Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss; Otto Preminger's The Human Factor

The Naked Kiss may be a moral tract, but it uses the cinema for its medium; its virtues rest not on the rightness of its moral but on Fuller's transformation of ethics into aesthetics.
Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger 1970)

Owing to Preminger's objectivity of presentation, we cannot say at any point that he endorses this or that; we can only say that such and such is endorsed by the film.
Robin Wood, The Movie Reader (November Books Limited 1972)


These two films, The Naked Kiss(1964) and The Human Factor(1979), were recently shown on Turner Classic Movies; each film represents an end point for its director.  Fuller's austere, corrosive film was his last major work and though he lived for another thirty-four years his few subsequent films (The Big Red One, White Dog, The Street of No Return) were all seriously compromised in one way or another.  The Human Factor was Preminger's last film and he struggled to get it made; .he died in 1986.  Each film to some extent is a summation of each director's work and each film is minimalist in style, emphasizing moral concerns.

The Naked Kiss stars the iconic Constance Towers who quits life as a prostitute and becomes a nurse in a small town.  She becomes engaged to the town's millionaire until she catches him molesting a little girl and kills him. (The naked kiss is the kiss of a pedophile).  Fuller's explains his philosophy in Godard's Pierrot Le Fou :  "Film is a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotions." The only innocents in Fuller's films are the children, because they have not yet been corrupted, though the adults are working hard to corrupt them.  Towers works in the children's ward at the hospital and in one astonishing sequence the children fantasize that they are no longer ill or crippled and can play outside.  But the small town where Towers works will not accept that she is reformed and she leaves, just as Fuller left America and worked for years in Europe, after continually exposing the hypocrisy of America during the Cold War (Fuller's major films were made between 1949 and 1964). 

The Human Factor is from a Graham Green novel, with screenplay by Tom Stoppard, and, like many of Preminger's films, has a strong Cold War consciousness.  Nicol Williamson plays a bureaucratic British spy, Maurice Castle, in the African section of the secret service M16.  He is giving information to the Russians because a South African communist helped to get his wife out of Africa.  When M16 suspects another agent and kills him Castle continues to give the Russians information about South Africa's plan to use nuclear weapons against its indigenous population.  Castle has to flee England, leaving his wife and child behind.  Preminger's final film is more subdued in style, with less camera movement and more cuts, than usual.  All the characters are in one moral dilemma or another but Castle's is the most severe, with no ideology to guide him, just a concern for individuals.