For a while there watching this I was thinking "I reckon this is over-rated, like a lot of movies the French really get into" - but as the quirky bits kept piling up I got more and more into it. It's a film noir/private eye flick like no other, full of weird moments and with an atmosphere that's completely unique.
For starters there's Ralph Meeker's PI hero Mike Hammer - he's huge, like a prop forward, with bulky shoulders and close cropped hair cut; he's also mean, sadistic, selfish, hilariously irresistible to women (seriously - one in particular at a party just comes up and shoves her tongue down his throat), not particularly smart (his secretary does more hard detecting... he gets information mainly by beating people up), dedicated, compulsive.
There's also A.Z. Bezzerides' flowery dialogue with its Sam Fuller-esque feel and characters referencing the classics; not one but two overacting Italian support actors who talk to themselves; Gaby Rodgers' pixie-esque femme fetale (I always forget she's a baddie); the Pandora's box of the mystery brief case with an atomic bomb in it; decent roles for black actors; memorable little bits like the stoned phone operator with her cat, the massive answering machine on Hammer/Meeker's wall, the secretary (Maxine Cooper) doing a ballet work out, a surprisingly large amount of torture (depicted by off screen screams), the credits scrolling backwards.
This was an early Robert Aldrich work and in hindsight some signature elements can be noted - a slap up pre-credit sequence, tough violence, misogynistic characters (men are constantly telling women to shut up or go away), long takes. It's also, like many of his later films, terrific.
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