The character:	Kelly
The actor:	Constance Towers
The movie:	The Naked Kiss (1964)

For me, this is Sam Fuller’s most affecting film. From the beginning, I’ve always found Fuller to be a little bit secondhand. He is a filmmaker of ideas, and while it’s certainly possible to be a filmmaker of ideas with remarkable reliance on feelings, Fuller’s work tends toward the essay. The major works, like The Steel Helmet and The Big Red One and Shock Corridor, are so considered as to be detrimental to the overall effect. Even in something more minor, like Park Row, the thesis demands more attention than the characteristically explosive content. It is no wonder that Jean-Luc Godard includes Fuller in Pierrot le fou, bringing him into the picture to aver that moviemaking is emotion. Godard was fond of thesis statements to a fault; so too was Fuller.

In 1964, there were few other moviemakers in America who could have made The Naked Kiss, which seems like it should be one of those thesis statements as well. Society shapes us, Fuller says, and it has a way of dominating us even when we fight back. Perhaps The Naked Kiss would have been another Shock Corridor, but Fuller chooses a trope even older than the hubristic journalist. That’s the whore trying to go straight, played here by Constance Towers. In choosing such a stale type as our introduction to his argument, that all of us are branded by our pasts, Fuller sets himself a trap. How many times had we seen women in prestige performances, desperately shaking the bars and screaming to be set free from their past before succumbing to the future? Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, Eleanor Parker in Caged, Susan Hayward in I Want to Live!, Elizabeth Tayor in BUtterfield 8. Towers is in such a line and working without the path to Oscar. Thus there must be something different, and Fuller, to his credit, provides it in a twist that is shocking even for him.

Kelly has been dodging Griff, the local law, as she tries to straighten out her life. She has become a respected nurse at the hospital. She is about to marry into the wealthiest family in town, and even better, her intended, Grant, has accepted her past as a sex worker with grace. And then she walks in on Grant as he is about to molest a child.

“Now you know why I can never marry a normal woman,” he tells her. “That’s why I love you. You understand my sickness. You’ve been conditioned to people like me…we’re both abnormal.”

It is one of the great sickening moments in American movies. We only have one stomach, but our stomachs fall out of our skin in that moment over and over again. First, the near miss of this molestation, but one which Grant all but admits that he’s done before. Second, the sham of security. Kelly has fallen into a tiger trap, and like the tiger, she should have known better. She let her guard down for the first time in years, choosing to believe that because of her own grasp at a better ideal that others (excluding Griff, anyway) would follow that path alongside her and even support her.

And third, the most awful. You are so damaged, Griff says, that you will accept this, encourage this. In our lives, when someone reaches out a hand and says that we are not so different – that we can bond despite what’s unattractive or unappealing in our pasts – this is one of the things that warms us most. This is the opposite, chilling to the bone. I know you, and you are as evil as I am. Not just rotten or corrupted, but like recognizes like in unpreventable depravity.

Kelly does the only reasonable thing to do in this situation. She kills him.