When, in the early sixties, the studio system more or less collapsed under the onslaught of television, Samuel Fuller had trouble getting money to make movies and worked once more as an independent filmmaker on very low budgets, as with this 1964 film noir “The Naked Kiss” (which I discuss in this clip). He took advantage of his status as a sudden outsider to give his wildly lurid imagination and tabloid fund of experience free rein for a story centered on Kelly (Constance Towers), a prostitute seeking redemption as a small-town nurse, and the web of unanticipated depravity in which she finds herself enmeshed. Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination. One of the story’s surprising elements concerns a local grandee of high-cultural accomplishment who takes a shine to her—asserting, no less clearly than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that devotion to the arts and sciences is no guarantee of moral character.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.