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Too much of everything

Best movie ever!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Model Gay Andrews, who looks rather like Shelly Fabares, is a loner in NYC. She gets a come on from married ad executive Bob Walker, a Steve Cochran look-a-like, after a gig in New Jersey. He wants to continue their necking session at a hot sheet motel. She turns him down but on their way back to NYC they get pulled over by a cop who hauls them to a corrupt JP who is in cahoots with a local pimp Wayne Jackson played by big man Ronald Long ( Love of Life (1951), The Notorious Landlady (1962) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)) who both resembles and sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock with hair.When Walker leaves to get money so that he can pay his fine in cash, the JP detains Andrews as a hostage until his return. Long is on hand an hour later to rescue Andrews. He pays the $100 fine and the JP tells her she's free. Long offers to give her a ride, seemingly a good Samaritan. At a cafe Long slips a drug into Gay's drink and she wakes up at Longs house. A Classic tale of don't go home with strangers.Koulias is good as Long's right hand man. The entire story is an instructional on white slavery, but its poster decries the "Public Relations Racket", the girl is first offered $50,000 for one year of service with the guarantee that she can go free after the year is up, then threatened with getting forced hooked on heroin if she won't cooperate voluntarily.It's all done very on the cheap and is a bit clunky in spots, but the film still manages to entertain mostly by what is suggested during all the descriptive dialog (supplied mostly by Long) rather than what actually happens. So far so good in Something Weird's "Six Weird Noirs" DVD pack.

"Unbelievably-Fantiscally TRUE! The brutal facts behind the expose of the so-called PUBLIC RELATIONS racket!" Despite that titillating tagline, the only thing exploitative about THE NAKED ROAD is its title and what a missed opportunity it is, too, considering the storyline. A young model (Jeanne Rainer of YOU'VE RUINED ME, EDDIE! fame) who won't put out for the married ad man she's out with is held as collateral when they're pulled over for speeding and fined by a corrupt Justice Of The Peace. Another motorist is hauled in for the same reason and he pays both their fines but the erstwhile Good Samaritan later drugs the girl's coffee and kidnaps her, intending to make her work for his public relations firm as an escort girl. If she doesn't, he'll turn her into a drug addict... Although rife with possibilities, the movie's all talk and very little action until the end when an escort girl gets thrown out a window and the cops chuck tear gas at the bad guys' hideout. Unfortunately, the only one home is the kidnapped model. The lethargic cast acts like they're under water and the whole thing looks like it was filmed for about a buck ninety-eight in an endless succession of living rooms and bedrooms. The same room with different furniture is probably more like it. Still, I can't say I didn't like it and why I don't know.

I discovered "The Naked Road" as part of Something Weird's excellent "Weird Noir" collection. Like everything in the set, it more than lives up to it's name. Director William Martin, who made some other strange films around the same time, seems to have something, perhaps something feminist, on his mind. The film compares the casual exploitation by an of Ad Man of a beautiful young model (the lovely Jeanne Rainer) with out and out White Slavery. In fact, the ad man, who ultimately shrinks from his pangs of guilt, is no doubt intended to be the biggest sleazbo of them all. Even considering that Martin had little time or budget, his approach to filmmaking is downright odd. He shoots every scene in a three or four shot with all characters in view, and just when the monotony becomes unbearable; he cuts to a close up at an utterly irrelevant moment. The actors seem to have been instructed to speak slowly and leave gaping holes between the lines. And none seem to be incompetents, tubby Ronald Long went on to a highly successful career, but his performance here is hilariously, well, odd. Martin may have been no worse or better than Ed Wood, but he had his own approach to making a terrible film. The abrupt climax is probably all for the best, but I could have stood another 15 minutes or so of these strange goings on. And again, Jeanne Rainer, you could have been a contender.

A weird grade B picture. Yes weird, in the acting - very slow dialogues, like early Bela Lugosi features ! - only indoor sets, and such a way of filming. It reminds me also scifi films, as those directed by Richard Cunha and Roger Corman in the fifties. The story has been told in plot line above. It reminds me, for the first part, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. Slow, very slow, but not uninteresting although. The score is laughable, when you ear it on the sequences shown in the same time. I don't know the actors. A film from outer space in the film noir genre. I am not used to it. In sci fi yes, but not with crime movies.