The Naked Road

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.

Jeanne Rainer was a pretty, shapely actress who reminded me of Adele Lamont, the attractive model in the cult classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die. They shared the same kind of sultry look and precise, serious acting style. Reading her bio here, I was very impressed.

I remembered Ronald Long best for his hilarious, snobby Sunsweet Prune commercials and also for his work on I Dream of Jeannie. Here Long is affably nasty in his plan to hook women into prostitution by drugging and kidnapping them. No doubt this was not a role and a movie that he looked back on with great affection. His henchman is even more scummy, casually killing girls for his boss when they are a threat, casually dropping one drugged girl out of a window. The acting got panned by most who bothered to review this quickie but the acting's not bad, just played out at a glacial pace. This snail pace is not for viewers hyperstimulated by the rapid cutting, action and diction of today's movies. There is no real action, just exposition. It's so mild and slow, it could have easily been broadcast on TV in 1959.

I'm not the only critic who was put in mind of Ed Wood with this bargain-basement effort about white slavery in what seems to be New Jersey. This is Ed without the defiant ebullience that somehow filtered through to the finished article, and turned his excruciating films into art-house classics. No such legend seems to attach to William (who?) Martin.

The plot starts out fairly well, with a married advertising man dining-out a young, unknown TV-model he has employed, on the assumption that she'll return the favour like a good girl. When she refuses, he reluctantly agrees to drive her home, but in his frustration, he accelerates away at twice the speed limit, only to get pulled in and escorted to the cop-shop. Lacking ready money, he has to find a bank, leaving her with the cops as security. Meanwhile another speeding offender (Wayne) takes pity on the model, and offers to pay the fine himself, so she can get home quicker with him - if she's willing, of course.

Not too believably, she agrees... and the next thing she remembers is waking up in a strange house, where her rescuer makes it clear that she's now a captive member of his 'public relations' group, just having to 'be nice to clients' in exchange for a (handsome) salary. As you may have guessed, drugs come into the picture in a big way.

We can't reveal much more, except to hint that small-town cops and prosecutors are not always immune to pressure from dodgy local business, and that Wayne's timely arrival may not have been the pure accident it looked like. But as usual, everything goes wrong before anything comes right.

I don't know whether the part of the model required a beauty of the first magnitude. Maybe not. Or maybe the budget just didn't stretch to one. Either way, the little-known Jeanne Rainer is only passably good-looking, and sounds particularly silly claiming to be only nineteen. Wayne is played by Ronald Long, an accomplished English actor who looks and sounds like Hitchcock merged with Charles Laughton, talking very 50's (with that mysterious 'n' in front of the 'yes'.) Otherwise the cast is quite forgettable, the elegant Eileen Letchworth making only a faint play at bunny-mother/wicked witch.

In 1959, I was a 12-year-old in a boys' boarding-school, and I think we would have been thoroughly titillated by this adult material, even though most of it was just talk. As for real adults, I cannot begin to imagine them paying good money at the box-office for The Naked Road.

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.