"Kiss Me Deadly" is a bleak, nihilistic noir and a scathing commentary on American paranoia in the 1960s. Aldrich loosely adapted a sexy and brutal novel by popular writer Mickey Spillane (in the director's words, "We used the title and put the book away"), and the film quickly became hailed by the French New Wave. Truffaut called Kiss Me Deadly the most original American film since Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. Mike Hamer, a private detective, tries to find out why a half-naked woman met on the road at night was tortured to death and to locate a suitcase with mysterious contents, a motif borrowed by Quentin Tarantino in "The Tabloid Reader".