Kiss Me Deadly: The prequel to Repo Man?

My perennial complaint about noir: too many women and too many corpses. At least we know there's a common source for all the dead bodies. The MacGuffin's a bit less compelling than, say, the eponymous statuette of The Maltese Falcon, simply because it's so vaguely described it could be anything. I have an inkling it'll be retrieved later and end up in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu, or in a briefcase carried by Samuel L. Jackson. It's got some compelling acting, characters good and comfortable in their roles, but, my, the plot's a mess, perhaps almost as much as The Big Sleep.

Oh, two striking visual elements: first, those backwards-scrolling credits are really jarring, since they're also printed bottom-to-top. And that answering-machine is great. I didn't know there were machine-type answering services in the fifties.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.