The Naked Kiss: Fuller's Lurid Small-Town Exposé

The film opens before the title. A handheld camera is being punched. A woman is beating a man with her handbag, swinging at the lens, and the man is drunk and grabbing at her, and in the struggle her hair comes off in his hand. She is bald. She keeps hitting him. When he is down she props a mirror on his chest, straightens her wig, takes exactly seventy-five dollars from his wallet — the amount she is owed and no more — and walks out. Then the titles roll.

Samuel Fuller wrote, produced and directed The Naked Kiss in 1964 for Allied Artists, and those two minutes are the most famous opening in American independent cinema. They are also, as an introduction, slightly misleading, because the film that follows is not a hard-boiled crime picture. It is a small-town melodrama with the emotional volume turned up past distortion, and it contains a sequence of nurses singing a song to disabled children that is played entirely straight and lasts an eternity. People walk out of this film. People also spend years thinking about it. Both responses are correct, and Fuller engineered them.

Kelly gets off the bus

Two years after the beating, Kelly (Constance Towers) arrives in Grantville, a clean American town with a park and a hospital and a family name on everything. She sells champagne door to door as a cover, meets the police captain, Griff (Anthony Eisley), sleeps with him within an afternoon, and is promptly told what her place is: Griff sends her across the river to Candy’s, the brothel outside the town limits that the town uses and does not acknowledge.

Kelly declines. Instead she takes a room with an old woman, buys a nurse’s uniform, and gets a job at the orthopaedic hospital caring for children with physical disabilities. She is good at it. She is transparently, unshowily good at it, and Fuller films her competence with a sincerity that has no irony in it anywhere.

Towers is the film’s foundation, and the performance is a marvel of control inside a picture that has none. Kelly is watchful, hard, quick to violence, and possessed of an absolutely rigid personal code that she never explains and never breaks. Towers plays her as someone who has been treated as merchandise for so long that she has developed a forensic eye for what other people actually want, and that skill — which the town regards as the mark of a whore — is what makes her the only adult in Grantville.

Then J.L. Grant (Michael Dante) notices her. He is the town’s benefactor, heir to the name on the buildings, a cultured, handsome, apparently gentle man who has travelled and reads and lives in a house full of art. He falls in love with her. He proposes. He knows exactly what she has been and tells her it does not matter.

Why it works: sincerity as a weapon

Here is the thing that makes The Naked Kiss an authentic oddity rather than a camp object. Fuller means it.

The sequence people cannot get past is the one in the children’s ward, where Kelly and the nurses sing a song with the patients — children in braces and wheelchairs, played by children with real disabilities — and it goes on, and on, sweetly, with no cutaway, no wink, no protective irony. A modern viewer waits for the film to undercut it. The film never does. Fuller shoots it as the most genuine thing in the picture, because in his scheme it is: this is what the outcast built when the respectable town would not have her, and its sentimentality is the evidence of her decency.

The tonal collision is the whole design. Fuller puts a scene of unguarded tenderness beside a scene of shocking violence and refuses to modulate between them, and the audience is left holding both. He had done a version of this in Shock Corridor the year before — the mad, gorgeous colour inserts, the naked emotion, the tabloid brutality in the same reel — and The Naked Kiss is the more extreme experiment. It has no register. It just has volume.

The photography is Stanley Cortez, and this is the collector’s fact worth carrying out of the room. Cortez shot The Magnificent Ambersons for Welles and The Night of the Hunter for Charles Laughton, and he brings to Fuller’s grubby little melodrama the same instinct for the fairy-tale image: deep-focus interiors, faces lit like woodcuts, a dreamlike stillness in the Grant house that sits at the exact centre of the film’s unease. Grantville looks like an illustration in a children’s book, which is precisely the point Laughton’s film made about the American landscape a decade earlier. Cortez is the bridge between the two, and he is doing the same job in both — making a wholesome surface look like a lie.

The handheld work in the opening is worth naming too. In 1964 an American film beginning with a smashed, reeling, subjective camera was close to unheard of, and Fuller does it with a camera operator taking real blows. He wanted the audience assaulted before the studio logo had faded, and he understood that an image which appears to be out of control buys an enormous amount of credit for a film that is, structurally, an extremely conventional melodrama.

The town is the target

The exploitation framing is a con. The poster sold a bad woman in a good town, and the film is about a good woman in a bad town, and Fuller is entirely open about which of the two he intends to disembowel.

Grantville’s hypocrisy is inventoried with real precision. The brothel across the river exists because the town’s men need it and the town’s morality requires it to be somewhere else. Griff, the police captain, sleeps with Kelly and then classifies her, and his classification is a professional judgement rather than a personal one — she is a category. The respectable citizens’ opinion of Kelly is fixed by a fact about her past that none of them can prove and all of them know. And the town’s philanthropist, whose family name is on half the buildings, is the fixed point the whole community has organised itself around trusting.

Fuller’s argument is that respectability is a purchase. Grant bought a reputation with his grandfather’s money, and the town takes the deal, because a town would always rather have a benefactor than an inquiry.

The shelf

For the collector, the Fuller run is the thing: Pickup on South Street for the studio-era Fuller with Fox’s resources and Fox’s supervision, Underworld U.S.A. for the coldest version of his revenge logic, and then Shock Corridor and this one, made back to back on his own terms with no adult supervision whatsoever. The two independents are where he stopped negotiating.

Its real ancestor is The Night of the Hunter, and not only because Cortez shot both. Laughton’s film is the other great American picture about a small community that hands its trust to a well-spoken man because he presents correctly. Both films are tonally impossible — hymns and horror in the same scene — and both were commercial disasters that spent decades being reappraised.

And the whole line of American cinema about the rot under the clean lawn passes through this film on its way to David Lynch, whose entire career is built on the proposition that the tidy lawn is the crime scene. Fuller got there in 1964, on a poverty budget, with a heroine who beats a man with her handbag in the first shot.

My verdict, mechanism below the line: The Naked Kiss is a broken film and a great one, and the breakage is the achievement. Nothing in it matches anything else in it, and the effect of that mismatch is a picture that never lets you settle into the comfortable position of knowing what you are watching. Constance Towers gives one of the decade’s best performances in a film almost nobody saw. The Criterion edition rescued it, and it plays regularly now to audiences who arrive for the opening and stay for the song. Take the song seriously. Fuller did.

Spoilers below

Kelly discovers what Grant is. She lets herself into his house to surprise him and finds him with a little girl, one of the children from the neighbourhood, and understands in a second what she is looking at.

Fuller films the moment almost silently, and what follows is the film’s detonation. Grant, discovered, does not deny it. He explains. He tells Kelly that they are the same — that his corruption and her past make them a matched pair, that she of all people should understand him, that this is why he chose her — and it is the most repellent speech in Fuller’s work precisely because it is delivered by a cultured man in a beautiful room as a proposal of intimacy. Kelly kills him with the telephone receiver, on the spot, without deliberation.

Then the town does what the town does. Nobody believes her. A prostitute has murdered the community’s benefactor, the man whose family name is on the hospital, and the story she is telling about him is exactly the story a whore would invent. Griff, who knows her, does not believe her either. She is arrested and comprehensively disbelieved, and Fuller lets that sit for a long, genuinely agonising stretch of the film, because it is his actual subject: her word is worthless because of what she was, and Grant’s word survives his own death because of who he was.

The title arrives here. Kelly explains that she recognised what Grant was from his kiss — that a certain kind of kiss carries the fact of a pervert in it, and that she has been kissed by enough men to know. This is the sort of lurid pulp psychology that should be laughable, and in Towers’ delivery it is not, because the film has established that her expertise is real and dearly bought. Her degradation is the reason she can see what an entire town cannot.

She is cleared only when the child is found and testifies. That is the ending’s cruelty: Kelly’s own account is worth nothing, and the truth requires a little girl to say it out loud in front of the people who would not listen to a grown woman. The town, vindicated in its own eyes, apologises. Griff apologises. Kelly picks up her suitcase and gets on a bus out of Grantville, and Fuller’s last shot is the townspeople watching her leave — the same crowd, in the same clean street, having learned that their benefactor was a monster and their pariah was a hero, and having decided that she should go anyway.