WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR B
USA (94 mi) 1965
d: Joseph Cates
Why with everybody
else? Why with every slob…and not with me?
—Lawrence Sherman (Sal Mineo)
A sleazy B-movie cult favorite and fetishistic voyeur’s
delight from director Joseph Cates, father of actress Phoebe Cates, where you might
expect to see flashers in raincoats in attendance, written by Arnold Drake who also
wrote and produced THE FLESH EATERS (1964), yet it’s also an absurd cautionary
tale dedicated to exposing a rising threat of pornography and all things
sexually prurient, literally showcasing the Times Square porn shops, peep
shows, and smut magazines in their heyday, where despite some excellent
performances from cult stars Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, and Elaine Stritch, the
exploitive tone veers so off the rails that the film was banned in the UK for
being too luridly explicit, sending mixed messages about recognizing the warning
signs, suggesting rock ‘n’ roll music is the devil’s work that may send you
into a tailspin where you’ll burn in Hell.
What’s mystifyingly different about this film is just how hysterically exaggerated
it becomes in misjudging reality, playing it completely straight, without the outrageous
wit and sarcastic humor of Luis Buñuel in films like VIRIDIANA (1961) and Simon
of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), both of which poked fun at religious
hypocrisy and conventional society’s overreaction to Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll, and
the wildly theatrical dance contortions on display in garish discotheques,
suggesting one whiff of that and you’ll be drowning in sin. Throughout this film it’s hard to tell just
where most characters are coming from, as they all seem to suffer from some
sort of character disorder. At the
center is Nora Dain (Juliet Prowse, never better, where it’s a shame she didn’t
make more films), a confident, independent woman living on her own in
Manhattan, who’s got the smarts to match her dazzling beauty, yet here she’s
down-on-her-luck, working as a DJ playing dance records at a seedy midtown discotheque
while in pursuit of a career as an actress. The nightclub is owned by Marian, tough as
nails Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, a lesbian with a special overprotective
fondness for her girls, where one of the busboys waiting tables and serving
drinks is Sal Mineo as Lawrence, a decade older than his Oscar nominated role
as Plato in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), where at 27 his career was on what
would be a decade-long, downward spiral, despite winning two Oscar nominations
by the time he was 21, now typecast as a sex pervert, where it would be four
years before he’d work again in the movies, instead working exclusively in
theater and television. Hollywood never
knew what to do with Sal Mineo, as he didn’t look the part they envisioned for
handsome, leading men in the 50’s and 60’s, and instead was always typecast as a
psychologically troubled or disturbed youth, playing demented criminal
lowlifes, like “the Switchblade Kid,” or some off-color, outcast character, a
Mexican boy, a Sioux Indian, a radical Zionist, and even a chimpanzee, where
it’s fair to say his typecasting all but ruined his career.
An acknowledged bisexual during his lifetime, posthumously Sal
Mineo has become something of a gay icon, a poster boy for gay beauty, with his
exotic Sicilian looks, but in his lifetime, an era when Rock Hudson had to hide
his homosexuality until his death bed, his openness about being gay curtailed
his career, resulting in roles like this one, a deranged criminal, where he
plays a disturbed psychopathic sexual predator, a stalker who anonymously calls
Nora on the phone, with a lurid book entitled When She Was Bad sitting on the mantle, crawling into bed, wearing
only his tighty-whities (a first in American cinema, as actors were previously
required to wear boxer shorts), and masturbates suggestively while whispering
sleazy trash to her, like “I just want to touch you…I’ll make you feel like a
real woman…You and I will be on fire!”
At first she thinks he’s just a drunk who’s got the wrong number, but as
calls persist, and she finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment, she
enlists the aid of police Lieutenant Dave Madden, Jan Murray, an otherwise
likable TV game show host who got his start as a Borscht Belt comedian, but
here he’s a cynical, hard-nosed vice cop who’s seen it all, becoming an expert
on “the sadomasochists, the voyeur masochists, the exhibitionists, the
necrophiliacs,” where his mind is so immersed in gutter crime that at one point
Nora believes he’s the perpetrator. In
fact, part of the strangeness of the film is that Nora feels personally
insulted and threatened by the overly personalized acts of both Lt. Madden and
Marian, who comforts her a bit too closely, apparently not wanting to let go,
which just gives her the creeps, but she’s not the least bit threatened by
Lawrence, and never reads the signs until it’s too late. In her haste to make a quick exit, Marian
inadvertently leaves Nora’s apartment wearing her fur coat, quickly noticing
she’s being tailed. While earlier in the
day we watched Nora walk through the crowded city streets outside her
apartment, where the city was a bustle of activity, yet Marian, in a bizarre parallel,
bolts for the nearest alleyway, where she finds herself cornered, only to be
strangled by Lawrence in a case of mistaken identity, suffering a similar demise
as Sal Mineo in real life, who at age 37 was fatally stabbed in an alley behind
his Sunset Strip, West Hollywood apartment.
According to Elaine Stritch, Son
of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Google Books Result, “I was a
lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled
on Ninety-third Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal
Mineo. Now who’s not going to play that
part?”
All kinds of shenanigans are going on in this film, where
Lawrence has an incestually suggestive, overly chummy relationship with his
brain-damaged, younger sister Edie, (Margot Bennett), seen falling down the
stairs in an opening flashback sequence that rather cryptically leads to the
title, startled and then terror-stricken at seeing him naked in bed having sex
with an older woman, where in her fright to run away she trips down the stairs,
causing permanent brain damage, also decapitating the head of her teddy
bear. Lawrence has felt guilty ever
since, unable to have healthy relationships with women, instead spending his
time on 42nd Street paging through titillating porn magazines with lurid titles
such as Shame Mates and Dance-Hall Dykes, raunchy books
featuring salacious material, including Naked
Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, and visiting XXX movie theaters in Times
Square, becoming obsessed with Nora, seemingly the perfect woman that Edie will
never become, where he can see into Nora’s apartment with binoculars and constantly
spies on her. Lt. Madden is
overprotective towards his own young daughter named Pam (Diane Moore), hiring a
housekeeper to look after her while he’s at work, as his wife was murdered by a
sexual psycho who chopped up the body afterwards, yet when he comes home, he
plays back tape-recordings of other women who were stalked by predators,
studying them for clues, completely oblivious to the fact that his daughter’s
in the next room and can hear every word, not to mention he leaves smutty
magazines around the house. Shot by
cinematographer Joseph C. Brun, who also shot the brilliant Robert Wise film
noir Odds
Against Tomorrow (1959), with assistant cinematographer Michael Chapman, by
the way, who ten years later would help direct Martin Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976), resembling the stylistic virtuosity of the John Cassavetes
classic Shadows
(1959), especially the black and white, cinéma vérité look of the street
scenes, offering a time capsule look of New York City. After showing scenes of Lawrence shirtlessly working
out in the gym, juxtaposed with Nora in skimpy swimming attire at the pool, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965)
Sal Mineo works out & swims in ... YouTube (4:24), the film does have a
serious erotic obsession with the human anatomy, especially Sal Mineo and
Juliet Prowse, though no explicit nudity.
While part of the camp style is watching the disco dancers do their
thing, blacks and whites mixed together on the dance floor, gyrating to very
cheesy music (they couldn’t afford real music, so they used fake rock ‘n’ roll
songs composed by former Four Seasons backup singer Charlie Calello), the scene
of the film takes place after hours, with Lawrence alone with Nora, who
couldn’t be friendlier, showing him how to dance after he expresses a certain
reservation, where the go-go dancing style at the time was representative of Shindig! (1964-66) or Hullabaloo (1965-66), where Nora is an
absolute delight doing the Watusi, Who Killed Teddy Bear Dance
Scene HQ - YouTube (2:21), so caught up in feeling good for a change that
she doesn’t notice the sudden change in mood that comes over Lawrence, creating
a lurid climax scene, where the psychological disorientation is vividly
expressed in a room full of mirrors that recalls Orson Welles in THE LADY OF
SHANGHAI (1947). While it’s not just
trashy fun, there are some poignant as well as bewildering moments, with plenty
of documentary style realism in the street locations, along with a theme song
sung over the opening and closing credits by Rita Dyson that captures the smoky
eroticism of the film, WHO
KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) Title song / opening ... - YouTube (2:34).
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