Rating: 
Summary: "That's the fourth customer she's cold-cocked."
Review: In "The Naked Kiss" prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) is running from her past when she arrives in the small town of Grantville. She claims to be a saleswoman but uses the cover of selling Angel Foam champagne to ply her real wares. On Kelly's first day in Grantville, she meets Police Chief Griff, and he tries to persuade her to sell her wares on the other side of the tracks--in a bordello called "Candy A La Carte."Kelly refuses to take the hint. She falls in love with the quaint small town atmosphere of Grantville, and she manages to get a job as a nurses' aide at the local orthopedic hospital. Soon she meets the town's eligible, millionaire bachelor, Grant, a veritable pillar of the community. Grant finds Kelly to be "the most interesting contradiction" he's met in years. Soon he's quoting Baudelaire, discussing Lord Byron and sliding next to Kelly on his leopard print furniture. Will Kelly be able to make a clean break with her past? I love this film, and for me, it's the heroine, Kelly who makes it great. From the startling opening scene until the very end, Constance Towers holds my attention. She is a classical beauty (reminiscent of Grace Kelly in some scenes), and she has the face of a wounded angel. In reality, Constance Towers is a lithe Amazon who protects the innocent and will correct an evil with violence when necessary. Constance Towers has an amazing screen presence, and I especially love the violent scenes--incredible stuff. "The Naked Kiss" is a superb cult classic--watch the scenes with Candy's Bonbons as the girls ply their wares and fight over customers. Director Sam Fuller captured the essence of small town life. On the positive side, he captured the quaint charm of a small town, but on the negative side, he also captured the hypocrisy manifested in the two main male characters, Grant and Griff. If you enjoy this film, I enthusiastically recommend "Shock Corridor" also from director Sam Fuller. Note that Grantville's cinema is playing "Shock Corridor" when Kelly arrives in town--displacedhuman
Rating:
Summary: CRIPPLED SOULS
Review: Produced, written and directed by Samuel Fuller, THE NAKED KISS is a little jewel. Constance Towers, in a " à la Gena Rowlands " role, gives a performance you won't forget easily. A great thanks then to Criterion which allows us to rediscover this wonderful movie. Samuel Fuller, from his 1940 debut in Hollywood until his last movies in France, deserves to be considered as one of the great american directors of the last fifty years. He mainly visited the western, war movies and film noir genres and gave us such masterpieces as FORTY GUNS, SHOCK CORRIDOR and UNDERWORLD, U.S.A. With no big stars but with a style of its own. Raw, violent and provocative, for the eyes and also for the intellect. THE NAKED KISS is a movie destined to shock the audience. An emotionally ultra-violent first scene prepares us to a journey through Cinderella Land and the Garden of Evil. Samuel Fuller won't let anybody unharm. The Charming Prince, the Hooker with a heart big as the world, the Cop blasé : everybody will suffer in front of Fuller's camera. It's the third time I watch THE NAKED KISS, the first time on DVD, and I like it even more now. Its atmosphere is one of the strangest you can find on film. Remember Charles Laughton's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER ? One can feel a bit of this dreamy atmosphere in Fuller's movie. The child song Constance Towers sings with the handicapped children will give you the chill. Image is great, a few white spots now and then coming from a non-perfect copy. The sound is good but you'll have to turn your volume control. Scene access and theatrical trailer as bonus features. A DVD for your library.
Rating:
Summary: CRIPPLED SOULS
Review: Produced, written and directed by Samuel Fuller, THE NAKED KISS is a little jewel. Constance Towers, in a " à la Gena Rowlands " role, gives a performance you won't forget easily. A great thanks then to Criterion which allows us to rediscover this wonderful movie. Samuel Fuller, from his 1940 debut in Hollywood until his last movies in France, deserves to be considered as one of the great american directors of the last fifty years. He mainly visited the western, war movies and film noir genres and gave us such masterpieces as FORTY GUNS, SHOCK CORRIDOR and UNDERWORLD, U.S.A. With no big stars but with a style of its own. Raw, violent and provocative, for the eyes and also for the intellect. THE NAKED KISS is a movie destined to shock the audience. An emotionally ultra-violent first scene prepares us to a journey through Cinderella Land and the Garden of Evil. Samuel Fuller won't let anybody unharm. The Charming Prince, the Hooker with a heart big as the world, the Cop blasé : everybody will suffer in front of Fuller's camera. It's the third time I watch THE NAKED KISS, the first time on DVD, and I like it even more now. Its atmosphere is one of the strangest you can find on film. Remember Charles Laughton's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER ? One can feel a bit of this dreamy atmosphere in Fuller's movie. The child song Constance Towers sings with the handicapped children will give you the chill. Image is great, a few white spots now and then coming from a non-perfect copy. The sound is good but you'll have to turn your volume control. Scene access and theatrical trailer as bonus features. A DVD for your library.
Rating:
Summary: DON'T MAKE KELLY MAD.....
Review: Sensational 60's b&w shocker from Sam Fuller about a hooker named Kelly who, as we see in the opening, has a nasty temper. Her "tout" shaved her head bald while she was passed out and she beats the hell out of him with her clutch bag! She splits and becomes a traveling hooker. (Well, I guess it beats peddling Mary Kaye.) She winds up in a very small town and her first customer is the local cop. Coming to like the small town life, she rents a room from a sweet old lady who has her own sad story and decides to go straight. But the cop is nervous about having Kelly around so he sends her across the river to a whorehouse run by Candy who takes a liking to her and offers her a job as one of her "Bon-Bons". But Kelly nixes the offer and goes back to the small town and gets a job as a nurse's aide in the crippled children's wing of the local hospital. There she finds what she's been looking for---purpose. Kelly is really a good person. But she has to make one more trip across the river to Candy's. She beats the hell out of Candy (with that trusty clutch bag again) for trying to recruit a down-on-her-luck co-worker at the hospital. She then stuffs the money Candy had given the girl right in Candy's mouth. Then things really begin to happen. A rich guy who's the "pillar" of the community wants to marry her and Kelly thinks she's met her Prince Charming until she catches him molesting a little girl! That nasty temper flares again and she shoots him. Of course this isn't the end but I can't say any more. The serpentine story never stops. The acting is first rate and the cast is perfect for each of their individual roles. Especially Constance Towers as Kelly and Virginia Grey as Candy. The two have memorable confrontations. As Kelly sits in jail for murder, Candy is called in to give a statement. She does. She says to Kelly, "Nobody stuffs dirty money in MY mouth!" This is an engrossing, if somewhat campy, film but well worth the watching. Criterion has done a fine job in the DVD presentation. Check it out and enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: Child molestation in 1964?
Review: That right there makes this a rare find! Quite risque for its time. Very daring, and yet refreshing. As controversial as "Lilith" (presumed lesbianism), this flick is definitely a keeper! It has a "Hollywood" ending (somewhat) but has enough "noir" to make it into my collection!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Story --A Must For Fuller Fans
Review: The Naked Kiss is pretty strong stuff for 1964. Sam Fuller didn't care -- he was a roque in your face director/writer that didn't care about the traditional Hollywood system. The Naked Kiss was made on a very small budget -- but the B&W cinematography and use of contrast is really something to see. The story keeps you interested and the climax is a shocker. The opening scene with a bald Constance Towers beating the bejeezus out of her pimp with her shoe is worth the price alone! Then she wails on a Madam with her purse and then kills her fiancee with a good old fashioned Western Electric Telephone (I won't tell you why -- you need to see it)! Great MELODRAMA in the classic sense. Sam Fuller was very underappreciated in his time -- he's a great storyteller.
Rating:
Summary: The Full Range of the Human Experience
Review: THE NAKED KISS opens with such a shocking, lurid and erotic scene of a prostitute violently beating her pimp, seen blow by blow from his point of view, that the viewer is immediately jolted and gripped by these images and is mesmerized. Director, Samuel Fuller hooks you and he doesn't let go. The statuesque Constance Towers is the prostitute named Kelly and eventually she arrives at a new town where she ultimately decides to start a new life that leads to her working with disabled children. Certain aspects of her past experiences lead her to conclusions that are unspeakable about the "normal" society that she has now established herself in. This is truly a remarkable film because director- writer Fuller takes the viewer to avenues of unexpected emotional response both subtle and outlandish touching raw nerves along the way leaving one disconcerted and devastated. The chiaroscuro cinematography by Stanley Cortez shooting the light and dark elements of Constance Towers face and figure within each frame lends to the off beat and sensational visual expression of this torn figure of a woman. Towers and Cortez both complete Fuller's vision of a hard world speckled with fleeting moments of sentimentality and an ever-elusive sentimentality.
Rating: 
Summary: Constance Towers rocks as a REAL tough gal!
Review: The opening of this movie is excellent, and sets the scene for Towers characters' tour of the sordid underbelly of middle class America. "Kelly" is one tough gal, and she doesn't take nonsense from ANYONE. Aside from short forays into (her class of) adorable little crippled kids singing a sentimental tune, we get to see Towers find the slimeballs under the rocks, stand up to them, and then, like Clint Eastwood's character in High Plains Drifter, reject the town and its citizens for the hypocritical cowards they are. An off-beat and entertaining story!
Rating:
Summary: A smack-your-pimp-with-the-phone classic!
Review: This film is amazing. Sam Fuller continues a series of films that make him cinema's wild man director. From the opening moments all the way through, this film is so absolutely Fuller! The dialog is some of the most oddly stylized stuff you'll ever hear. I love it! I can't reccomend it highly enough-see all the Fuller films you can!
Rating:
Summary: As Good As Low Budget Gets!
Review: This is an important film to me because it made me realize a major difference between truly American directors, and the European expatriates like Hitchcock, Wilder, David Lean, that mainstream Americans remember from this same period. I believe at their core American film directors want to preach; though, "preach" is a pejorative word for it. And directors either went at the system head-on -- e.g., Welles and Kubrick -- and were then forced out of the US, or they worked below the radar: and Fuller is the most outspoken American director that tried to stay under the radar (though even he was eventually forced from our land of free speech in order to finance his films -- alas, free speech is anything BUT free, if you want anyone to hear you anyway). I could write a thesis on both of the paradoxes mentioned above, but it would bore you. I think "The Naked Kiss" was meant more as an entertainment than "Shock Corridor", but it sure as [heck] ain't a film for average Joe and Jane Q. American where the freedom to say what you mean and mean what you say is edited and re-edited in order to meet a democratic, social, money-paying group. I do think if you have aspirations to make films it's an important film to understand. Fuller's sense of humor, irreverence, and yet heart are quintessentially American. Any American artist (filmmaker, writer, architect, etc.) you've ever heard of usually has these qualities, and there are few other places where they are more naked than in "The Naked Kiss."
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