Ralph Meeker (November 21, 1920 – August 5, 1988) was a film actor who appeared as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.
He was born Ralph Rathgeber in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 21, 1920, the son of Ralph and Magnhild Senovia Haavig Meeker Rathgeber.
He made his film debut in 1951 with a small role in MGM's Teresa, followed by a starring role in the Swiss-made Four in a Jeep, directed by Leopold Lindtberg.
For his performance in the play Picnic, Meeker was awarded the New York Critic's Circle Award in 1954. Picnic became a classic film in 1956, with William Holden and Kim Novak starring in the roles originated by Meeker and Janice Rule.
Meeker starred as Mike Hammer in the 1955 Robert Aldrich film of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly. In 1957 he starred in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, playing one of the condemned soldiers. He also starred in the film St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) as George "Bugs" Moran. Also in 1967 he appeared as Captain Stuart Kinder, the military...
Created by dipity on Feb 7, 2008
Last updated: 11/17/09 at 03:41 AM
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Brannigan is a 1975 film set in London starring John Wayne and Richard Attenborough, directed by Douglas Hickox. It tells the story of a Chicago detective sent to England to organise the extradition of an American mobster (John Vernon).
After turning down the role of Dirty Harry and seeing the subsequent success of the film John Wayne made two gritty police thrillers in quick succession. After McQ he ventured over the Atlantic to make a “cop out of water” film in the same vein as Clint Eastwood's Coogan's Bluff.
Tough Chicago cop Jim Brannigan is sent to London to extradite notorious American gangster, Ben Larkin, but before he can collect him, Larkin is kidnapped and Brannigan spends the rest of the film running around London in search of his quarry. Whilst struggling to adapt to the British way of life and the restrained style of policing, he employs techniques not usually seen outside Chicago (or other large U.S. cities). In the meantime, a contract has been put out on Brannigan's...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072732
Paths of Glory (1957) is an anti-war black and white film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Kubrick and his partners purchased the film rights from Cobb's widow for $10,000.
The book had no title when it was finished, so the publisher held a contest. The winning entry came from the ninth stanza of the famous Thomas Gray poem Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard:
In 1992, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of five French soldiers, under General GĂ©raud RĂ©veilhac, executed for mutiny during World War I; their families sued, and while the executions were ruled unfair, two of the families received one franc each (roughly equivalent to 15 American cents in today's currency), while the other three received nothing.
The movie begins with a voiceover describing...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050825
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A. I. Bezzerides based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly.Kiss Me Deadly is considered a classic of the film noir genre. References (usually to the glowing briefcase) appear in such diverse films as Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997).The film grossed $726,000 in the States and a total of $226,000 overseas.Meeker plays Mike Hammer, a tough Los Angeles private eye who is just slightly less brutal and corrupt than the crooks he chases.One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina (Cloris Leachman), an attractive hitchhiker he picks up on a lonely country road. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semiconsciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048261
Ralph Meeker was born
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