This morning, on WQXR, New York’s classical-music station, I heard that today is Franz Schubert’s birthday (he was born in 1797 and died in 1828). The composer’s vast, rhapsodic, and ruminative piano sonatas, his songs, and his chamber music are among the very pinnacles of human achievement and among my own greatest artistic experiences. (His very summit is his string quintet, which is, to quote Guy Maddin’s movie title, “The Saddest Music in the World,” and which I saw the Juilliard Quartet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse perform with a soul-shaking intensity unlike any I’ve heard on record.) But, since this is a movies blog, it’s worth recalling that Schubert’s music turns up in a most surprising way in a movie that is, itself, one lurid and exhilarating surprise after another from beginning to end, Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film noir “Kiss Me Deadly.”
It’s an adaptation of a novel by Mickey Spillane; the smeary-voiced Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a low-rent, low-credibility detective constantly on the make. It opens with madness, ends with apocalypse, and teems with reckless energy, frenzied passions, extravagant violence, and Cold War paranoia throughout. Yet the high-toned cultural artifacts that Aldrich pumps it with—poetry by Christina Rossetti, an aria sung by Caruso, and, most of all, the insistent recurrence of a theme from Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony”—suggests something that must have seemed strange in 1955 but is perfectly obvious now: this wild pulp masterpiece doesn’t just cite high art, it is high art, as are many other popular, commercially produced movies. But which critics, beside the young enthusiasts at Cahiers du Cinéma, knew this at the time?
P.S. One of the biggest changes that have come about since then is the rise of the independent cinema—movies that are made more like the way novels are written than the way buildings are built. And the paradox is that critics who have grown accustomed to seeing art in big-budget productions now often have trouble finding it in rougher-hewn movies made on an intimate scale.
