Samuel Fuller: THE NAKED KISS (1964)

Film as battleground; film as sensation; film as headline

What does one say about this film?

Okay, Fuller often receives the sobriquet – “primitive.” His cinema is often called primitive because of its crude effects. If Fuller writes with the camera, as he says he does, then he writes a kind of narrative we might think of as “pulp.” Characters, action (plot), and style are “in your face,” unsubtle. Fuller’s most insistent genre is the war story, the story of men in battle. He used to fire a pistol on the set to begin filming. He was a filmmaker who more often than not focused on men. His world is a world in which men control things, men struggle for position and power, and men fight for survival. Men are often predators, as Skip was in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and as Griff is in The Naked Kiss. Skip wandered the subway looking for his prey, a suitable victim of theft; Griff lurks by the bus station eyeing new girls in town. Man as predator is evident in THE NAKED KISS; both Griff (the policeman) and Grant (the wealthy “owner”) prey on those weaker than themselves, Griff on women who need a job and will set up as bon-bons for Miss Candy, and Grant on children. Then we have the pimp (procurer) from whom Kelly extricates herself at the beginning of the film.

Beginning and the Gaze
The first scene of The Naked Kiss begins prior to the credits and moves right through the credits. The first minutes of the film are disturbing and frantic. We see a man and a woman struggling; he knocks off her wig and we see that she is completely bald; she bashes him with a shoe finally knocking him unconscious; she sprays some water on him; she rifles his pockets taking $75.00 she says he owes her and leaving other bills scattered about. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom where she stands a looks into the mirror. The camera becomes the mirror and we see her staring – no gazing – directly at us, bold and contained. The title appears, also in bold letters: THE NAKED KISS. As the credits pass on the screen, we continue to see the woman as she places a wig on her bald head and makes herself up, all the time gazing at us. Credits end, she leaves, the man revives and scrambles to pick up the scattered bills, and the camera comes to rest on a small table where we see some of the bills and a desk calendar with the date July 4, 1961. It is Independence Day, folks. Fuller is never very subtle.

The Gaze: okay, what to make of that first scene. The opening struggle with its frantic camera movements announces a film that will be a struggle. We may have an uneasy time watching this film. The fight is physical, and it is between a man and a woman – and the woman appears to win. This is not how things usually play out in movies, especially Hollywood movies. We’ve been warned.

But then we have the gaze. By gaze, I mean a particular kind of look, a look that owns. The gaze is the look of ownership, the look of desire and control. Laura Mulvey, quite some time ago, theorized that in cinema the viewer gazed upon the screen, and this viewer was as often as not a male and this male gazed upon the female. In other words, women in film were the objects of the male gaze. And it is true that in much western art that depicts women, the women do not return the gaze; they look to the left or right or wherever, but rarely directly at the viewer. Exceptions do exist, and these are noteworthy because when the object of our gaze looks directly back and returns the gaze, this look can make us uncomfortable. We now become the object of the gaze, the one under scrutiny. To return the gaze is to challenge us, to remind us just how desirous we are to control others, to take pleasure from another, and how uneasy we are when we become the pleasure of someone else without agreeing to deliver this pleasure. And so, Fuller confronts us with a woman who returns the gaze. She takes control, as she has just done in the struggle with her procurer. She is tough. She won’t just remain passive and accept the gaze of others. And as this woman gazes at us, she also looks at herself; she is, after all, looking in a mirror. She takes a good look at herself and decides she does like what she sees (and did not like what she saw…). We watch as she prepares to make a change in her life. This opening scene prepares us for the “murder” that takes place near the end of the film.

As we watch this woman beneath the credits, she places a wig on her baldhead. We learn later why she is bald in this scene, but at the outset we do not know why. Her baldness is a jolt because it is so unexpected for a woman in 1964. Her head is as bald as this film – bald and bold. But her baldness also conjures up concentration camps in which women had their heads shaved as a sign of diminishment and control and de-sexing. This woman’s baldhead informs us that she has been a prisoner, and she has: a prisoner of a certain lifestyle and presumably of her pimp. We later have the women in Candy’s Bon-Bon house – Hatrack, for example – who are also prisoners to a place and a life. As The Naked Kiss begins, we see a woman about to turn her back on the prison life. (Remember: Fuller is never subtle and so his invocation of a certain type of prison may or may not be acceptable.)

Shift to August 1963 and Grantsville
After this opening scene, the film shifts to a shot of a town street with a banner across it declaring a charity event to help the local Children’s Hospital. And as we move into this town we have images of children. Children are, in effect, the subject of this film. We have skipping children, hale and healthy, and handicapped children using crutches and wheelchairs. Ultimately, we know that everyone in Fuller’s world is “handicapped.” This is a town focused on children. As Kelly, the woman we saw in the first scene, arrives on a bus, she catches the eye of local men, and she herself notices the children, stopping for a moment to admire an infant in a baby carriage. The leering men and the innocent children form a frame for Kelly – the men being the people she wants to place at a distance and the children being the people she now desires to help. She wants to stop being a prostitute and begin being a mother (or at least a nurturing female). She has come to a town that has children and prostitutes, the innocent and the experienced.

Kelly begins her life in Grantsville by plying her old trade; she sleeps with the policeman, Griff. He is a cynical bastard who tries to send her to Candy’s house of ill repute across the river. She turns to the local children’s hospital instead. Here she charms everyone with her dedication and her firm but effective way with the children; see, for example, the scene in which she is fixing a toy as a young boy on crutches struggles up to her and she looks straight at him and asks: “Well, do you want a medal?” This boy becomes her special favourite.

And so Kelly becomes a fixture at the hospital, and she also meets and begins an affair with Grant, the local wealthy man whose family has “owned” this town. Grant takes an especial interest in Kelly, an interest that grows even stronger after she tells him about her former life. Grant says he will take her anywhere she wants to go; she picks Venice and Grant proceeds to show her home movies of Venice. If we don’t suspect something funny by now, we are not attending to this film. It is peopled with oddities. Griff the policeman is gruff enough; Grant the dispenser of gifts from abroad is oily; Candy the Madame from across the river is cynical and selfish; the people of Grantsville are generally a faceless collection of stooges – the Borg before its time; even the children are easily manipulated. Although Fuller does not develop the theme closely, he does invoke earlier 1950s films such as HIGH NOON (D. Fred Zimmerman) and SILVERLODE (D. Allan Dwan) that deal with the weakness of the collective, the tendency of towns to follow a corrupt leader and fail to stand up for what’s right.

The film falls into three parts: the opening scene, the middle part when Kelly becomes a Mother Teresa who will marry, and the final part in which Kelly faces a murder charge. The middle period contains Fuller’s usual gamut of close-ups, angled shots, and twisted action (such as Grant’s home movies). The famous set piece here is the musical interlude in which the children sing a song about Mommy, accompanied by Kelly. Here we have Fuller’s vision of America as a multicultural “We Are the World,/We are the Children” sing-a-long. This is hokey. Why does Mommy have tears in her eyes? What the viewer does not yet know is the real reason why Mommy has tears in her eyes – even the children are corrupted in this corrupt place. Corruption runs deep in Main Street America. Fuller’s America is a long way from that of Harold Lloyd. The musical interlude fits smack in the middle of melodrama. And yes, melodrama is the stuff of Fuller’s vision.

(A side note on melodrama. The word “melodrama” comes from the Greek for “song drama.” And the scene before us is “song drama,” if ever a scene was one. What characterizes melodrama is sensationalism and extravagance – emotional excess. Characters in melodrama are usually extremely good or extremely bad. Melodrama is often now associated with soap opera, a kind of narrative that thrives on the unsubtle; it manipulates the audience shamelessly. The interrogation scene near the end of THE NAKED KISS strikes me as a clear example of melodrama; the actors don’t talk, they shout, and the emotional quotient of the scene is as high as it can get. We either fall for the excess or we find it false and strident. In any case, Hollywood cinema in the 1950s used melodrama a lot, perhaps most famously in the films of Douglas Sirk. Cinema noir had used melodrama at times. I think at its best, noir does not fall into melodrama – I think of such films as LAURA, KISS ME DEADLY, THE BIG COMBO, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, DETOUR, PUSHOVER, THE SCAR, FORCE OF EVIL, THE BIG KNIFE, THE BIG HEAT. But undoubtedly, noir does use melodrama – although noir and melodrama are not synonymous. Douglas Sirk’s films are melodrama but not noir. Melodrama is emotional excess; noir is a visual style that reflects a Hobbesian vision of the world.)

Back to the musical interlude. This scene is so over the top that it amounts to parody. How can we take it seriously? The tears in Mommy’s eyes are for the absurdity of this vision in a world that contains such broken people as the ones who people this film. Fuller’s sense of the absurd is nowhere more evident than here.

Not long after this comes the revelation. In a scene noteworthy both for its impact and for its tact, Fuller allows us to share Kelly’s shock of recognition. She tells us later that when she first kissed Grant, she felt the “naked kiss” of a pervert. I think if we rethink the film, we will realize that when we first see Grant on the screen (a scene in which he talks with Griff and then lifts a young child in his arms), we will have felt something similar. From the beginning, Grant has seemed weird. Yet both Kelly and we, the viewers, do not allow our instincts to distance ourselves from Grant until the moment of recognition. Now the camera shoots quickly close-ups of Kelly, Grant, a little girl, and we then see the child run from the room. Close-ups of both Kelly and Grant follow as he “confesses” why he wants to marry Kelly – from his perspective both of them are abnormal. The shots remind us of the opening shots of Kelly’s gaze. Here is a gaze competition. Grant wants to hold Kelly; Kelly wants to stand her ground. The two face off. The scene ends in a manner close to the opening scene; she hits him, not with a shoe, but with a telephone receiver. She kills him.

The final part of the film contains the interrogation scene, the scene in the jail when Candy comes and lies about Kelly, the shots of the children outside the jail window, the outside “line-up” of children, and finally the clearing of Kelly. Outside the courthouse stand many of the town’s citizens, that faceless bunch of spineless conformists. Kelly makes her way through this crowd. She leaves town, stopping to chuck a baby before we see her disappearing down the street and away from a banner that mentions the Charity affair for the hospital and the date January 1964. Kelly has been in town approximately 5 or 6 months. Whew.

And so a film that began as the story of a prostitute who wants her independence becomes a film that confronts the painful theme of pedophilia. Fuller, as always, deals with the sensational. Near the end of the film we even have sensational headlines flashed on the screen to remind us of Fuller’s interest in the media. By linking prostitution, pedophilia, police corruption, and public passivity and ignorance, Fuller shows us just how complicit we all are in the ills of society. If society is sick, and in Fuller’s vision it is, then it is sick because of its failure to see. Signs of sickness (including the sensational headlines of newspapers) are all around us, but we do not see them. Fuller forces us to see. And this is what makes his films so uncomfortable. Even that scene that I have called the musical interlude forces us to see that the musical conventions in Hollywood films are both artificial and masking and thereby complicit in the general air of corruption in American society.

Kelly as American hero
A final word on this film: Fuller’s hero is a loner, a flawed person whose saving grace is independence and inner strength and who has a commitment to something outside the self. In this case, Kelly’s commitment is to the children. In Fuller’s world, even such a laudable commitment can come a cropper. Kelly, like the lone gunman who arrives in town to clean it up, leaves at the end, leaving behind a place perhaps better for her having been there, but not necessarily. And she leaves for where? We do not know what lies ahead for this person. She lights out for the territories, for empty space, for another town, another adventure, another confrontation with corruption. What is, perhaps, striking about this is that Kelly (an androgynous name, as the film tells us) is a woman. Isn’t this audacious in 1964?

Oh, and we might note that in Grantsville, the local cinema is playing a film called SHOCK CORRIDOR. SHOCK CORRIDOR was Fuller’s previous film (1963), and once you have seen it, you will realize just how demented the people in Grantsville really are. Even Kelly’s landlady is rather loopy. She still talks to her husband who died twenty years before in the war, and she still keeps a bust of him upstairs with his coat and hat. Oh, she’s a lovely lady, but she is also loopy and she is also a sucker for Mr. Grant’s charms.

As SHOCK CORRIDOR informs us, Fuller’s metaphor for America is lunacy. This is a metaphor that would become more general as the 1960s move along (think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for example). The lunatic fringe suddenly becomes society’s center.