• Produced, written and directed by Samuel Fuller
• Starring
  • Constance Towers
  • Anthony Eisley
  • Michael Dante
  • Virginia Grey
  • Patsy Kelly

Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss has all the elements of a noir B-movie: prostitutes getting into and out of the business, lawmen who straddle the fence, and murder most foul. Fuller gives those tawdry elements both a sheen of respectability and a deep infusion of cynicism. It’s also a very flawed movie, possibly because of the studio making cuts that infuriated Fuller, but probably also because of what you’re going to get when you make a movie full of exploitative elements for a mainstream early-’60s audience, i.e., so much pussyfooting that the impact is blunted.

Kelly (Constance Towers, who’s got very much a Julie London thing going on) is a prostitute, whom we first meet in a scene which is bewildering at the time: She beats a man into submission with her shoe, and along the way she has her red wig knocked off, showing her bald head. She takes seventy-five dollars from the semi-conscious man — what’s coming to her, she says — and leaves. I’ll grant that it’s a gripping way to open a movie, but even once the scene is explained to us later in the movie, it never becomes clear what it has to do with anything.

“Sampling.” Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Instead, we fast-forward two years and find Kelly, her own hair grown back to a luxuriant blonde, arriving by bus in Grantville, the quintessential small American town. Keeping it safe is the quintessential small American town cop, Captain Griff (Anthony Eisley), who takes a professional interest and then some in the pretty blonde lady who just got off the bus. He’s also fairly intelligent; it doesn’t take him long to see through this “traveling champagne saleslady,” and because he’s single and worldly, he volunteers to sample her wares, as it were. (No, really. Says he, “I’m pretty good at popping the cork if the vintage is right.”)

After “sampling,” he tells her that he’s got to keep Grantville clean, so he’ll make introductions for her at Candy’s cathouse across the river. He goes back to work, Kelly stays in his apartment overnight, and… and then the next morning she decides to give up prostitution, rents a room in town from the spinster seamstress, and gets herself a job at the children’s hospital.

Of course, she already owned the nurse uniform. Plus French maid, cheerleader…

Sorry, but whaaaa? I’m not saying that prostitutes can’t go straight, in the movies or in real life. But usually that kind of momentous “career change” doesn’t just happen on the spur of the moment, with little or no provocation. But no, Kelly just decides she’s no longer open for business¹ and turns to respectability.

Griff initially thinks that her hospital job is a cover for her “real” career, but when he sees how good she is with the kids (and, presumably, how she goes straight home after work and doesn’t entertain visitors), he grudgingly doesn’t cause trouble for her.

But trouble’s on the way. First, she makes an enemy out of Candy (Virginia Grey), the brothel owner, when Candy tries to recruit one of Kelly’s fellow nurses to be one of her “bon-bons.” Actually, “makes an enemy” doesn’t cover it; she opens a can of whupass on Candy, and stuffs her $25 advance money into her mouth. Kelly is apparently willfully unaware that madames on a first-name basis with the police captain can exact their revenge.

“Bring… cue card… closer!”

But the big trouble is that she falls in love with Grant (Michael Dante), young scion of the wealthy family that built Grantville and supports the hospital she works at. She meets him at a charity function, even though Griff gives her the hairy eyeball, and their relationship goes far enough that Kelly feels she has to break it off by telling Grant the truth: that she came to town as a prostitute, even though she gave it up almost as soon as she got off the bus. To her surprise, Grant responds by proposing marriage. It’s a dream come true for a former working girl — a husband who’s handsome, intelligent and respected (and rich, but that’s really not part of the equation, no, of course not).

And then it all falls apart when she surprises Grant at his house with her wedding dress, and discovers a young girl skipping out. In our second “Whaaaa?” scene, this immediately means that Grant’s a child molester, and when he says that he’s marrying her because she’s “abnormal” too, she clubs him on the head with the telephone and kills him.

“Fine, fine, you can all be ‘Pegleg.’”

So, a child around the house can only be explained if he’s a pervert? I’m not saying it’s not suspicious, but it seems more than a little leap to me, especially with as circumspectly as a movie released in 1964 treats the subject. In fact, I was left a little confused after that scene — was I really supposed to understand that he’s a molester? — so much so that I stopped the movie and looked up some reviews online to confirm that, yes, that’s exactly what was meant. (Okay, I could just have waited one more scene, in which Griff grills Kelly at the station, but I didn’t know that scene was coming.)

And you know that there’s no evidence in her favor; the little girl disappears, Kelly can’t identify her, and anyway she’s already convicted by public opinion when word gets out that “GRANT WAS KILLED BY A PROSTITUTE.” Everyone with a grievance against her comes out of the woodwork; Candy concocts a story of Kelly planning on a “Blackmail Incorporated” scheme, and her former procurer Farlunde (Monte Mansfield) — the man she beat up in the opening scene — shows up as a “character witness” for the prosecution. (Here’s the background: He was holding out on a bunch of girls, Kelly organized a walkout, Farlunde slipped her a pill and shaved her head while she was unconscious, Kelly administered the already-seen beating, and then she kept moving for the next two years to stay away from Farlunde’s mob connections, working the small-town route. That leads to two questions: 1) Is any of this important enough to her backstory that it has to be established in the opening scene of the movie? 2) Wouldn’t that traumatic event have been a more likely and logical juncture for her to switch careers, instead of two years later, when she decides to settle in Grantville for no reason?)

No man could hold her… but prison could!!

Yup, there’s no way for her to clear herself. No way, except for a contrived happenstance that involves a police station jail cell with a glassless, bars-only window onto the alley, and a half-dozen children who habitually play in that alley, one of whom just happens to be the girl she saw at Grant’s place…

I don’t know. There are plenty of people who consider this a classic, which accounts for its Criterion Collection edition in 1998. But thanks to the understated way in which pivotal moments are played, plus the necessity of beating around the bush to present such potentially exploitative subject matter in a respectable film, I felt like I was watching the trimmed-for-TV version.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Constance Towers (Kelly) played “Taxco” in the DS9 episode “The Forsaken”
  • Michael Dante (Grant) played “Maab” in the classic episode “Friday’s Child”

1. Yes, I hate myself.[back]