I'm wondering if anyone can give me some information regarding the changes/edits in the ending. Why was there an alternate/edited ending?
Also, can anyone tell me if the ending in the novel is any different from the ending in the film?
-Ed
I saw this on Turner Classic Movies tonight, and they said that in the European version, Meeker was in the house when it blew up. In the American release, he and his girl get out. Apparently the escape scene was missing until 1997. There are a couple of good articles on that:
http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus/kissdead.htm
http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue03/features/kmd1.htm
Hope that helps!
Either way, they'd have to keep running for miles to survive the effects! And with a bullet lodged in his midsection, at that!
shareI thought it kind of strange that the much more cynical, brutal ending was the one predominantly shown before the restoration...usually it's the "happier" endings that get forced onto the screen.
You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday.
Regarding the ending... is there a nuclear physicist in the house? If so, please pardon what you'd probably consider a dumb question, but why would the box full of uranium (I guess...?) suddenly become so unstable when the box's lid was opened. Was the thing going critical mass? If so, why? Also if so, would it explode or just fizz, giving off lethal levels of radiation?
In short, could someone please provide a scientific explanation (plausible, if you please) for the ending (whether Mike got out or not)?
TJB
Either way, they'd have to keep running for miles to survive the effects! And with a bullet lodged in his midsection, at that!
Danny Peary talks about this in "Cult Movies". He thinks that Hammer is already dying when his hand gets burned. He also thinks that a major portion of Southern California proabably would get harmed by this bomb. I don't think that Hammer and Velda would live too much after the end of the film. Gabrielle has loosed Pandora's box on the world (and looks a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark).
share[deleted]
I too think it was a thing from another world, not some human creation. Maybe something left on earth by aliens.
sharePandora's Box
shareWe're dealing with a Hollywood ending, not a science demonstration. But if you're willing to accept a plausible explanation, just not something we can actually do in the real world, I think I can manage that.
Pat tells Mike the following words: "Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity." The Manhattan Project was the codename for the atom bomb project at Los Alamos, which produced the first atom bomb test called Trinity. I interpret what Pat saying is that Mike has gotten hold of a prototype for a new type of nuclear weapon. If it had been used before, Pat would've mentioned Hirsohima, Nagasaki, or Bikini Atoll (America's first H-bomb was exploded at Bikini Atoll the year before the movie was made. That was big news back then, and the name would've been recognized).
Like Trinity, this new weapon is proof of an idea, a small scale test of what later would become much larger and deadlier bombs. It's important to remember for our characters that this weapon is designed to be limited, which is how Mike and Velda survive at the end. Also, note that Pat didn't say anything about a UFO or Rosewell. This is a purely American test weapon, and it's not at all alien.
What kind of a weapon is it? In the real world, nuclear bombs give off light, heat, x-rays, gamma rays (high energy x-rays), and subatomic particles. What if it was possible to design a nuclear bomb that gave off almost all it's energy as light and heat, with just negligible (tiny, tiny) amounts of other forms of radiation. Such a bomb would kill your enemies by explosion, burning or vaporizing but would not be radioactive in the conventional sense. The most important advantage of such a "Heat Bomb" is that it wouldn't produce radioactive fallout (see Wikipedia for a discussion of fallout). You could immediately take territory after using a Heat Bomb and not worry about your troops being exposed to radioactivity.
Since the bomb in the film only seems to give off light and heat and is a prototype, I submit that the weapon in the film - not doable in the real world - is a nuclear powered Heat Bomb. It's always in a state of low activity, which is why the box is always very warm to hot. When the box is opened it's activity increases, building toward a state where it detonates. The hissing noise the box makes then is from heat escaping from the bomb (like the sound of a teakettle coming from hot water vapor). Maybe the hissing also serves as a built-in warning that the box is open and will soon detonate. Since it's a test weapon, it's been designed to only have a small explosion and generate lots of heat. The blast at the end of the film is either the final stage of the Heat Bomb going off, or maybe the heat has detonated something in the house, such as a a gas line. Mike and Velda live because it's such a small explosion, they're not burned, and with a Heat Bomb only tiny amounts of radiation are given off. Again, the whole purpose of a Heat Bomb is to kill and destroy with blast and lots of heat, not radiation.
The rest of the film makes a great deal of sense from this perspective too (I haven't read the book so I'm only going by the movie). Christina becomes a literary, anti-nuclear activist. She's afraid that without the threat of radioactive contamination, the American public will see nuclear powered Heat Bombs as no different than big chemical bombs and would allow them to be used in future wars. Other nations might then respond by trying to develop Heat Bombs or by being more willing to develop and use regular nuclear weapons. Christina and a small group of others - which includes a science writer and someone who's inside the Heat Bomb project - have decided that the world is better off without this new technology. Somehow they manage to steal the prototype bomb, but before they can go public- their goal is to stop the U.S. government through world pressure and their possession of the only working bomb - a gang of thieves find out what they're up to (probably through the science writer who seems to be connected to both groups). The thieves are willing to sell the bomb to a foreign power, but they don't have it. Mike and Velda end up getting caught between the government, the thieves, and the anti-Heat Bomb activists, yet they live to tell the story to their grandchildren.
You didn't realize that you were watching an early forerunner of an Arnold Schwarzenegger/ Harrison Ford/ Action/ Adventure/ Science Fiction/ Techno-thriller/ Mystery film-noir, did you? Let's just hope that it's also not a documentary about our own future.
THE END(?)
Thanks DslBarney, that made an awful lot of sense. Bizarre film!
Nobody's perfect!
A nuke the size of that box was not out of the realm of possibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device%29
However the way the "Pandora's Box" behaves is totally fictional, in the novel Hammer burns Gaby Rodgers character with a lighter.
"Listen, do you smell something? -Ray Stantz"
The real reason they changed the ending in the American version was that according to the moralists if Mike Hammer and Valda lived it would debase the morals of American society, cows would give soar milk, small children would be moved to steal each other's lunch money, women would stop birthing babies and America would loose the war for the moral high ground. All the usual moralist excuse for movie censorship.
I suppose it could also be argued that Europeans, particularly the French are more sophisticated then Americans and would except a less moralistic ending. Of course the French think Jerry Lewis is high art so that conclusion may be in question. LOL   
TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.
You really need to work on your spelling.
shareif you really need a working explaination, yes, a lot of this makes sense...
i just dont think that it was reality what the director was looking for.
i think its much better to abstract from this bomb.
its a symbol of a power which isnt controllable by any human kind
and still mankind will always open the pandoras box.
i think such an abstracting thinking about it is also much deeper and more interesting.
and though someone above said people knew already everything about atom bombs
i have to deny this. most people got a very naive idea of whats going on...
even in the 80s you got tips for behaviour in such a case which were absolutely ridiculous.
in the 50s the government simply lied to their own people
i also think that this bomb is much more powerful than we see on the screen.
the guy which was killed by her at the end
said to her "do not open it!".
she was his killer!
why shoukd he try to save her life?
even a hardcore buddhist without any feeling of anger and revenge
wouldnt say that and would say - in the best case - nothing.
everybody else would like to see her in fire, cause she killed him.
he obviousky was afraid that a lot of people will die, not just his killer...
i think it shoukd have been much more apocalyptic,
but they were not able to show bigger explosions.
"I saw this on Turner Classic Movies tonight, and they said that in the European version, Meeker was in the house when it blew up. In the American release, he and his girl get out. Apparently the escape scene was missing until 1997."
Actually it's the other way around. In Europe the film was always shown with the longer original ending, whereas most Americans (including directors like Quentin Tarantino) have seen it with the shortened ending aka the U.S. censorship ending.
The most likely explanation for the shortened ending were censorship measures done by several institutions (this was before the MPAA installed ratings to prevent every Dick, Harry and Tom in local institutions to cut films like they wanted) to make it look like Hammer and Velda die in the house to "atone for their sins." Check the site DVDSavant for more on this theory.
Aldrich basically had the same idea, only more subtle (hah, here's some irony). He said, he wanted to keep Hammer alive long enough to see what destruction he has caused. He also stated that he had never seen the shortened ending, clarifying that Hammer's and Velda's escape is indeed the original ending and that the censorship cuts were done by someone else after he finished the film.
thats wrong!
1st there was the todays uncut ending, which was also shown in the US one time.
this copy went to europe, so the europeans got to see the same version you will find on a nowadays DVD (Hammer alive in the ocean).
after this first presentation US-americans got to see the cut version, with Hammer still in the house while it is exploding.
so americans go to see the more pessimistic version,
which i think is also the better and stronger one.
the ending in the novel
I'm just about to read the book, so I'll post the book ending on this site in a couple of days. Whatever the written ending, the film, ending lifts this movie from a great hard-bitten film noir to a movie of mythic dimensions
sharedid you read the book? what did you find out?
sharei have read that the book is about mafia and drugs,
so maybe there wasnt even this mysterious bomb.
i am not sure and cannot remember, but i think i ve read somewhere that this bomb was the idea of the director and another guy involved with the film. so maybe there is not even a bomb in the book and the ending couldnt be similar to what we have seen
I've just watched it, I Sky plussed it about a year ago.
The ending I saw they escape and stagger down the beach as the house goes up, final shot is them staggering into the sea.
"He couldn't get nailed in wood shop"
[deleted]
Back in 1982 I took a gangster film course and the teacher we had said the ending was put in without showing what looked like an a-bomb going off. The government back then did not want to show any bad press on nuclear bomb effects to the public. The showing of the bomb blast got Robert Aldrich in trouble and I believe he had trouble finding work after this movie. Later versions showed what looked like the a-bomb going off and Hammer and his girlfriend out in the ocean surviving the blast. Hope that helps. Rich
shareI would just like to cover some of the points from the previous postings. While I do not claim to be a designer of nuclear weaponry, I do know a bit more about nuclear physics than the average person in the street. Here goes:
1. There is no way you could make an A-bomb fit inside a briefcase.
2. You can't use Uranium to make an atomic bomb as Uranium needs a moderator for the chain reaction to be successful. You first need to convert it into plutonium in a reactor.
3. If you did manage to fit a charge of plutonium into the briefcase, it would be far too heavy to carry, let alone run around with in the way that they do. Plutonium, uranium and all the other nuclear materials are extremely dense. It's their very heavy atoms that gives them their nuclear properties.
4. The radiation given off by the plutonium would have killed the pair of them long before the end of the film.
5. To detonate an a-bomb, you squash the charge together using conventional explosives. Assuming this was detonated by them opening the case, this explosion would have killed them anyway. Let alone the nuclear blast.
6. No, you cannot run away from a nuclear explosion.
That's all I can think of right now. I came across this film purely by chance a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was most impressed by the intrigue of the ending. The one I saw was where they opened the case then ran onto the beach as the house lit up. At no point did I think it was anything like a nuclear detonation. I have no idea what it was supposed to be and I think that was the idea. You, as the viewer were supposed to be left puzzled and intrigued. This film came to mind later on when I saw Pulp Fiction. Tarantino was clearly inspired by the audiences' emotions of 'what's in the box?'.
P.S. Apart from Civilization, what else have I missed?
Yes you can make an A-bomb from uranium. Tall Boy the bomb on Hiroshima was a U-235 gun type bomb. The Trinity and Nagasaki bombs were implosion plutonium bombs. The current types are all implosion because the plutonium is easier to produce (if you have the reactor) than U-235 and they are more compact.
shareOh ok, my mistake. So how do you get the chain reaction with U-235 without a moderator then?
P.S. Apart from Civilization, what else have I missed?
what about U 238?
Nothing is more beautiful than nothing.
I haven't seen the film for a while but from what I remember it isn't actually a bomb in the box but radioactive material.
The contents of the box don't blow up in any kind of nuclear explosion, they seem to super heat the surroundings to the extent that they quickly combust.
There didn't seem to be any more of an explosion than could be accounted for by the contents of an average house on fire - e.g. mains or bottled gas appliances.
Whether this almost instant combustion is plausible I have no idea but it's worth remembering that the film was made only a decade after Hiroshima and at the height of the Cold War when detailed knowledge of the effects of fissionable material wouldn't have been common - or might even have been secret.
Radioactive material is commonly found as a compound and not on its own. Furthermore, U-238 is a stable isotope of Uranium and useless for explosive use.