THE NAKED KISS, Samuel Fuller (1964) / The art of high-class pulp

Sex worker Kelly becomes no longer willing to put up with exploitation by her pimp. After assaulting him, she moves to Grantville, determined to leave her past life behind. She finds a new job in pediatric nursing and wins the respect of the town's residents, though pressed by the need to conceal her past. Just when love and matrimony seem within her grasp, her path towards happiness is blocked when she witnesses a shocking event, threatening not just her happiness, but her mental health and personal freedom as well.

Directed, written, and produced by Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez
Editing: Jerome Thoms
Music: Paul Dunlap
Release date: 29 October 1964
Running tine: 1h 30m

HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream The Naked Kiss online, visit JustWatch.com and TV.Movie. Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, October 25. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 10/24 in order to ensure being admitted.

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No one could ever accuse Sam Fuller of refinement. In his autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, Fuller claimed that he didn't speak until age 5 and that his first word was "hammer." And his style of filmmaking had more of the bludgeon to it than many studios were willing to accept. But that only made Fuller more determined to get his movies made at whatever risk, often in a matter of weeks.

His orneriness was surely incubated in the roughness of his life: newspaper copyboy at 12, crime reporter at 17, decorated WWII soldier, and certainly as pulp novelist. Fuller became renowned for churning out low-budget, high-aspiration films at a steady pace, throughout his heyday from the '50s through the early '80s. He brought to the fore themes other directors and the studios seldom ventured: mental illness (Shock Corridor), Cold War politics (Pickup on South Street), the chaos of war (Steel Helmet), and the indelibility of race relations (White Dog). Always, even while indulging his occasionally lurid imagination, he pressed the boundaries of the socially acceptable in the name of social progress.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLlUc-A2RM0

Rotten Tomatoes: 93% of 14 reviews
Metacritic: 83 based on 15 reviews (universal acclaim), Must See

Fuller's work earned him the respect of other directors, especially from the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard gave him a cameo in Pierrot la Feu, encapsulating Fuller's philosophy to a T. He appears as himself at a party, smoking his signature cigar, and is asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo's character to explain cinema. "A film is like a battleground. It's love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotions,"

The film's title comes from a remark that Kelly makes, in which she says you can tell a dangerous sexual deviant from his "naked kiss." Fuller suggests that the way men treat women in American society is nothing less than perverse -- quite a statement for 1964.

BLURBS & ATTITUDES
The Naked Kiss is a sneaky movie. It seems at first like a campy noir film about a call girl trying to go straight. But stick with it. This is one of the wisest, slickest, and most unorthodox feminist films one could ever hope to see ...That film noir is often the most woman-hating (or at least woman-fearing) of genres makes The Naked Kiss all the more unexpected. Only when you back up and look at it does it become clear that the entire film is about the abuse and exploitation of women. Kelly meets women who are hookers, who are pregnant and abandoned, who are destitute. Meanwhile the men run the show, make the money, and perpetuate the double standard. Towers is remarkable as the fierce street angel, hard as ice and cold as nails. ∞ Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

The kind of film you feel you need to shower after seeing: it just might have been Fuller’s finest hour. ∞ Variety

Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force. ∞ Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club

Something amazing happens in it just about every 90 seconds. From one moment to the next you have no idea where the director is going. It's as if the screen has been hard-wired directly to Fuller's id. ∞ Don Irvine, The Globe and Mail

When, in the early sixties, the studio system more or less collapsed under the onslaught of television, Samuel Fuller had trouble getting money to make movies and worked once more as an independent filmmaker on very low budgets ... He took advantage of his status as a sudden outsider to give his wildly lurid imagination and tabloid fund of experience free rein for a story centered on Kelly (Constance Towers), a prostitute seeking redemption as a small-town nurse, and the web of unanticipated depravity in which she finds herself enmeshed. Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination. ∞ Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Sam Fuller is deservedly a cult director and this is the cult film that best expresses his go-for-the-jugular skills ... The story-line is a kind of psychotic fairy tale in which all kinds of ideas about people being trapped within others' expectations find convincing expression. Sex as warfare, loss of innocence and an overriding fascination with the deceptive nature of appearances are all right in here, not simply ideas grafted onto the story. It's a tragic and tender Fuller classic, way ahead of its time.∞ William Thomas, Empire

It takes a little swallowing, but Fuller's grasp of character and milieu is so sure that the film gradually imposes itself as a scathing exposé of hypocrisy, unforgettable for the sharp savagery of scenes like the one in which Towers calmly marches into the local bordello and stuffs the madam's mouth full of dollar bills as retribution for trying to corrupt an innocent. ∞ Time Out

The Naked Kiss is a gut punch with the rhythm of a dream. ∞ Angelica Jade Bastien, New York (Vulture)