The Naked Kiss (1964) Directed by Samuel Fuller
Black and white, 90 minutes
Special Features and Extras:
Constance Towers interview (28 min.)
The South Bank Show: "Sam Fuller" (32 min.)
Cineastes de notre temps (featuring Fuller discussing film, in English, 24 min.)
Cinema Cinemas (more Fuller discussing his career, in French and English with subtitles, 13 min.)
Theatrical Trailer (2 min.)
24-page booklet
The Naked Kiss is a strange little film, made even stranger when you consider that it was released in 1964, the same year that gave us Beatlemania, My Fair Lady, and the Ford Mustang. We might consider it somewhat tame today, but for 1964, The Naked Kiss was a shocking, defiant, in-your-face film that dealt with then-taboo topics of prostitution and molestation in a bold, unflinching manner.
Constance Towers plays Kelly, a prostitute running away from her former pimp after a highly charged opening scene that grabs your attention. Kelly steps off a bus, landing in the small All-American town of Grantville. After spending the night with Griff, a local cop, Kelly decides to go straight, working for a local hospital for handicapped children. Eventually Kelly meets and falls in love with one of the pillars of the community, J.L. Grant, causing great disturbances among the locals.
Of course the previous paragraph sounds absolutely preposterous. Yet Fuller makes it work, showing the audience the seedy underside of small-town crime and making you believe that Kelly is caught between trying to do the right thing and utter anguish. Most of the time you’re unsure whether you’re witnessing a video tabloid or trapped inside a surreal nightmare. Yet Fuller insists on keeping the viewer focused on this noir-ish low-budget melodrama. The Naked Kiss a strange, nightmarish world that often creeps you out, but it’s nearly impossible to look away. As such, I think of it as a sort of precursor to a later (and much more disturbing) film like Blue Velvet.
Yet The Naked Kiss is ultimately a film of hope and redemption, even if some of those aspects seem a bit forced at the film’s end. Towers does a great job of pulling off the role of Kelly, one of the strongest female characters I’ve seen from this era of film, but it’s Fuller’s unrelenting refusal to sugar-coat the story that makes The Naked Kiss potent.
I’ve only seen one other Samuel Fuller film before this, Pickup on South Street, a great noir film from 1953 starring Richard Widmark, but it’s now obvious that I clearly need to see more. Perhaps the Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller...
4/5
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