

Mike Hammer is a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon; he knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prize-fighters and he makes the ladies swoon--but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?"). Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. --Ali Davis