Set in the fictional Alberta mining town of Little Creek, The Naked Flame (aka Deadline for Murder, 1964) transplants the sensational logic of the American exploitation picture into a distinctly Canadian landscape, where conflict between orthodox Doukhobors, radical Freedomites, and Anglo outsiders is staged under the sublime shadow of the Banff mountains. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines how the film turns ethnoreligious difference, nude protest, and coercive assimilation into dramatic spectacle, balancing themes of tolerance against a patronizing gaze. Tracing the film’s movement from prairie gothic to courtroom melodrama, Broomer argues that in The Naked Flame, Canadian marginality is reshaped through the borrowed forms of settler modernity.