The Naked Kiss (1964) film notes for SAM Films

Kelly (Constance Towers) brushes her wig into place, draws on her eyebrows, and lines her eyelids. She leaves her pimp lying on the floor, whipped by her, and coughing, “I’m drunk Kelly, please.” Loud music plays in his apartment. To the neighbors it might have sounded like a party. The pimp is the one who gave Kelly the wig after giving her a knockout pill and shaving her head for bad behavior. The Naked Kiss (1964) begins with her retaliation. 

Captain Griff (Anthony Eisley) seems to be the only policeman in Grantville. He waits at the Greyhound station to send hoods out of town with a one way ticket while he waits to see who is going to blow into town. Griff is the keeper of Grantville’s shiny surface. “Go do it elsewhere,” is his motto. He’ll happily imbibe, just not in Grantville. “Thanks a lot Griff. I’ll pay you back,” the young hood says as Griff hands him his ticket and a few bucks. “I’m giving you a break because your brother was in my outfit. I don’t want to see you in this town again,” Griff replies. He is the town’s sidewalk sweeper; what he doesn’t like, he sweeps out of sight. 

Kelly gets off the bus the only way to get off if you want to make an impression. Cool in her monotone colored suit and pumps, she carries her luggage. She smiles like a stranger. Two years have passed, and her hair she has grown back. Her descent stops the men’s conversation. Griff is paying attention. “That’s enough to make a bulldog bust his chain,” he says and follows Kelly. She notices. She takes off her jacket and sits, legs crossed, on a bench in the park. “Traveling saleslady?” Griff asks her. “Uh Huh,” she says as she pages through a paperback. “Staying long?” Griff proceeds, making a case of which she knows what kind. “Long enough to cover this territory,” she says. While he’s at it he may as well know where she’ll be sleeping, “Well, there’s one hotel in town, special rates for salesmen.” He looks down at her suitcase. He is curious. “What are you selling?” She closes her book and opens her Samsonite, “Angel foam.” His legs are crossed towards hers. “Champagne,” he says surprised. He is about to become her first and last john in Grantville. They have spotted one another. Their’s may be the world’s oldest professions. One needing the other. Or so Griff thinks.

“Angel foam goes down like liquid gold and comes up like slow dynamite for the man of taste. Think you can afford it?” Kelly says, knowing he knows what she’s really selling. On that bench in the park the pair might look like a husband and wife. There is a friendliness between them that someone might mistakenly see as wholesomeness. Griff sees his job as keeping the park clean. All the while he’s in a trenchcoat, he’s the flasher.

Griff takes Kelly to the hotel that welcomes salesmen. A transaction occurs. A record plays as they sit on the couch mimicking the bench outside in the park. Kelly gets dreamy, “Moonlight Sonata. My favorite. I see myself in a boat when I hear that. A boat on a lake in the moonlight. Leaves lazily falling on me. What do you see?” As he kisses her neck, Griff says, “I’m tone deaf.” 

Kelly asks Griff, “How long have you been a cop?” He laughs, “Is my badge that obvious?” Kelly asks, “Is mine?” Standing in front of Kelly, Griff puts on his jacket and says, “This town is clean.” With his hand he makes a sweeping motion and walks across the room to adjust his collar in front of the mirror. Griff wants to see Kelly again, though not in Grantville, as he does with all the young women who have come as Kelly did, “Across the river there is a wide open town, Delmore Falls. It’s not in this state. There’s a salon there and I don’t mean a beauty parlor. Candy a la carte. Candy is a personal friend of mine. I’ll buy a bottle from you now and then.” An empty one is stuck upside down in a bucket of ice. “You’ll be my ichiban.” He tells her, “That’s a Japanese expression I picked up in Tokyo.” Kelly has traveled as far as he has. “I know,” she says, “It means number one.” 

The Naked Kiss is about a prostitute who looks in the mirror, sees herself and doesn’t like what she sees. But, she wants to so she is motivated to change her life. The Naked Kiss is about a town in love with its own story which turns out to be the kind you can only love if you don’t look at it too closely. 

Kelly doesn’t go to Candy’s. She wakes up and rubs perfume on her limbs. She looks at herself in the same mirror that Griff looked so blindly at himself. Kelly turns a page and rents a room from Madame Josephine, Grantville’s seamstress who doesn’t need a character reference. She tells Kelly, “You’re reference is that face.” 

Griff goes looking for Kelly at Candy’s where the girls don’t have names. Collectively they are called “bonbons.” They are called things like “Marshmallow” and “Hatrack.” Candy (Virginia Grey) explains, “There isn’t a customer here who doesn’t want to hang his fedora on her.” Hatrack, with an airy voice and a head of black hair, comes down the stairs. She too sat on a park bench in Grantville with Griff and was sent by him to Candy’s. When Griff met her, she was a blonde. Candy explains, “Well she was, but the color clashed with my upholstery so I made her go back to her own natural peasant color.” 

Griff’s picked up phrase, “ichiban” and Candy’s bon mot “bonbons” are meant to distinguish people, like “mayor” and “the town virgin,” labels to define how a person should be treated. Kelly won’t go by a moniker. Her name is short enough; so is life. 

Griff doesn’t find Kelly working the streets. She’s working as a nurse with handicapped children in the Grantville hospital. He’s outraged. He pulls Kelly aside. The nurses have no idea that a prostitute is among them. Or maybe they do, but Kelly is so good at her job.