TIM WONG files an appreciation of Samuel Fuller's incendiary “The Naked Kiss”.

NOT THAT YOU would have noticed, but I have this obsession with suburbia, and I just can't shake it. Maybe it's because I still reside in one, or that on a deep subconscious level, I'm chipping away at my own mental barriers of complacency as a comfortably apathetic, middle class citizen. For the last four years, I've absorbed, researched, scrutinized and made the neighbourhood I call home my own private little ant farm. I've photographed just about every archway, picket and SUV; walked up and down it a zillion times; nearly once mustered the courage to knock on a few doors and ask if I could look around. I've also scoured a lot of suburban-related movies – Ghost World, Far From Heaven; dirty Larry Clark flicks; stuff by Douglas Sirk, David Lynch, Todd Solandz – the usual suspects. I pretty much consider myself a nerdish expert on the subject, but only really since discovering The Naked Kiss.

Unlike every other contemporary exposé of suburbanites and their oh-so-dysfunctional lives, the protagonist in Samuel Fuller's 1964 pulp melodrama isn't trying to break out of monotony, rebel against materialism, or cling onto a disintegrating façade – in fact, she just wants to become one of them. And so enters the hot-to-trot Ms. Kelly; a fire hazard in high heels, as one of those vivacious trailers might say. Brandishing a shoe in her right hand, she's pummeling the alpha-male crap out of some bastard who probably deserves it, takes $75 from an $800 wad, and stuffs it between her breasts. She's almost good enough for a Russ Meyer movie; almost, if only she wasn't bald.

In another time and place, Kelly might have taken the $800, sped off in a convertible and signed up as a go-go dancer, but she's got other ideas. Two years, and a full head of hair later, she's stepping off a bus into Grantville – Middle America with all the warning signs, where the only theater in town is showing Shock Corridor, a film about dementia, nymphomaniacs and negro white supremacists. Played by the girl with a movie star name, Constance Towers is a starlet you think you should have heard of, but like the rest of the nondescript faces in this movie, she's memorably anonymous, as if plucked from the heartland of a Normal Rockwell. Loitering at the bus stop is Griff, the local badge of honour, and obvious Brill Cream spokesperson, performing his civic duty by soliciting Kelly for a $20 "job", if you know what I mean.

Motives come in two – especially in The Naked Kiss – and if Griff's test-drive of Kelly appeared purely for sexual release, it's revealed soon enough he wants her out of town – preferably, across the river to the local brothel. But as life epiphanies go, Kelly's is as prompt as they get. The next day, she rents a room with the town's motherly seamstress, and follows that up with a pure light-bulb moment: nurse handicapped children for a living! So determined to ditch the prostitution gig and assimilate into an honest living, Kelly's Florence Nightingale act turns out to be the only genuine vocation in Grantville. Fuller really plays up her maternal instinct here – she's protective of the young and vulnerable, drawn to anything in a cot, and is a natural with the disabled kids, inspiring miraculous toe-touching feats and a Rodgers & Hammerstein-esque musical number so perfect, it's sickening.

And all while mocking the very decency of her crusade in an environment just waiting to implode. This is the mid-60's, mind you – the studio system's gone kaput, the Beat Generation's making way for the Counter Culture, and It's a Wonderful Life seems, well, a lifetime ago. Hence, Fuller can afford to send up the likes of Bedford Falls, towns that could really only exist within the bubble of Golden Age Hollywood. And he gets to burst it with a great big pin, spiking at the very unwavering, Jimmy Stewart pillar of the community, Mr. Grant. A guy who names the town after himself should be a giveaway, but to the residents of Grantville, he's wealthy, respected and immensely likable – bachelor charms that rub easily off on the reformed Kelly. He's the last ingredient in her recipe for perpetual bliss, and even the revelation of her past doesn't break their engagement. And then, a bombshell – she likes children, he does too, just not quite for the same reasons...

As the laws of domestics would have it, nothing is ever as it seems, and that it all eventually turns to shit, is inevitable. Yet, in Fuller's mind, the critique is heroic, and the protagonist isn't part of the problem. It's a picture a little more blurred than first anticipated, where Kelly is less of an avenging angel than she is a reluctant saint, and where her journey doesn't seek retribution or a cause, but wherever it takes her, just can't avoid it. She's an anti-heroine in the world-weariest sense – a redemptive, bitch-slapping Travis Bickle, sporting a "Save the Hookers" bumper sticker – who went looking for "America", and thought she found it. And when that brave new world caves in around her, Fuller instinctively avoids pile-driving it into the ground – which goes against the grain of cinema's preoccupation with just how low suburbia will really go. He's not without irony and cynicism, either, but triumphantly concludes amidst an air of futility, that behind the grassy knolls and hedge trimmings, there's actually an ideal worth fighting for.

And if the film wasn't radically furnished enough, turns out, Fuller is also a feminist. At least, for 90-odd minutes, he is. Granted, it's a 60's film, and obvious by-product of its era. Yet, when it comes to the Y-chromosome, it's not as simplistic as her being just a man-hater, just part of the anti-establishment, or just sexually liberated. Kelly's all those things and more, and would still rather tie the knot than break someone's neck – but when confronted by a social order preserved, corrupted and micro-managed by a posse of misogynists, what's a girl to do but start hitting people over the head with a handbag, or for that extra wallop, the end of a phone receiver?

Part hard-boiled film noir – the kind in sizzling black and white, teeming with hot flashes of corrosive dialogue – and part collective sigh-of-relief that someone made a film truly smart about suburbia, even 40 years on, and The Naked Kiss is still showing us how it's done.

See also:
» The Naked Kiss (Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam)