The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

Cast: Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Betty Bronson, Patsy Kelly, Karen Conrad, Marie Devereux, Virginia Grey, Linda Francis, Bill Sampson, Edy Williams. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Art direction: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Paul Dunlap.

The Naked Kiss begins with a bang: a woman beating the crap out of a man, using her shoe and everything else that comes to hand, even spritzing him with seltzer from a siphon before she finally knocks him cold, collects the $75 he owes her, replaces the wig that has fallen off her bald head during the fight, and departs. It's going to be hard to top that, you might think, unless you know Samuel Fuller's movies and can be sure that he will. We learn that she's called Kelly, that she's a prostitute, and the man she's beating up is her pimp, who shaved her head as a punishment. Some time later, long enough for her hair to have grown back fully, we catch up with her arriving in the town of Grantville, posing as a traveling saleswoman with a sample kit of a Champagne called Angel Foam. And it's there that she will try, after one last trick with the good-looking town police captain named Griff, to go straight. She gets a job in the local hospital for children with disabilities, thrives, and gets engaged to the town's most prominent citizen, a man named Grant. Of course, when we first encounter Grant, who is handsome in a particularly oily way, we know that things won't go right -- even after Kelly confesses about her past to him and he accepts her anyway. This is melodrama at its pulpiest, and Fuller makes the most of it in his own special way. There is nothing "realistic" about The Naked Kiss. You might even call it "para-realistic" -- existing somewhere alongside reality in the way lurid fictions do. Fuller's films, made without benefit of the budgets and technical resources of the big studios, look like the work of someone playing with the available money and resources to express a private vision that's slightly askew, like memories or even dreams of big studio movies. They're filled with unexpected details, such as Kelly's wig or the dressmaker's dummy that Kelly's landlady costumes in the uniform of her late fiancé, killed in the war. They make us laugh as much as they creep us out. There's even a slightly hallucinatory quality to the disabled kids Kelly works with, who are called on for a performance of a song known as "Little Child," which takes on a sinister irony when we discover that Grant, for whom Kelly stages the performance, is a pedophile. Sometimes I'm not even certain if I watched The Naked Kiss or if I dreamed it.