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.

The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957)

The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957)

Cast: Joanne Woodward, David Wayne, Lee J. Cobb, Edwin Jerome, Alena Murray, Nancy Kulp, Douglas Spencer, Terry Ann Ross, Ken Scott, Mimi Gibson, Alistair Cooke. Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, based on a book by Corbett Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Art direction: Herman A. Blumenthal, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Marjorie Fowler. Music: Robert Emmett Dolan.

When cases of what was then called "multiple personality disorder" were first diagnosed and made known to the public, it was a godsend to actors, who could then show off their skills in three-or-more-in-one roles. Playing "Eve White," "Eve Black," and "Jane" in The Three Faces of Eve launched Joanne Woodward's film career and won her a best actress Oscar. Later, it would give Sally Field a chance to play more than a dozen characters in the TV movie Sibyl (Daniel Petrie, 1976), earning her an Emmy and helping her break out of the "manic pixie dream girl" type that she had been stuck in after the TV series Gidget and The Flying Nun. (Sibyl's producers also indulged in the stunt-casting of Woodward as Sibyl's psychiatrist.) Today the disorder is more usually known as "dissociative identity," and it still stirs controversy in psychoanalytic circles, with some questioning whether it really arises from childhood trauma like the ones portrayed in The Three Faces of Eve and Sibyl, and even if it might be induced by the psychiatrist's own techniques in treating patients. That is to say, despite the attempts -- which include a sober-faced introduction in which Alistair Cooke solemnly asserts that the film is a "true story" -- by The Three Faces of Eve to present its narrative as a sort of docudrama, the movie needs to be met with a lot of skepticism. That doesn't deny, of course, that Woodward gives a terrific performance, carefully segueing from one Eve to another and eventually to Jane. And I liked Stanley Cortez's manipulation of shadows in filming the story -- though it's not a movie that needed to be in CinemaScope, always something of a distraction in black-and-white. But what may make Woodward's performance stand out even more is its contrast with the hamming of David Wayne as Eve's violent hick husband, a man almost as much in need of a shrink as she is. And Lee J. Cobb is uncommonly bullying as Eve's doctor, constantly sucking on a cigar as if invoking Sigmund Freud. We have a happy ending, of course, despite the fact that the real "Eve," Christine Costner Sizemore, led an anxious and troubled later life, at one point suing 20th Century Fox over a contract that deprived her of the rights to her own story.

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

Peter Breck and Hari Rhodes in Shock Corridor

Johnny Barrett: Peter Breck
Cathy: Constance Towers
Trent: Hari Rhodes
Stuart: James Best
Boden: Gene Evans
Pagliacci: Larry Tucker
"Swanee" Swanson: Bill Zuckert
Dr. Menkin: Paul Dubov
Dr. Cristo: John Matthews
Wilkes: Chuck Robertson
Dr. Fong: Philip Ahn

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor is the kind of raw, nightmarishly energetic film that cinéastes love but more classically oriented movie lovers often find ridiculous or repellent. And sure enough, there's plenty to ridicule, starting with the film's premise that schizophrenia is a contagious disease. (This is not a film for people who take mental illness and its treatment seriously.) Johnny Barrett is a hotshot reporter lusting after a Pulitzer Prize -- "Pulitzer fever" is, as anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows, a real and untreatable illness -- who pretends to be in love with his sister so he can get committed to a mental hospital where he plans to solve the recent murder of an inmate. He doesn't have a sister, however, so he persuades his girlfriend, Cathy, who works as a stripper, to play the part. Cathy doesn't much want to go along with the plan, worrying that he can't handle the stress of constant contact with the inmates and may go mad himself. But she somewhat abruptly decides to go along with the idea, which is endorsed by Johnny's editor. Once inside, Johnny befriends three inmates who actually witnessed the murder. The murder case, however, is just a MacGuffin -- a plot device that allows Fuller to make symbolic statements about the malaise of America in the 1960s, afflicted by the Cold War, racism, and the nuclear arms buildup. One of the witnesses, Stuart, is a Korean War vet who briefly turned communist and was imprisoned; he now thinks he is the Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. Another, Trent, is a young black man who was the first of his race to attend a Southern university; he was harassed into a breakdown and now thinks he's the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan -- he steals pillowcases off of beds to make hoods. And Boden is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb and is so laden with guilt that he has regressed to the mental age of 6. Johnny's friendship helps each of them break through to brief moments of sanity during which they provide clues that help solve the murder before reverting to their disturbed states. But Cathy's fears about what might happen to Johnny also come true, so at the end, as one of the doctors says, "An insane mute will win the Pulitzer Prize." This is grand exploitation B-movie stuff, treated with a mixture of low-budget quickie filmmaking and actual artistry, but it doesn't quite deserve to be taken as seriously as some of its admirers do. There are too many glaring continuity gaffes: In one scene, the closeups, lighted by the fine cinematographer Stanley Cortez, have a deep-shadowed expressionist look, but when the film cuts to an establishing shot the faces are conventionally lighted. There's a ridiculous scene in which Johnny wanders into the women's ward and is attacked by a group of what he calls, in voiceover, "Nymphos!" Six or eight women knock him down and swarm over him, but it's not entirely clear what they're up to. Later, we see Johnny with his face heavily bandaged as if they had bitten or scratched him, but after the bandages come off there are no visible bruises or scabs. The performances are mostly good, especially Hari Rhodes as Trent, but Constance Towers's part is a thankless one. She spends most of the film histrionically worrying about Johnny, but she also has to bring off a clunkily choreographed striptease scene that begins with her face completely muffled by a large feather boa, making her look in closeup like Big Bird's butt. In short, Shock Corridor is fascinating personal filmmaking, which is why it has an enormous cult following. But if you're of a conservative or conventional bent, you should know what you're getting into.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

So much has been written about the mishandling and mutilation of Orson Welles's second feature film that it's hard to see the Magnificent Ambersons that we have without pining for the one we lost. What we have is a fine family melodrama with a truncated and sentimental happy ending and an undeveloped and poorly integrated commentary on the effects of industrialization on turn-of-the-20th-century America. We also have some of the best examples of Welles's genius at integrating performances, production design, and cinematography -- all of which Welles supervised to the point of micromanagement. The interior of the Amberson mansion is one of the great sets in Hollywood film: It earned an Oscar nomination for Albert S. D'Agostino, A. Roland Fields, and Darrell Silvera, though the credited set designer, Mark-Lee Kirk, should have been included. Welles used the set as a grand stage, exploiting the three levels of the central staircase memorably with the help of Stanley Cortez's deep-focus camerawork. Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Anne Baxter's grandfather, visited the set and hated it: It was precisely the kind of domestic architecture that he had spent his career trying to eliminate, which, as Welles said, was "the whole point" of the design. As for the performances, Agnes Moorehead received a supporting actress nomination, the first of four in her career, for playing the spinster aunt, Fanny Minafer. She's superb, especially in the "kitchen scene," a single long take in which her nephew, George (Tim Holt), scarfs down strawberry shortcake as she worms out of him the information that Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) has renewed his courting of George's widowed mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello), which is especially painful for Fanny, who had hopes of attracting Eugene herself. Holt, an underrated actor, holds his own here and elsewhere -- he is, after all, the central character, the spoiled child whose selfishness ruins the chances for happiness of so many of the film's characters. We can mourn the loss of Welles's cinematic flourishes that were apparently cut from the film, but to my mind the chief loss is the effective integration of the theme initiated when Eugene, who has made his fortune developing the automobile, admits that the industrial progress it represents "may be a step backward in civilization" and that automobiles are "going to alter war and they're going to alter peace." Welles was speaking from his own life, as Patrick McGilligan observes in his book Young Orson. Welles's father, Dick Welles, had been involved in developing automobile headlights -- the very thing in which Fanny invests and loses her inheritance -- and was the proud driver of the first automobile on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles's home town. The Magnificent Ambersons would have been much richer if Welles had been able to make the statement about the automobile that he later told Bogdanovich was central to his concept of the film.

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

Is there another great film so inconsistent in tone and technique? For it is a great film for the most part -- certainly every part that features Robert Mitchum in one of the defining roles of his career. And the central section that deals with the river journey of the two children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl Harper (Sally Jane Bruce), has a mythic resonance, enhanced by Lillian Gish's marvelously naive retelling of the stories of Moses in the bulrushes and the flight of the Holy Family from Herod's massacre of the innocents. Director Laughton, cinematographer Stanley Cortez, and art director Hilyard M. Brown give us memorable images like that of the drowned Shelley Winters, hair floating like the underwater weeds, or the one of Mitchum on horseback silhouetted in the distance against the night sky as the terrified children cower in a barn. I particularly love one heart-stopping moment: Lillian Gish has been sitting on her screened porch, shotgun on her lap, protecting the children while Mitchum waits outside. Gish and Mitchum have both been singing the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" in an ironically peaceful duet. Then a child brings a candle to the porch and its light is reflected on the screen for a moment, hiding Mitchum from Gish's view. She quickly blows out the candle, but by the time she does, he has disappeared. If Laughton had been able to sustain this sort of tension throughout the film, it would be easier to call The Night of the Hunter a masterpiece. But some of his work is undone by the intrusive score by Walter Schumann. And Laughton, in his only film as director, isn't able to bring off what should be the film's climax: the capture, trial, and threatened lynching of Mitchum's character. As staged and edited, it proves anticlimactic. Nor does the Christmasy happy ending succeed in avoiding sentimentality. Some of the film's flaws no doubt result from the screenplay by James Agee, much revised by Laughton, which occasionally works too hard at being "poetic." But it's criminal that the poor initial reception of the film discouraged Laughton from trying his hand as director again.