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Rating:  -
"The Naked Kiss" is in-your-face pulp fiction, written, directed, and produced by Sam Fuller in 1964. It's reminiscent of film noir, but with an effrontery and moralism that makes it unique. The opening scene is one of cinema's most memorable, as cinematographer Stanley Cortez' camera stares into the eyes of a call girl as she beats the living daylights out of her pimp. Soon Kelly (Constance Towers) is on the run from the pimp, eventually landing in the small town of Grantville. In spite of her elegance, she's immediately spotted by the local sheriff, Griff (Anthony Eisley), who tells her she can't shop her wares in town. He recommends a brothel in the town across the river. But Kelly decides she would prefer a new line of work at the town's orthopedic rehab hospital, where she has a talent for inspiring the handicapped children.
Kelly is an odd woman. Lovely, poised, a cool cookie whose worldliness gives her an acute sense of what goes on around her. But she erupts in a violent rage when she is morally outraged. Sam Fuller makes her both Madonna and whore, a kind of Hester Prynne who is exalted above the hypocrisy around her. Constance Towers inflects her tone of voice from high to low depending upon what moral plane Kelly is supposed to inhabit. It's odd, but no moreso than anything else in "The Naked Kiss". The characters speak of two world's: the "normal" good world and the seedy underbelly. Kelly dreams of moving from one to the other. Griff is unconvinced that she can and always doubts her sincerity. Fuller uses Kelly's plight to comment on society's hypocrisy. But he seems to agree that the aberrant world is bad, while believing firmly that people can be redeemed, even hypocrites.
The DVD (Criterion Collection 1998): This print is not bad but neither is it perfect. It has some white specks. Sound is good. The only bonus feature is a theatrical trailer (2 min). The film is widescreen (1.66:1), so if you're considering buying it on VHS to get a better print, keep in mind that it will be pan-and-scan.
Rating:  -
Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss is one of those strange cult films that is so bad and so inherently odd that it begins to grow on you. The film attempts to present the underbelly of American post war society for what it is. The suburbs may look fresh and clean but they are filled with moral decay.
Kelly (Constance Towers) is a former prostitute who moves to Grantsville to begin a new life. There she becomes involved with the town police Captain, Griff (Anthony Eisley) who sees her only for what she once was. In her new life she becomes the towns hero: working with handicapped children and falling in love with the great grandson of the founder of the town and chief philantropist Grant (Michael Dante). But like all good noir there are terrible secretes hiding just under the surface and this film is no exception.
Fuller uses every trick in the book to take us into his world. There is stilted dialogue, over acting, way too much music,and a town that looks so phony it could only have come from Hollywood yet surprisingly it all works in the end.
While this is not one of Critereon's best efforts it is perfectly watchable. It provides no real extras except the trailer.
Rating: -
I recently viewed the Critereon edition of THE NAKED KISS (1964), director's Sam Fuller raw, brutal yet at the same time sentimental and charming expose of "one of the truths behind the American way of life" circa 1964.
To say that Sam Fuller's films are "the cinema of the extreme " is to understate the situation. Mr. Fuller seemed to believe he could illustrate his theories of why things are the way they are by usng the most extreme examples in every story and idea.
In THE NAKED KISS, Sam Fuller might be saying that because our society is structured the way it is, women and children are pretty much unprotected when a socially acceptable appearing predator, expecially one with wealth and position, comes calling on society's most helpless potential victims.
THE NAKED KISS has sharp contrast B&W cinematography, beautiful musical interludes and enough shocking situations to fill several films from the same era. I think that it is the juxtoposition of these contrasts, one right after another that really make this film dig into your psyche, at least while you're viewing it.
As I said, some of the contrasts are quite jarring but the overall theme is smoothly delivered and sort of sneaks up on you, even now, in 2009.
Yes, violence gets the story moving and pretty much resolves the criminal situation but Sam Fuller's larger question remains: How can this situation be allowed to exist? A startling question in 1964 and an even more urgent question in 2009.
The Critereon edition of THE NAKED KISS has no extras save the trailer & scene selections feature, something of a disapppointment. I gave this film a five star rating because if you give THE NAKED KISS half a chance it'll grab at your consciousness and won't let you go for some time.
Rating:  -
Sam Fuller wrote numerous hard-boiled scripts for the majors Hollywood studios, including 1952's Scandal Sheet, 1953's Pickup on South Street and 1961's Underworld U.S.A. In 1963 he launched a sensational string of independently produced films by writing and directing the lurid expose, Shock Corridor. He followed up in 1964 with this even more brutal story of small town corruption. Fuller's films from this era were pulp novels brought to the screen, hard-hitting stories of troubled and troubling souls, laced with over-the-top physical and emotional violence and twisted by mawkish sentimentality.
The Naked Kiss tells the story of a big city prostitute who finds small town America no place to reform. Try as she might to leave her past behind, the dark secrets of her adopted Grantville, and the cathouse across the river, continue to dog her. Fuller shot this on the cheap, and the cardboard quality of the back lot settings add wonderfully to the feeling that everything and everyone is projecting a façade. The uneven pacing - some scenes languish, some cut sharply - gives the picture an emotional jumpiness that matches its subject, and Fuller's uses close-ups to startle the viewer into direct confrontation with the protagonists.
Fuller's script bluntly weighs the relative morality of prostitution, corruption, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and child abuse. The acting is just as sensationalistic as the themes, with Constance Towers as a hooker whose hardened exterior hides a sensitive intellect within. Not the stereotype hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, but a human being with external awareness of her own predicaments. The male leads, Anthony Eisley as the police captain and Michael Dante as the love interest, are just the opposite, professionals who harbor dark, predatory secrets within.
This is by no means fine cinema, but it makes good on Fuller's philosophy that film is all about emotion. Even the oddly staged musical number is part of the creep show as Towers, having settled into a job as a nurse at a children's orthopedic hospital, practices with her physically crippled charges. Fuller spared no cinematic effort - within his miniscule budgets - in provoking viewers, and his journalistic storytelling combines with black-and-white cinematography to keep a believable edge on even the most outlandish elements of the script. Critereon's DVD includes the original theatrical trailer as the only bonus. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]
Rating: -
Maverick American filmmaker Sam Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art's use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character, a prostitute named Kelly, who describes the kiss of the fiancée she kills, that way, meaning she could tell he was a sexual deviant from the get go. It's a film that has brilliance, inanity, memorable scenes of realism, and trite predictable scenes of sheer fantasy- such as the mention of the titular act, which is not real, but works symbolically to explain certain elements of the lead character's behavior.
That lead character, a hooker named Kelly, is played by B film mainstay Constance Towers, whose decades of acting in low budget films gave her the limited sort of celebrity appeal that only grows with time. For the last few years more people have become familiar with her role as the evil Helena Cassadine on the ABC soap opera General Hospital than in all her previous roles combined, but The Naked Kiss may be her most memorable film role. The film opens with a bang- a shot of Kelly beating the crap out of a man with her purse. He's her pimp, Farland, but he has been cheating her. After she knocks him out she takes only the $75 owed to her, and not a penny more. But, in their struggle, he pulls off her wig, to reveal her as bald. He has shaved her as an act of revenge for a perceived betrayal. It is one of the most kinetic and memorable openings in film history. After getting her money, Kelly puts her wig back on, while looking in a mirror and primping, as the title credits roll. Already, Fuller has set up the character as a `bad girl', but one with scruples. She will be the classic `hooker with a heart of gold', but Fuller goes beyond the stereotype, although he does so only by saturating the viewer with so many other stereotypes and clichés that one is forced to deal with the surfeit as its own raison d'etre.
Only Fuller's films run the gamut from low brow Ed Wood-like total crap to great moments and writing that rival the best moments in a Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese film. Yet, he never had total control over any of his material. Even his magnum opus, the terrific war film The Big Red One, was butchered by its studio, and not restored until nearly a quarter century later. Similarly, The Naked Kiss was butchered to a point where Fuller threatened to have his name removed from it. In some ways, this film superficially resembles Federico Fellini's Nights Of Cabiria, save that Kelly ends up getting the upper hand, in true Hollywood fashion, albeit in a way that Hollywood would never allow. All of Fuller's films are didactic treatises where his characters, usually outcasts and reprobates, do the things that `good people' should do, but are too fearful to do. A Fullerian antihero walks the walk that typical Hollywood characters are only willing to talk. Fuller empathizes with the lowlifes in his films, even as he condemns their lifestyles, taking the most Christian ideal of loving the sinner while hating the sin to heart. Of course, there is a big ethical difference between harmless prostitution and wicked pedophilia, yet it is prostitution that gets a dressing down as a social evil from Kelly, while pedophilia merely gets a death blow, and no such direct address. Fuller also takes a very unique approach to triteness by not just using clichés but wallowing in their excesses until they have to be accepted as part of his slightly askew universe. Only then does he show his traces of originality.
Still, many of his metaphors are too forced- such as his equation of Grant's pedophilia with the hypocrisy and sexual repression of the townsfolk. It's as if one is to believe that the evils of pre-sexual liberation mores were behind Grant's perversion. Only Fuller could be daring enough to cover such a topic- as well as prostitution and abortion, yet do so in the most hackneyed ways playing against the most direct and honest. It is this meshing of disparate methods that makes Fuller so unique, even when at his worst and most pedantic. This carries over into his film style, where he is a primitive, artistically. The camerawork by cinematographer Stanley Cortez is often wobbly, off-kilter, out of focus, full of glare, and the editing is often bizarre. The DVD, put out by Passion Productions, has no extras, but the print is surprisingly high in quality- better than some of the titles put out by bigger companies like Fox-Lorber or The Criterion Collection.
Yet, compared to such stiff moralistic Hollywood fare as Charles Laughton's Night Of The Hunter, which also deals with child abuse, one can see why a film like this chose to go over the top to slip in its medicine with such candied fluff. The Naked Kiss is anomic, leaves many of its scenes open to interpretation, is over-simplistic, ahead of its time, trite, yet also has moments of true human emotion. It is the definition of that work of art which is definitely not great, but, in a sense, essential, for it perfectly distills the contradictions of a time between the repressed black and white morality of the Cold War 1950s and the sludgy gray of the coming morass of Civil Rights Era abuses and mass murder in Vietnam. But, when all of that is said and one, it's just a fun film to watch, beyond any analysis, and that's a rare enough quality in any age.
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