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Rating: - A Singular Vision
The first scene: (This film has one of the best first scenes of all-time.) A tall buxom brunette wearing only a black bra is wrestling with a man in a living room. The man seems to be losing consciousness but before he blacks out he rips off the woman's wig exposing her bald head. She re-attaches and re-adjusts her wig and flees.

The second scene: A woman (the same as the one in the first scene) now blonde, exits a bus on a bright day. Its a typical American town. She's all legs and lipstick and sunshine and smiles. All the men stare, the boldest chats her up. Turns out she is a traveling salesman or woman, named Kelly, and shes selling "Angel Foam" champagne. The guy talking her up is the town cop, Griff, and he decides to buy a bottle. The two end up at his place.

Kelly, it turns out is a call girl, but shes a call girl whose decided that she has performed her last trick. The town that she has chosen to reform in, however, needs some reforming of its own. It seems every woman that arrives in town is greeted by Griff who then sets them off on one of two career paths: working as a nurse in the town hospital or working at Candy's Salon as a "bon bon" girl. Its the guys who rule this town called Grantville, the girls just work there. After spending some time working in the hospital for handicapped children as well as assisting the abused women of the town, Kelly becomes a kind of hero. But after she finds that her fiance, the most powerful man in town, has committed an unspeakable crime, in retaliation she commits one herself and ends up in the town jail, vilified by all. Its only then that we learn what happened in that first scene.

The only way to vindicate herself is if all the women of the town stand together.

Samuel Fuller is a legend for breaking with Hollywood conventions and making pictures without Hollywood stars, and without your usual Hollywood characters and storylines, and, most importantly, without your usual Hollywood sensibility. I suppose that it is tempting to say that Fuller is interested in a more realistic vision of life than the visions of life offered by the Hollywood directors, but that doesn't really do justice to Fuller for his vision of life and his aesthetic is not realistic but expressionistic (at times even surrealistic). Fuller certainly understands cinema and the fact that it is not reality but a heightened version of reality. His aesthetic is, therefore, no more realistic than any other directors aesthetic. Some call Fuller's a B-film aesthetic, but that term is too generic and "B-film" usually means artless, and there's plenty of "art" in Fuller's vision. I think the right word to describe the Fuller vision and aesthetic is "carnivalesque". That word suggests a recognition of appetites, of carnal desire, and of the fact that most of us mask our appetites and desires and distance ourselves from them by rationalizing and/or refining them until they are unrecognizable. A Fuller film can do many things, but rationalize and refine are not in his arsenal. He uses cinema to lay bare, to expose the raw and unrefined truth (as he sees it).

Fuller is obviously drawn to the odd lurid characters that Hollywood (and America) either marginalizes, exploits, or ignores. His films serve as a reminder that the marginalized, the exploited, and the ignored also have stories to tell. This makes Fuller a kind of chronicler and champion of the abused. This in itself is admirable, but this praise is complicated by the fact that Fuller doesn't just tell their stories and thus humanize the marginalized, exploited, and ignored. Rather, he evolves an aesthetic that allows us to feel what it feels like to be one of the marginalized, exploited, and ignored.

Maybe the most disconcerting thing about a Fuller film is that Fuller knows full well how to exploit his material and the audience's appetite for the lurid. (No one would doubt that his films work very well as voyeuristic thrill and chill rides into the forbidden and the taboo.) But he also does more than that. Fuller's films also allow the viewer/voyeur to both identify with the alienated creatures on the screen and to be on their side. This is what is so innovative and so countercultural about his work.

NAKED KISS is a raw film. The viewer has been trained by countless Hollywood films to gaze at the vixens and villains on the screen , but Fuller's films have served as a countercultural alternative to mainstream cinema, and they invite us to relate with and examine what is on the screen in a different way than a mainstream film does. The films of Fuller ask us to relate to whats on the screen in a more intimate way. His characters and stories are lurid and seedy but there is also something genuine and authentic seething within them. Fuller peels away the cool exterior to expose the hidden and explosive truths not just about other people but about us. The more we learn about the exploited and the more we identify with them, the more difficult it is to see them as separate.

I would not call Fuller's films masterpieces, but I don't think that is what he's trying to create. They are more like experiments with a medium and an aesthetic. Sometimes the experiments are awkward and sometimes shocking but there is a power and an honesty in Fuller's amateurism and his awkwardness that is absent from most other cinematic art.

Highly recommended for the viewer seeking directors with singular visions.

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