|
|
Whistle Stopper - Naked Kiss
|
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $23.00
Your Save: $ ( % )
Availability:
Manufacturer: Homevision
Starring: Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly
Directed By: Samuel Fuller
|
Average Customer Rating:   
|
|
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302969221
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 6302969220
Label: Homevision
Manufacturer: Homevision
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Homevision
Release Date: 2000-06-20
Running Time: 90
Studio: Homevision
Theatrical Release Date: 1964-10-29
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Fuller
Comment: Maverick American filmmaker Sam Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art's use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character, a prostitute named Kelly, who describes the kiss of the fiancée she kills, that way, meaning she could tell he was a sexual deviant from the get go. It's a film that has brilliance, inanity, memorable scenes of realism, and trite predictable scenes of sheer fantasy- such as the mention of the titular act, which is not real, but works symbolically to explain certain elements of the lead character's behavior.
That lead character, a hooker named Kelly, is played by B film mainstay Constance Towers, whose decades of acting in low budget films gave her the limited sort of celebrity appeal that only grows with time. For the last few years more people have become familiar with her role as the evil Helena Cassadine on the ABC soap opera General Hospital than in all her previous roles combined, but The Naked Kiss may be her most memorable film role. The film opens with a bang- a shot of Kelly beating the crap out of a man with her purse. He's her pimp, Farland, but he has been cheating her. After she knocks him out she takes only the $75 owed to her, and not a penny more. But, in their struggle, he pulls off her wig, to reveal her as bald. He has shaved her as an act of revenge for a perceived betrayal. It is one of the most kinetic and memorable openings in film history. After getting her money, Kelly puts her wig back on, while looking in a mirror and primping, as the title credits roll. Already, Fuller has set up the character as a `bad girl', but one with scruples. She will be the classic `hooker with a heart of gold', but Fuller goes beyond the stereotype, although he does so only by saturating the viewer with so many other stereotypes and clichés that one is forced to deal with the surfeit as its own raison d'etre.
Only Fuller's films run the gamut from low brow Ed Wood-like total crap to great moments and writing that rival the best moments in a Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese film. Yet, he never had total control over any of his material. Even his magnum opus, the terrific war film The Big Red One, was butchered by its studio, and not restored until nearly a quarter century later. Similarly, The Naked Kiss was butchered to a point where Fuller threatened to have his name removed from it. In some ways, this film superficially resembles Federico Fellini's Nights Of Cabiria, save that Kelly ends up getting the upper hand, in true Hollywood fashion, albeit in a way that Hollywood would never allow. All of Fuller's films are didactic treatises where his characters, usually outcasts and reprobates, do the things that `good people' should do, but are too fearful to do. A Fullerian antihero walks the walk that typical Hollywood characters are only willing to talk. Fuller empathizes with the lowlifes in his films, even as he condemns their lifestyles, taking the most Christian ideal of loving the sinner while hating the sin to heart. Of course, there is a big ethical difference between harmless prostitution and wicked pedophilia, yet it is prostitution that gets a dressing down as a social evil from Kelly, while pedophilia merely gets a death blow, and no such direct address. Fuller also takes a very unique approach to triteness by not just using clichés but wallowing in their excesses until they have to be accepted as part of his slightly askew universe. Only then does he show his traces of originality.
Still, many of his metaphors are too forced- such as his equation of Grant's pedophilia with the hypocrisy and sexual repression of the townsfolk. It's as if one is to believe that the evils of pre-sexual liberation mores were behind Grant's perversion. Only Fuller could be daring enough to cover such a topic- as well as prostitution and abortion, yet do so in the most hackneyed ways playing against the most direct and honest. It is this meshing of disparate methods that makes Fuller so unique, even when at his worst and most pedantic. This carries over into his film style, where he is a primitive, artistically. The camerawork by cinematographer Stanley Cortez is often wobbly, off-kilter, out of focus, full of glare, and the editing is often bizarre. The DVD, put out by Passion Productions, has no extras, but the print is surprisingly high in quality- better than some of the titles put out by bigger companies like Fox-Lorber or The Criterion Collection.
Yet, compared to such stiff moralistic Hollywood fare as Charles Laughton's Night Of The Hunter, which also deals with child abuse, one can see why a film like this chose to go over the top to slip in its medicine with such candied fluff. The Naked Kiss is anomic, leaves many of its scenes open to interpretation, is over-simplistic, ahead of its time, trite, yet also has moments of true human emotion. It is the definition of that work of art which is definitely not great, but, in a sense, essential, for it perfectly distills the contradictions of a time between the repressed black and white morality of the Cold War 1950s and the sludgy gray of the coming morass of Civil Rights Era abuses and mass murder in Vietnam. But, when all of that is said and one, it's just a fun film to watch, beyond any analysis, and that's a rare enough quality in any age.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Singular Vision
Comment: The first scene: (This film has one of the best first scenes of all-time.) A tall buxom brunette wearing only a black bra is wrestling with a man in a living room. The man seems to be losing consciousness but before he blacks out he rips off the woman's wig exposing her bald head. She re-attaches and re-adjusts her wig and flees.
The second scene: A woman (the same as the one in the first scene) now blonde, exits a bus on a bright day. Its a typical American town. She's all legs and lipstick and sunshine and smiles. All the men stare, the boldest chats her up. Turns out she is a traveling salesman or woman, named Kelly, and shes selling "Angel Foam" champagne. The guy talking her up is the town cop, Griff, and he decides to buy a bottle. The two end up at his place.
Kelly, it turns out is a call girl, but shes a call girl whose decided that she has performed her last trick. The town that she has chosen to reform in, however, needs some reforming of its own. It seems every woman that arrives in town is greeted by Griff who then sets them off on one of two career paths: working as a nurse in the town hospital or working at Candy's Salon as a "bon bon" girl. Its the guys who rule this town called Grantville, the girls just work there. After spending some time working in the hospital for handicapped children as well as assisting the abused women of the town, Kelly becomes a kind of hero. But after she finds that her fiance, the most powerful man in town, has committed an unspeakable crime, in retaliation she commits one herself and ends up in the town jail, vilified by all. Its only then that we learn what happened in that first scene.
The only way to vindicate herself is if all the women of the town stand together.
Samuel Fuller is a legend for breaking with Hollywood conventions and making pictures without Hollywood stars, and without your usual Hollywood characters and storylines, and, most importantly, without your usual Hollywood sensibility. I suppose that it is tempting to say that Fuller is interested in a more realistic vision of life than the visions of life offered by the Hollywood directors, but that doesn't really do justice to Fuller for his vision of life and his aesthetic is not realistic but expressionistic (at times even surrealistic). Fuller certainly understands cinema and the fact that it is not reality but a heightened version of reality. His aesthetic is, therefore, no more realistic than any other directors aesthetic. Some call Fuller's a B-film aesthetic, but that term is too generic and "B-film" usually means artless, and there's plenty of "art" in Fuller's vision. I think the right word to describe the Fuller vision and aesthetic is "carnivalesque". That word suggests a recognition of appetites, of carnal desire, and of the fact that most of us mask our appetites and desires and distance ourselves from them by rationalizing and/or refining them until they are unrecognizable. A Fuller film can do many things, but rationalize and refine are not in his arsenal. He uses cinema to lay bare, to expose the raw and unrefined truth (as he sees it).
Fuller is obviously drawn to the odd lurid characters that Hollywood (and America) either marginalizes, exploits, or ignores. His films serve as a reminder that the marginalized, the exploited, and the ignored also have stories to tell. This makes Fuller a kind of chronicler and champion of the abused. This in itself is admirable, but this praise is complicated by the fact that Fuller doesn't just tell their stories and thus humanize the marginalized, exploited, and ignored. Rather, he evolves an aesthetic that allows us to feel what it feels like to be one of the marginalized, exploited, and ignored.
Maybe the most disconcerting thing about a Fuller film is that Fuller knows full well how to exploit his material and the audience's appetite for the lurid. (No one would doubt that his films work very well as voyeuristic thrill and chill rides into the forbidden and the taboo.) But he also does more than that. Fuller's films also allow the viewer/voyeur to both identify with the alienated creatures on the screen and to be on their side. This is what is so innovative and so countercultural about his work.
NAKED KISS is a raw film. The viewer has been trained by countless Hollywood films to gaze at the vixens and villains on the screen , but Fuller's films have served as a countercultural alternative to mainstream cinema, and they invite us to relate with and examine what is on the screen in a different way than a mainstream film does. The films of Fuller ask us to relate to whats on the screen in a more intimate way. His characters and stories are lurid and seedy but there is also something genuine and authentic seething within them. Fuller peels away the cool exterior to expose the hidden and explosive truths not just about other people but about us. The more we learn about the exploited and the more we identify with them, the more difficult it is to see them as separate.
I would not call Fuller's films masterpieces, but I don't think that is what he's trying to create. They are more like experiments with a medium and an aesthetic. Sometimes the experiments are awkward and sometimes shocking but there is a power and an honesty in Fuller's amateurism and his awkwardness that is absent from most other cinematic art.
Highly recommended for the viewer seeking directors with singular visions.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Definition of Pulp
Comment: Finally I own a movie that I can hand someone when they ask me to define pulp stories to them. It does not get more lurid and melodramatic then this. The in-your-face camerawork of Kelly beating her pimp before the titles have even ran across the screen instantly throws the viewer into this twisted world. Some will find the over the top dialogue, situations, camera work, editing and acting to be too exaggerated, but those that enjoy the classy seediness will eat this up. Even I had to do a double-take and rewind, when the little girl skips out of the house, finding it hard to believe after everything else, they still found a way to sneak pedophilia into the mix.
The dvd itself has a nice print quality, with the occasional scratch, but solid contrast and definition. Unfortunately, there is no bonus features, which is always disappointing coming from Criterion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A little over-rated, but interesting period piece
Comment: Well, I rented this movie from the library based on reviews here. Definitely some interesting aspects to this movie, but it is a message movie. The acting is kind of wooden; everyone is playing their roles in this morality drama. The sexual double entendres are clumsy...this is not Bogart and Bacall. It is definitely more frank than a lot of movies in terms of issues raised, but it's not like the story arises from a Leave It To Beaver kind of atmosphere. The small town of Grantville she comes to seems almost like a community that's been nuked. Hardly any people around. Maybe he just couldn't get enough extras, but there's no warmth to this town. I see it more as sort of an early exurbian town, you really don't know people yet, and where people are on the move a lot and no one knows each other. The brothel is "across the river." Anyway, I would group it with other morality message movies of the 50s and 60s. A lot of heavy symbolism. Has almost an Invasion of the Body Snatchers feel to it (the original one). The final scene, with the close ups of these anguished faces that are really hard to read...that was great. Close up faces of anger and fear, as many message movies would do at that time (kind of like "The Miracle Worker," too). Those faces stick with you as she walks down a completely abandoned street.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Upscaled old transfer to be anamorphic!
Comment: This new VCI anamorphic edition of THE NAKED KISS does feature some new to DVD bonus interviews, BUT the transfer is not good at all! It looks to have been unscaled from a flat widescreen master, and there is major ringing and compression artifacting around words anytime they are on the screen. This transfer is worse than Criterion's, which also needs to be redone. So far the best I've seen this film look is on the UK R2 PAL DVD release, which is unmatted but is properly cropped on a widescreen TV once the full/fill mode is used. It is sharper, brighter and smoother than any US release I've seen.
DON'T BUY THIS DVD IF YOU ARE WANTING A HIGH QUALITY NEW ANAMORPHIC TRANSFER!
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
Film is like a battleground, with love, hate, action, violence, death...in one word, emotion." So proclaimed Samuel Fuller, the screen's modern master of melodrama. The Naked Kiss is quintessential Fuller, with its sultry story of a prostitute's redemption in small-town America--where not everything is as it seems. The Naked Kiss
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
