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List Price: $29.95Amazon.com's Price: $26.99 You Save: $2.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9780780021082
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 0780021088
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Letterbox
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: August 26, 1998
Running Time: 90 minutes
Sales Rank: 34194
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: October 29, 1964
Editorial Review:
Description:
The setup is pure pulp: A former prostitute relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit into mainstream society. But in the strange, hallucinatory territory of writer/director/producer Sam Fuller, perverse secrets simmer beneath a seemingly wholesome facade. Criterion is proud to present The Naked Kiss in a beautiful widescreen transfer.
Amazon.com Review:
Until Sam Fuller came along, movies in the 1960s were still bound by Hollywood's self-imposed and often hypocritical rules of discretion. The crimes and misdemeanors of lurid pulp fiction remained on drugstore spin-racks and newsstands, diluted on screen until Fuller, with his cigar-chomping audacity and confrontational style, liberated movies from artificial restraint and kicked them into the meaner, darker, but more honest maturity of the post-Kennedy era. Shock Corridor announced Fuller's brazen agenda a year earlier, but The Naked Kiss is even more astonishing because its trashy, provocative plot dares to find depth and humanity beneath the hardened shells of corrupted souls.
The film begins like no other before it: Kelly (Constance Towers) beats her pimp with a handbag, grabs the cash he owes her, adjusts her telltale wig and makeup, and sets out to begin life anew, free from the shame of prostitution. Two years later she's in Grantville, a typically Rockwellian slice of Americana, working wonders with disabled kids and gaining distance from her miserable past. She's even engaged to the town's most respected citizen, but dark clouds are gathering: a corrupt cop knows Kelly's hidden secrets; a nearby brothel taints the community; and a pedophile is lurking in the shadows. Through it all, Fuller calibrates The Naked Kiss with such precision that sentiment and sordidness can run parallel without colliding, shifting from outrageous vice to shameless tear-jerking with equal facility. With twisted tricks up his sleeve, Fuller can be accused of tabloid tackiness, but that would be missing the point: In Fuller's cruel and ugly world, compassion still finds a way to survive. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Good Fuller
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, ... Read More
Rating:  - A Singular Vision
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Definition of Pulp
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 ... Read More
Rating: - A little over-rated, but interesting period piece
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - Upscaled old transfer to be anamorphic!
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 ... Read More
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