“What is the smell of the naked kiss?” Samuel Fuller’s Film-Noir-inflected moral drama THE NAKED KISS tantalizes with an olfactory come-on, then debunks it as one of the lowest human perversity. Our protagonist is Kelly (Towers), a woman bestowed with both intellect (predisposed to quotes like Goethe’s “Nothing is more terrible than active ignorance”) and physical beauty, but practices the world’s oldest profession, Fuller offers no backdrop of her past, but in the movie’s sensational, jazz-infused, frenziedly montaged opening scenes where she whups the living daylight out of her ignoble pimp (Mansfield), a shocking reveal of her bald head piques audience’s interest in this unconventional heroine, and in the following story, she will literally slap her way into a cathouse madam (Virginia Grey, grittily holds true of her vice) and ultimately, a killing instinct when facing the abject shock.
Escaping from the vindictive pimp, Kelly perambulates from town to town and alights at Grantville, after transacts her first business with the local police captain Griff (Eisley, cogently channeling the suspect ambivalence), Kelly gets a rude awakening and decides to go straight and enrolls as a nurse in the hospital to minister to handicapped children, although Griff is skeptical of her wiping-the-slate-clean endeavor. Kelly proves to be more than competent in her new vocation, meanwhile saves young girls from entering her abjured old profession, even ponying up a handsome amount of dough to convince and tide over a pregnant girl to keep her baby.
Pro-life and ineluctably maternal, Kelly, who admits that she is sterile, is a steely moral police on that front, and soon her distinguished poise also spellbinds the most eligible man of the town, the scion Grant (Dante), who likewise enjoys throwing apothegms like “…happiness was born a twin” from Lord Byron and “a sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle” from Baudelaire. Moreover, much contrary to her trepidation, after confessing her unsavory past to Grant, Kelly is on cloud nine when his marriage proposal isn’t retracted.
That is just a too unbelievably perfect ending for a woman like Kelly (almost never happens in a fiction movie except for Garry Marshall’s PRETTY WOMAN, 1990), and Fuller patiently divulges the catch while the catchy nursery rhyme piping up on the monograph when the small-town insidiousness coldly catches up with her, dashes her hope and puts the label of a murderer on her, she needs a key witness to vindicate her version of the story, aka. the truth, but there are many impediments laying about, not least a bloody-minded Griff who just cannot believe the concealed nature of the impeccable Grant.
Although the crime-clearing procedure is a bit willful and incoherent, what makes THE NAKED KISS stick is Fuller’s sledgehammer esthetics of tackling and dissecting a tabooed and thorny issue no one has dared to approach thus far, wedding the story with an engrossing pace sustained compellingly by Towers’ wholesomely righteous and affecting performance, it also pointedly flags up the society’s sexist double standards on prostitution, there is no scruples for a john to disparage a fallen woman, and THE NAKED KISS is a veritable paean of a fallen woman, ever so unsparingly fearless, no wonder she doesn’t make changes.
referential entries: Fuller’s UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961, 6.7/10); THE CRIMSON KIMONO (1959, 7.1/10).
