The Naked Kiss

THE NAKED KISS   ***

Samuel Fuller

1964

IDEA:  After running away from her pimp, a prostitute ends up in a seemingly idyllic suburb and becomes a nurse at a children's orthopedic hospital.

BLURB:  True to Samuel Fuller’s caustic, impertinent ways, The Naked Kiss is a subversive twisting of film noir codes. The dissipated postwar milieu is still here, but its moral rot is totally disguised by the patina of everytown Americana. Into this artificial suburb, Fuller drops Kelly, a former prostitute first seen beating and fleeing her pimp in the film’s jolting opening scene. In another, more familiar context, Kelly would be the de facto femme fatale, setting poisonous sexual traps. In The Naked Kiss, Fuller introduces her as an agent of insubordination and danger, only to then reveal her true, almost comically opposed position as a virtuous reformer. As the layers of Grantville get peeled back, and its golden boy philanthropist is revealed to be a child predator, Kelly’s taboo-ness, her socially vilified out-of-place-ness, is recast as something nearly holy: a whore and a mother, a bitch-slapping demimonde and a steward for justice. She’s the foil to the feckless male characters, as any femme fatale must be, but she confounds our expectations by being totally righteous in her crusade. And when she makes her ambiguous exit, she wanders off like a distaff Ethan Edwards, a result of failed assimilation that suggests the values of a hooker are above most of the stuff that passes in an allegedly civil society.