Amazon.com Customer Reviews
 Rated 5 out of 5!
DON’’T MAKE KELLY MAD.....
Sensational 60’’s b&w shocker from Sam Fuller about a hooker named Kelly who, as we see in the opening, has a nasty temper. Her "tout" shaved her head bald while she was passed out and she beats the hell out of him with her clutch bag! She splits and becomes a traveling hooker. (Well, I guess it beats peddling Mary Kaye.) She winds up in a very small town and her first customer is the local cop. Coming to like the small town life, she rents a room from a sweet old lady who has her own sad story and decides to go straight. But the cop is nervous about having Kelly around so he sends her across the river to a whorehouse run by Candy who takes a liking to her and offers her a job as one of her "Bon-Bons". But Kelly nixes the offer and goes back to the small town and gets a job as a nurse’’s aide in the crippled children’’s wing of the local hospital. There she finds what she’’s been looking for---purpose. Kelly is really a good person. But she has to make one more trip across the river to Candy’’s. She beats the hell out of Candy (with that trusty clutch bag again) for trying to recruit a down-on-her-luck co-worker at the hospital. She then stuffs the money Candy had given the girl right in Candy’’s mouth. Then things really begin to happen. A rich guy who’’s the "pillar" of the community wants to marry her and Kelly thinks she’’s met her Prince Charming until she catches him molesting a little girl! That nasty temper flares again and she shoots him. Of course this isn’’t the end but I can’’t say any more. The serpentine story never stops. The acting is first rate and the cast is perfect for each of their individual roles. Especially Constance Towers as Kelly and Virginia Grey as Candy. The two have memorable confrontations. As Kelly sits in jail for murder, Candy is called in to give a statement. She does. She says to Kelly, "Nobody stuffs dirty money in MY mouth!" This is an engrossing, if somewhat campy, film but well worth the watching. Criterion has done a fine job in the DVD presentation. Check it out and enjoy.- Rated 5 out of 5!
The Full Range of the Human Experience
THE NAKED KISS opens with such a shocking, lurid and erotic scene of a prostitute violently beating her pimp, seen blow by blow from his point of view, that the viewer is immediately jolted and gripped by these images and is mesmerized. Director, Samuel Fuller hooks you and he doesn’’t let go. The statuesque Constance Towers is the prostitute named Kelly and eventually she arrives at a new town where she ultimately decides to start a new life that leads to her working with disabled children. Certain aspects of her past experiences lead her to conclusions that are unspeakable about the "normal" society that she has now established herself in. This is truly a remarkable film because director- writer Fuller takes the viewer to avenues of unexpected emotional response both subtle and outlandish touching raw nerves along the way leaving one disconcerted and devastated. The chiaroscuro cinematography by Stanley Cortez shooting the light and dark elements of Constance Towers face and figure within each frame lends to the off beat and sensational visual expression of this torn figure of a woman. Towers and Cortez both complete Fuller’’s vision of a hard world speckled with fleeting moments of sentimentality and an ever-elusive sentimentality.
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