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.

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.

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.

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.

"The Naked Road" has a pathetic overall score of 4.9 at this time...indicating that it's probably a very bad movie. However, despite a low budget and mostly unknown actors, it manages to work very well and is quite entertaining.

The story is about a young model who is at heart a very nice girl. When the film begins, she's on a date with a real creep who simply believes models are glorified prostitutes. The jerk even goes so far as to suggest they go to a hotel and that she put out! He's very blunt, crude...and married. Soon he ends up trying to drive her home, as she'll have none of this monkey business. But on the way, he's arrested for speeding and they're both brought to see the judge. Now why she had to do and what happens next are huge problems in the movie as it just doesn't make sense. The judged demands the jerk pay a fine in cash...and lets him go home to get the money and keeps the model as collateral!! This is pretty dumb...fortunately the rest of the film is much more intelligent.

Soon another law breaker arrives in court and after promptly paying his fine, he offers to drive the lady home. Instead, however, he takes her to a house and holds her prisoner for days...starving her and threatening to get her hooked on drugs to make her turn tricks. And, since no one seems to know where she is, rescue from this prison is unlikely...however, she steadfastly refuses to cooperate and become a prostitute.

The film is very tense and the acting surprisingly good. All in all, aside from the brief portion in court which made no sense, it's a gritty and exciting and tense little film you can currently find on YouTube.