Sam Fuller is one of the cult auteurs of post-McCarthy Hollywood, beloved of the French New Wave, among others. His films are out there, on a melodramatic edge. The Naked Kiss recounts the story of Kelly, a prostitute trying to change her ways, who falls in love with someone who turns out to be a child molester. Not a bad set-up for early sixties USA, about to tumble down the rabbit hole of that decade. The movie plays with the idea of an ideal US small-town, Grantville, which is all peaches and cream, but is actually the de facto domain of the pedophile Grant, the man Kelly falls in love with, after working in the paediatric hospital he has set up. There’s nothing particularly subtle about the movie and things that must have been shocking in the early sixties don’t come across as anything like today. Nevertheless, Fuller concocts a curious dreamlike vision of the USA (not a million miles away from either Wilder’s Our Town or Von Trier’s Dogville), where there’s a constant sense of menace beneath the surface, and the sensation that nothing is ever quite what it seems. One can just about conceive how impactful this must have been in its day, (and why Truffaut, etcetera were so enamoured), so that even the weirdly upbeat finale feels as though it carries a disturbing subtext.
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