Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: THE NAKED KISS (Sam Fuller, Director)

This 1964 neo-noir film written and directed by the great Sam Fuller is a strange bird, indeed. Constance Towers plays the hard-edged prostitute Kelly who breaks out of her profession and goes on the lam to escape the wrath of her pimp with his underworld contacts. She ends up getting off the bus in a small town called Grantville which features a children's hospital set up by the wealthy scion of the town's founding family. She has a one-time tryst with the local police captain and then gets hired as a nurse's aid at the hospital where she excels at her job. She falls in love with the scion and seems to have finally hit easy street. Of course, since this is film noir, she runs into a couple of major obstacles. Her past catches up to her, and her love is nothing at all like what he appears. This movie has it all. It's sentimental, lurid, romantic, nostalgic, repulsive, and grotesque. Somehow, Kelly maintains her integrity, and this viewer had to know what became of her. Towers does a first-rate acting job. I saw Fuller's The Big Red One at the cinema back in 1980, but all I can remember was Lee Marvin starred in the war picture. I plan to view Fuller's Shock Corridor (he shamelessly plugs it on the town's movie marquee in The Naked Kiss) one of these weeks. Recommended.