The Frame

Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this one. Samuel Fuller was a B-grade director well known for his rather off-the-wall, shocking films (his most famous film is probably Shock Corridor); this is the first one of his films that I’ve seen. And it’s so incredibly strange that I loved it! It opens with a woman beating the crap out of the camera–actually, she’s whaling on a former lover, but the first person view is the first of many surprising takes on what might otherwise be an ordinary storyline. The woman is a prostitute trying to get out of the business, so she changes towns and becomes a teacher at a home for crippled children. The only person who knows about her past life is the local cop, who helps protect her from recognition; that is, until she decides to marry another man, the town’s most upstanding citizen (he may be mayor, I forget the details, because I was so focused on its idiosyncratic style that I didn’t pay close attention to the plot). There’s another twist at the end which I won’t reveal. But the thing that sets The Naked Kiss apart is, as I said, its sheer oddness. There’s a scene where the children are all singing a song, which one would expect to be cute and saccharine sweet, but the tune is so bizarre and the children so blank that the scene becomes surreal, even creepy (see below). If you could count “cult film” as a genre, I think you’d have to put this up there with Carnival of Souls as the prime 1960s examples. I’m not sure I’d say it was “good”, but it was far too interesting to pass up, and even several weeks later, it keeps popping up in my head. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Well Above Average

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clip mentioned in review: