The Naked Road

Thia film has no redeeming features. The acting is terrible,the small rooms and sets are terrible,the script is terrible,the music is terrible,the plot is terrible,the main english actor is really terrible,.everthing about this film is terrible and really unbelieveable. Please do not be tempted to spend any time seeing,watching or thinking about Naked Road. This ntitle has no connection with the film in any way. The poster for the film is more iteresting than the film ans it illustrates a scene not shown in the film. Many people may snear at British films made at the same time as this U. S. A.film but none are never as bad as Naked Road.

I think that adds to the credibility of the movie. It's not like these kinds of sleazy things are exactly glamorous, indiscrete, provide a great health care plan, and a 401k.

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.

Jean Rainier is held by Ronald Long and his associates until she agrees to work for him in his publicity department, dating clients and, seeping with them ..... they talk around the subject in the stupidest manner, doubtless because of the Production Code. There are hints they will get her hooked on unspecified drugs, but it's all discussed in such a vague manner that there's no sense of actual menace of White Slavery, as it used t be called. While it is true that the vagueness could be threatening, unfortunately, with the exception of Long, everyone speaks their lines as if they are reading them off a slate, and cannot read very well. Long is pompous and unctious, and thoroughly obnoxious.

It's a movie that promises sordidness, and teenaged boys probably snuck into the theaters hoping to see something prurient. If so, they were doubtless disappointed.

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.