D2D #57: The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #10.)
Few directors understood the direct potency of pure pulp better than Sam Fuller. Subtlety was not his stock in trade - if he had something to tell you, he hollered it in the bold 72-point type that befits a newspaper man. For most other directors, this would be a crucial flaw (think Stanley Kramer), yet Fuller has the pitiless sensibilities to match the bluntness of his messages. His films are screaming yellow journalism, huge headlines grafted onto the sensational, the bleeding and the leading, yet handled with enough tact so as not to seem exploitative. The Naked Kiss is firmly in this vein, and while it isn’t as ferocious as Shock Corridor or as taut as Pickup on South Street, it’s cutting stuff all the same. The opening sequence, in which an angry bald hooker uses a shoe to beat her pimp senseless, is justly famous, and while the story that unfolds in its wake is a plea for forgiveness and second chances, it’s far from the wispy melodrama such a description implies (there’s a clear demarcation between things that can be forgiven and those that can’t, as well as a Faulknerian acknowledgment of the past as integral to the present). As always, Fuller uses tight framing and judicious closeups as emotional shorthand, and his cuts are wielded like weapons, clubs taken straight to the cortex. Can’t say I was prepared for the dark direction in which this shot off during its third act, either. Pretty terrific stuff, this.
