Aldrich hails from Cranston, Rhode Island, by the way!
Here is a bit from Thomson’s essay on him:
“Kiss Me Deadly is still one of the best, and most surprising American films of the 1950s, a lucid transformation of pulp Spillane into a vicious insolent allegory of violence, corruption, and forbidding futures in America. Did overbearing producers and more restrictive censorship push Aldrich into a disciplined and even ironic evocation of brutality? Did the cheerfulness of the fifties allow such glittering darkness to slip through?”
From David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated
