The Naked Kiss (1964 Sam Fuller & scr, prod)

An extraordinary opening - to good jazz, Constance Towers assaults a drunken man, who rips off her wig, revealing her to be bald - she beats him into submission, then takes the money she is owed...

She's a great character who assaults a number of other deserving people in Fuller's taut drama, which half the time exists in a white picket fence land, and thus is all the more shocking when it reveals its true story of a child abuser.. The film is WAY ahead of its time, and though can appear crude at times is memorably well executed - it exerts a strange power, in fact... That haunting song, sung by the children, into the camera...

In my review of 24/1/09 I wrote 'Even the French must have been surprised at this Fuller'. (Just for the record we also that day watched Arthur Ripley's The Chase, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Pineapple Express and Malena!)

It's quite refreshing when you watch a film in which not one name in front of the camera is familiar - Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Karen Conrad, Marie Devereux, Bette Bronson.

Photographed by the great Stanley Cortez.