Other Titles • The Naked Kiss • The Iron Kiss (1964) • Alaston suudelma • Il Bacio nudo (1964) • O Beijo Amargo • Una Luz en el hampa (1966) • Det Nøgne kys (1967)
Synopses for The Naked Kiss (1964)
1.
Shock And Shame. The Story Of A Night Girl.
Kelly, a prostitute who tires of her city syndicate and seeks to forget her past, arrives at the small town of Grantville and obtains a job at the Children's Orthopedic Hospital as a nurses' aid. At once, in the small town, she is caught up in a romantic whirl first with a police chief who wants her for what she used to be, and then with his best friend, the town's millionaire, who, even though aware of her former life, begs her to marry him. She accepts, but things go awry as Kelly discovers a shocking murder scene. Arrested by the police chief, she is quickly convicted in the minds of most townspeople and must suffer their judgment based on her past.
(20 votes)
2.
The set-up is pure pulp: A former prostitute relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit in to mainstream society. But in the strange hallucinatory territory of writer/ director/ producer Samuel Fuller, perverse secrets simmer beneath a seemingly wholesome facade. Criterion is proud to present The Naked Kiss in a beautiful widescreen transfer.
(19 votes)
3.
Amazon.com Review Until Sam Fuller came along, movies in the 1960s were still bound by Hollywood's self-imposed and often hypocritical rules of discretion. The crimes and misdemeanors of lurid pulp fiction remained on drugstore spin-racks and newsstands, diluted on screen until Fuller, with his cigar-chomping audacity and confrontational style, liberated movies from artificial restraint and kicked them into the meaner, darker, but more honest maturity of the post-Kennedy era. Shock Corridor announced Fuller's brazen agenda a year earlier, but The Naked Kiss is even more astonishing because its trashy, provocative plot dares to find depth and humanity beneath the hardened shells of corrupted souls.
The film begins like no other before it: Kelly (Constance Towers) beats her pimp with a handbag, grabs the cash he owes her, adjusts her telltale wig and makeup, and sets out to begin life anew, free from the shame of prostitution. Two years later she's in Grantville, a typically Rockwellian slice of Americana, working wonders with disabled kids and gaining distance from her miserable past. She's even engaged to the town's most respected citizen, but dark clouds are gathering: a corrupt cop knows Kelly's hidden secrets; a nearby brothel taints the community; and a pedophile is lurking in the shadows. Through it all, Fuller calibrates The Naked Kiss with such precision that sentiment and sordidness can run parallel without colliding, shifting from outrageous vice to shameless tear-jerking with equal facility. With twisted tricks up his sleeve, Fuller can be accused of tabloid tackiness, but that would be missing the point: In Fuller's cruel and ugly world, compassion still finds a way to survive. --Jeff Shannon
(19 votes)
4.
Sam Fuller's full blown pulp melodrama is straight off the pages of dime-store crime magazines. His use of arty compositions and artificial dialogue prove once again that people only talk like this in his movies. This, his seventeenth film, takes place when all the women were dames and all the men were heels. Kelly, a former prostitute, is a woman of two worlds trying to find redemption in a world controlled by men. Relocated to Grantville, a suburb where everyone is artificially decent, she soon turns into Mother Teresa, quotes Goethe and teaches cripples to walk. The infiltration goes smoothly until she discovers a shocking murder scene and her cover begins to unravel. Fuller also manages to break traditional filmmaking manners by employing jump cuts, long inner monologues, and one of the most questionably placed and maudlin musical numbers ever filmed.
(19 votes)
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