Blowhard, Esq. writes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClsN0u2M8p8

Cheap, lurid, corny, sensational, sentimental, blunt, and perverse, Sam Fuller’s THE NAKED KISS opens with a bald hooker beating her pimp. After winding up in Squaresville, USA she decides to go straight, lands a job as a well-respected nurse, and snares the town’s rich and sophisticated scion. But can she escape her past? And is the man of her dreams too good to be true? One of Scorsese’s favorites, it also clearly influenced David Lynch, who swiped its placid-suburbia-with-corrupt-underbelly for BLUE VELVET and brothel across the river for TWIN PEAKS. The screenplay is a bit creaky — the movie loses most of its momentum with the second act climax — but it’s hard to beat the authentic early 60s B-movie noir seediness. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Related

• The film reminded me of Donald Westlake’s Memory which I recently read and Fenster reviewed here.
• Back here I took a look at some process footage of late 40s L.A. shot for the movie Shockproof, co-written by Fuller.