The Naked Kiss

(Samuel Fuller, 1964) Talking Pictures TV, 1.40am

Revered by film-makers from Jean-Luc Godard onwards, Samuel Fuller had a colourful past as a pulp novelist and crime reporter, fuelling his repute as a cigar-chewing sensationalist. But his varied, wildly inventive films continue to fascinate with their visionary intensity and ambivalent political content. The Naked Kiss stars Constance Towers as a sex worker trying to start afresh in a small town and getting caught emotionally between a cop and a socialite. Respectable society, however, has its own dark secrets… Fuller uses lurid melodrama as a vehicle for provocation; photography by the great Stanley Cortez creates a tone of genuine nightmare. One of American cinema’s most authentically out-there movies.