The Naked Kiss

Fuller’s tabloid sensibilities propelled his most florid tale, starring Constance Towers as a prostitute who descends on Anytown, USA, in an effort to go straight (but only after a last trick with the town police chief) and winds up caught in a web of scandal. Marked by one of the most striking openings in cinema, in which a bald Towers is seen beating her pimp senseless with a high-heeled shoe and taking “only what’s coming to her” from the cash in his pocket, The Naked Kiss careens wildly from double entendre–laced melodrama to stirring morality play, Fuller’s sharp dialogue and black humor bridging the impossible gaps between genres. Towers’s Kelly keeps a straight face as she effortlessly goes from hooker to pediatric orthopedist, even as her dark past threatens to consume her and her love affair with the town’s richest man reveals the true meaning of the “naked kiss.”