Samuel Fuller’s 1964’s film noir masterpiece The Naked Kiss is not as relentingly depressing as Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), nor as brutally raw as Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), nor as caustic as Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It doesn’t have the calculated restraint of Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), nor the mazing narrative patterns of Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) or Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), nor the energetic verve of Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1949). But what it does have is a kind of sadistic sleazy energy and a fast truncated style, both of which betray Fuller’s occupation as a tabloid crime reporter before entering filmmaking. In fact, Fuller’s definition of film as, "Love, Hate, Action, Death -- in one word, Emotion!" could just as easily have been a description of the elements that make up a good newspaper story. And watching a Fuller film, one is constantly reminded of his crime reporter origins. His films seem to be uncovering, with voyeuristic pleasure, the sadistic energy that runs like a dark electric current through the misery and violence that inhabit a city’s streets. The Naked Kiss opens abruptly with a wild jazz score and a sudden onslaught of images. A woman, Kelly (Constance Towers), is beating her former pimp. He begs her to stop. She relentlessly continues. The relentlessness of the assault is powerfully conveyed by having the audience experience Kelly’s anger from the POV of the pimp. For a moment her handbag rains down on him and us. He grabs at her. Her hair unexpectedly comes off, revealing a bald head. This moment is beautifully noir. No-one in film noir is quite what they seem. Everyone hides an ugliness, past or present. Kelly is no exception. Trying to escape the shadows of her past, trying to build a new life for herself, she finds at every point the same suspicious minds, the same corruption, that she is fleeing.

Fuller’s script and direction capture emotion with an unusually strong sense of physicality. For example, when Kelly moves to a new town after her former pimp threatens to have acid thrown in her face, she finds herself working in a children’s hospital. Fuller’s camera presents the simple happiness that can come so easily to the faces of even sick children, but also the signs of debilitating illness and decay, such as the metal braces that hold together one child’s frail legs. These sick or physically handicapped children are a reflection of a society that is inwardly crippled and unlikely to overcome the obstacles that counter its growth. This sense of stagnation is, as in other noir films, is allied to a sense of inescapable increasing darkness that lies both actually and metaphorically just around every corner. Yet unusually for noir the portents of doom that hang heavy in The Naked Kiss end on a positive note. Fuller did not make typical noir. Many noir films pleasure themselves in the seductiveness of the dark, corrupt and violent underbelly of American society, but The Naked Kiss does not. Fuller learnt about the hardness of life through firsthand experience, and if he ever felt the lifestyle of prostitutes and petty crims was seductive, he knew that life well enough to see its emotional scars. He seems to have seen it in the same way that he lets us see Kelly’s face: pretty with a caring smile and genuine warmth, but equally tough, cold, and thinly concealing past and present suffering.

Although The Naked Kiss lacks an emphasis on some of film noir’s more formal properties, such as Dutch angles, stylized shadows and high-contrast lighting, expressionistic compositions, and architectural settings which create images of entrapment, nevertheless, Fuller demonstrates an ability to imbue the emotional register of noir with an intense physicality. If in classic noir the sense of concealed depravity circulates across a highly stylized and aestheticized cinematic surface, in The Naked Kiss it obtains a rare degree of emotional and physical reality.

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