The Naked Kiss

 The Naked Kiss (1964) is a Sam Fuller neo-noir.  It's trash.  The film, about a prostitute trying to go straight, is mildly entertaining and, even, gathers some power toward its end, but the movie's dialogue and acting are laughably bad.  The picture is made with zero money and looks as cheap as it is.  The casting seems to have occurred at a suburban used car dealership -- the men all look smarmy, like caricatures of handsome fellows, but, on closer inspection, nothing much; the women, particularly the lead, Constance Towers, looks like a harlot, which is good I suppose given the film's subject matter, but she can't act and when, inspected closely (and Fuller uses big, unflattering close-ups) is not just unattractive but sort of ugly.  (Towers later became an acclaimed stage actress and won several awards for her acting and, so, I don't mean to be ungallant -- but a stage actress is a figure viewed from afar.)   In my opinion, The Naked Kiss is not just trash, but, not even, trash of a high order.  Sure, it's well-directed and has an ingenious, if implausible, script (also written by Fuller) but I can't make any particular claims of excellence, or, even, competency for this film.

That said, the narrative is lurid to the point that it would engage the attention of a rock or a sober labrador retriever.  A prostitute in a wig beats up a man, slamming him across the face with her purse that must contain stones or something.  She knocks him to the ground -- the assault is filmed big close-ups with the enraged whore beating at the camera with her black purse; we see the attack from the POV of its victim.  Not content to knock the poor devil on his ass, the whore sprays him with a seltzer bottle (a nice touch I thought), kicks him in the ribs and, then, loots his wallet, pulling out 75 dollars owed to her, but leaving another 800 scattered around him on the floor.  In the course of the assault, the victim grabs the whore's wig and pulls it off, revealing her to be totally bald, her head shaven clean.  After some blaring music and credits, the whore appears at a bus station in a suburban town called Grantsville, the place named after its leading citizen and benefactor, a manufacturer named Grant who has donated money for a children's orthopedic hospital located in the village.  This is nice suburban town but, across the river, from a hellhole said to be an open city.  The prostitute encounters a corrupt cop who hangs around the bus station surveying the scene for bad actors coming into his nice, clean town.  The cop, named Griff, accosts the prostitute who is under cover, soliciting johns in the guise of a traveling champagne sales(wo)man.  Griff tries out the merchandise, both the wine and the girl, and, then, tells her to hit the road -- go across the river, he says, to the prosperous local madame's brothel, "Candy's Place."  (The first 15 minutes of this ninety-minute film deploys an almost constant stream of risibly raw double entendres.)  Instead of going to Candy's whorehouse, the prostitute becomes a nursing attendant at the local children's orthopedic hospital.  She works with typically cute and photogenic waifs and achieves an excellent reputation as a compassionate and caring nurse.  In this role, she is introduced to Griff's son, the handsome scion of the Grant fortune; predictably enough, he falls in love with the ex-whore and, indeed, proposes marriage -- they will have a "white wedding" and a honeymoon in Venice.  Griff, appalled by the relationship, orders the prostitute to leave town but she refuses -- she has already confessed her checkered past to Grant -- and calls her fiancee in Griff's presence to prove her point.  Griff apologizes.  Meanwhile, one of the nurses at the hospital, unable to bear the stress of working with badly disabled children, decides to become a prostitute.  She gets an advance from the loathsome Candy.  The ex-whore, learning about this, goes to the brothel, beats "the fucking shit" (to quote the President of the United States) out of the Madam, using her handy bludgeon of a black purse.  She, then, stuffs the Madam's mouth with banknotes.  The heroine has been living with a kindly seamstress.  The seamstress makes her a beautiful wedding dress with a fabulous white veil.  She takes the wedding dress and veil to Grant's house, interrupting her wealthy betrothed while he is sexually molesting a six-year old girl.  The ex-whore, who has a bad temper, beats the pedophile to death with the phone receiver -- the veil floats down to cover the pedophile's dead face. Of course, she tossed in jail and accused of murder.  She claims that she killed Grant because he had been sexually abusing a child, but can't identify the little kid and doesn't know her name.  Needless to say, Griff who is holding her in jail, condemns her for the killing and refuses to believe her story.  The Madam, Candy, whose whores are called "Bon-bons", comes to the jail to accuse the heroine of wanton violence, referring to the assault at her whorehouse.  The nurse whose transgression triggered the attack denies that she received an advance for sexual services from Candy -- she's ashamed to admit that she was about to become a whore herself.  There are some additional complications, including a visit from the heroine's former pimp (called a "tout" or "procurer" in the film's sixties-style stilted dialogue) who says that the ex-whore beat him up too and stole his money.  (It turns out that when she tried to quit his "stable", the tout knocked her out and shaved her head bald.)  In the end, the ex-whore identifies the little girl who was Grant's victim and, I guess, all's well that end's well.  The heroine's manslaughter with telephone receiver is, apparently, forgiven by everyone in the town and, when she is released from jail, the townsfolk come out to applaud her.  Nonetheless, according to the Wikipedia plot summary, she takes the next bus out of town -- this is patently untrue:  she apparently misses the bus which drives by her as she walks determinedly down the street with her valise full of champagne bottles.  

The movie is garish. with a few unsettling scenes:  Grant's confession to the ex-prostitute that he intends to marry her because they are "both abnormal" -- that is, he intends her as a "beard" for his perversions is interesting and affecting.  Similarly, the little girl's confession of the sexual abuse, although reticent is very well-done.  But the movie is a grotesque combination of super-hard boiled action and dialogue and hideous sentimentality.  The little crippled kids, close-ups emphasizing their cute miniature crutches, perform sad little songs and dress as play-pirates.  The town's "old virgin", the seamstress keeps a mannequin in her house wearing her own fiancee's uniform and war medals as well as a big Red One, signifying the man was a member of Fuller's unit in World War Two, the 16th Infantry Regiment First Infantry Division -- I assume the medals on the mannequin are Fuller's own (he received a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and just every other combat medal available for his service in the war.)  Of course, Charley, the old maiden's betrothed, didn't make it back from Europe and both the seamstress and the ex-whore confide their worries and concerns to the mannequin in soliloquies that are truly hideous to behold.  The ending is fairly suspenseful.  But, even on the level of accomplished trash, the movie fails.  One of the prostitutes in Candy's brothel is an accomplished karate expert -- she knocks out a john with a single well-placed karate chop.  So where is the big cat-fight between the heroine and the whore with the Black Belt?  The scene is shamefully missing from the story.  Similarly, it would be great if the heroine's bald head at the start of the film had been shaven to apply electrodes for execution in the electric chair.  Furthermore, the film is rife with anti-prostitution speeches.  The picture doesn't draw the obvious conclusion from the squalid proceedings -- prostitution shouldn't be denounced but legalized.   Come on, Sam, have the courage of your tawdry convictions! 

Tar - a second look

 I saw Todd Fields' Tar in a movie theater about three years ago.  The film impressed me with its discipline and apparently intimate knowledge of the classical music business.  The titular Tar is a woman-conductor who has ruthlessly devoted her life to achieving fame at the podium; in the end, she is humiliated as a result of her own overweening ambition and arrogance -- when summarized in this fashion, the film seems to be another picture in which a woman is punished for acting like a man.  In this case, Tar suffers because she aspires to be like her mentor, Leonard Bernstein.  Bernstein's behavior, tolerable in a man, is unseemly and uncanny in a woman.  But the film is much bigger, more ambitious, and digressive than my summary.  As years pass, the picture seems to grow in status and is, generally, accorded the honor of being one of the most important films made during this new century.  Many reviews has remarked that Todd Fields, who appeared as an actor in Kubrick's last picture, the posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut, seems to have absorbed the precision and obsessive concern with detail apparent in that director's films.  In some ways, Tar's ambition to become a female Leonard Bernstein (complete with their joint obsession with Mahler) mirrors Fields' allegiance to the rigor that Kubrick shows in his movies.  

I won't address the picture in this note in any detail.  I have reviewed the movie elsewhere in this Blog and encourage readers to access that writing to view my earlier thoughts on the film.  Here, I will address a contention that everything in Tar is highly deliberate and intentional.  This applies, I think, even to sequences that on first viewing seem disorienting and, even, remote from the films' narrative thrust.  On a second viewing, it's clear that all episodes in the movie are directed toward elucidating the film's plot and character development.  For instance, we see Tar slamming her fists violently into a boxing bag -- she seems to use boxing exercises as a way to sublimate her rage when her ambitions are stalled and opposed.  This seems merely a picturesque extravagance until we understand that the movie will climax with a savage attack that Tar mounts on a rival conductor whom she believes has betrayed her.  The rival is tall man and she plows into him on stage when he is directing Mahler's Fifth Symphony for the Berlin Philharmonic.  She knocks the much larger man to the floor, pummels him, and, then, not content with her initial aggression begins to savage him again -- this might seem implausible since Tar is not physically imposing, but, in fact, we understand from watching the picture that she's a trained boxer who runs daily for her fitness and, no doubt, is far stronger, more physically aggressive, and much more lethal than the man that she attacks.  The man's betrayal is established in an early scene that we might regard as mere atmospherics -- Tar and the man discuss conducting and he asks her if she will give him "a peek" at the annotations she has made on her score of the Mahler symphony.  She refuses, but at the climax of the movie, we understand that the annotated score has been stolen from her apartment and is being used by her rival to conduct the symphony.  Early scenes that we may not understand to have narrative significance in retrospect are important to establish plot points that will be disclosed two hours later.  Similarly, there is a scene at the outset of the film in which Tar is anxiously waiting backstage, performing breathing exercises and, otherwise, girding herself for a public performance.  We expect that she is about to conduct an orchestra but learn that she is actually about to appear at a public forum to discuss music with the New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.  Just before, Tar attacks the rival conductor, we see her again pacing nervously and, then, breathing deeply before going out on stage.  But the symphony has already begun -- an off-stage trumpeter plays a fanfare - and, so, we are confused -- what's going on here?  If she's conducting, why isn't Tar at the podium already?  In fact, she's preparing to assault the conductor.  These two scenes of Tar preparing for performance rhyme with one another and supply context for the climax.

One of the most baffling sequences in the film involves Tar's final humiliation.  She has gone to Manilla in the Philippines to conduct the music for the game Monster Hunter in concert -- this is a far cry from Mahler.  She complains of jet lag to the clerk at the rather seedy hotel where she is staying; he seems to misunderstand her because he sends her to a brothel.  At the brothel, the girls are arrayed demurely in a "fishbowl" -- that is, behind glass sitting in a semi-circle with each woman identified by a number.  The patron is to inspect the women in the fishbowl and, then, pick the one that pleases him (or, in this case, her.)  One of the girls is numbered as 5.  She and Tar exchange pained looks.  We don't know if the transaction is consummated.  In the next shot, Tar runs out of the brothel onto Manilla's busy night street and vomits in the gutter.  This is a striking scene but one that is difficult to interpret.  There are two auditions featured in the movie.  In the world of professional musicians, auditions are blind -- the candidates appear behind a screen that conceals them.  The purpose for these "blind auditions" is to eliminate bias and make certain that performers are judged on the merits of their playing and not by gender, attractiveness, or ethnicity.  Nonetheless, we see that Tar manipulates these blind auditions to make certain that a young Russian cellist, whom she desires, wins the competition.  (Tar has been accused of using her prominence to groom young female musicians so that she can seduce them - and there is truth to this accusation of predatory behavior.)  The scene with the prostitutes in the fish-bowl correlates to these auditions -- the selection, that is, of a sexual partner.  The "fishbowl audition," if we can call it that,,is the exact opposite of the so-called "blind audition", but both are configured to relate to Tar's choice of a young woman for sexual purposes.  It's my contention that Tar recognizes the correlation between the two types of auditions, a similarity based on her sexual preferences, and is repelled, even nauseated by the association.  Number 5 relates, of course, to Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Fields' direction is reticent and the plot proceeds by leaping over snares and pitfalls -- the narrative is highly elliptical.  Unanswered questions add to the film's eerie, horror-movie ambience.  Why does the Russian cellist live in a literal hole-in-the-wall?  (The fissure, in a heavily placarded and graffiti-smeared wall along which Tar runs for her exercise, leads into a ruinous courtyard that seems to have been occupied by squatters.  There are wet passages and subterranean corridors that look like imagery from Tarkovsky.  Is this some sort of reflection of the squalor of Tar's sexual predation?) A short scene in which the cosmopolitan Tar returns to her humble family home in Queens is startling.  She was a different person when she lived with her family of origin -- literally, it seems, because her brother seen from the top of stairs in a long shot calls her Linda, not "Lydia" which is her assumed name in the art world.  Field's reticence is best illustrated by another long shot scene -- the only person who genuinely loves Tar for herself is Petra, the daughter of Tar's girlfriend (first violin in the symphony).  Near the end of the movie, after Tar has betrayed her girlfriend, the protagonist goes to Petra's school to pick up the child.  (She has previously intervened on behalf of the child with a bully -- a fearsome scene in which Tar, a self-proclaimed "U-haul Lesbian" (whatever that means), goes up to the other child and introduces herself in German as Petra's "father", then, terrorizes the child in a dramatic, even, horrific way).  The girlfriend suddenly appears in the schoolyard and, as Tar begs her to not deny her access to the child, leads Petra away.  This is a painful scene, but distanced, in accord with Fields' tactful direction -- we can't see how poor Tar reacts which is a mercy.

As I suspected, Tar seems inexhaustible.   There is more to see in the film the second time that you watch it.