White-hot thrills and blood-red kisses explode on screen when a mysterious hitchhiker pulls private dick Mike Hammer into an escalating world of danger and paranoia in Robert Aldrich’s atomic adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled novel. An indelible Ralph Meeker stars in the nihilistic film noir masterwork whose influence and reverberations can still be felt today, from the French New Wave to Pulp Fiction and beyond.
