The prostitute, whose name is Kelly (Constance Towers), takes the $75 she is owed by her john, reaffixes her wig, and stalks out of the apartment. We catch up with her two years later, when she alights from a bus in the small, seemingly benign town of Grantville. At this point, she has every intention of continuing her trade, as her first afternoon is spent with Griff (Anthony Eisley), the town’s police chief. He is the film’s first object lesson in hypocrisy, as he casually follows his tryst with Kelly by trying to send her “across the river” to work at a brothel run by a madame named Candy (Virginia Grey), something he has clearly done with many women before. Griff wants to keep his town “clean,” even as he ensures the opportunity for himself and others to indulge in the very activities he wants to run out of town.

Kelly has a change of heart, rejecting Griff’s proposal and instead staying in Grantville and taking a job working as a nurse in a hospital for disabled children. It is her bid to go straight, to redeem her life by rejecting “the buck, the bed, and the bottle,” as she alliteratively puts it, and make it worth something--a desire that will be challenged on all fronts, both openly and secretly. In Fuller’s world, which is informed as much by his experiences working for tabloid newspapers in the 1920s and ’30s as it is by the B-movie conventions that he made so furiously his own, nothing is simple and no one is innocent. The world is a messy place, rife with contradictions and lies, and if Kelly is the hero of the story, it is not so much because of her strength and determination (both of which are profound), but rather because she is the one character who is not a hypocrite. She knows what she wants and she takes what is hers (which is why it is so important that she only took the $75 from her john and didn’t rob him when she could have). Her bid for respectability sometimes entails hiding her sordid past, but when she becomes romantically involved with J. L. Grant (Michael Dante), the handsome son of the town’s wealthy founder, she is honest with him. Yet, in a sick twist that only Fuller could have imagined (and probably no other filmmaker would have dared put on screen at that time), Kelly’s honesty with Grant becomes a trap into which she unwittingly walks. Her willingness to play it straight turns her into a possible accomplice to a heinous crime, which provides yet another object lesson in the difference between surfaces and what lies beneath them.

The Naked Kiss was one half of a pair of films (the other being 1963’s Shock Corridor) that Fuller produced independently for producer Leon Fromkess. Fuller had been making films since the late 1940s, and he had succeeded at both the major studio level, shooting four pictures for Daryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox from 1951 to 1955, and working independently with his own production company, where he shot six films from 1957 to 1961. Yet, regardless of where he was working and for whom, Fuller was always a fiercely independent artist, melding his personal experiences and his sensationalist subject matter and always infusing the mix with a heady sense of social observation and political critique. He had already been investigated by the FBI and considered a potential traitor for his critical views of the Korean War in The Steel Helmet (1951) and the bureau itself in Pickup on South Street (1953), but that was hardly enough to slow him down, much less stop him.

Like Shock Corridor, which features a journalist who has himself committed to a mental institution in order to solve a murder but is inevitably driven mad by its microcosm of American insanities, The Naked Kiss uses it tabloid-sensational subject matter to probe at the country’s darkest recesses. The idea of a small town’s surface innocence hiding dark secrets was nothing new, but there is something particularly provocative in the way Fuller deploys this trope. We see everything through Kelly’s outsider eyes (she is in every scene in the movie), which turns every corner into a new discovery. She is a woman of the world who knows how to handle herself, which is why it is all the more disturbing that what she encounters in Grantville is ultimately more than even she can take.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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