WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR? 1965 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2014/10/who-killed-teddy-bear-1965.html
I suppose there’s a kind of tinpot triumph in making a film about the dark underbelly of human sexuality which succeeds in being, in itself, a work of astounding sleaze and prurience. Such is Who Killed Teddy Bear?; a highpedigreed '60s exploitationer whose interrogative title suggests another entry in the Whatever Happend to Baby Jane? “hag horror” sweepstakes, but is, in fact, an example of what I call “cesspool cinema.” Cesspool cinema is a '60s exploitation sub-genre of low-rent, reactionary, social-commentary films preoccupied with the alleged rise in sexual degeneracy. These films dedicate themselves to exposing (in as prurient a way possible) the threat that drugs, pornography, and delinquency pose to a civilized society. Tackling the kind of material David Lynch would later build an entire career upon, these movies sought to lift the sewer lid off of life, offering a dark, bleakly nihilistic glimpse into the twilight world of depravity and violence seething below the surface of so-called normalcy. Posing ostensibly as tell-it-like-it-is cautionary tales warning against the dangers of unchecked morality and wanton sexual license, “cesspool cinema” films tend to tip their sincerity hand by actually being every bit as skeevy as the world their narratives purport to condemn. A good example of cesspool cinema that runs a close second to Who Killed Teddy Bear? on the sleaze-o-meter is the sensationalistic 1964 Olivia de Havilland shocker Lady in a Cage. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is first posed as a musical question crooned melodramatically (not to mention, over-eloquently, given the character whose thoughts its lyrics are meant to convey) over the film’s tantalizingly lurid title sequence. A sequence which, depending on the copy you see, features a woman in bra and half-slip and a man in incredibly tight, white underwear—the latter being something of a motif in this movie—locked together in an impassioned, touchy-feely embrace. Bearing witness to all this in the bedroom’s doorway is an understandably wide-eyed little girl clutching Sal Mineo as Lawrence Sherman a teddy bear. A little girl who, upon fleeing the scene too swiftly, loses her balance and tumbles down a flight of stairs. Cue the psychosexual dysfunction and guilt. 1/12
When Who Killed Teddy Bear? is posed as a question a second time, it’s by the inconsolable Edie (Margot Bennett)—the hapless little girl on the stairs, now a brain-damaged 19-year-old—inquiring of her older brother, Lawrence (Mineo), the fate of her beloved lost childhood toy. You see, the sordid events unfolding under the film’s opening credits turn out to have been Lawrence’s guilt-ridden nightmare/flashback to the time when Edie was left in his charge. The siblings are orphaned (there being a brief allusion made to their parents’ deaths, with Edie going so far as to call her brother, “mommy-daddy”) and it was Lawrence's momentary neglect—as a then-underage boy surrendering to the seduction of an unidentified “sexually-experienced older Juliet Prowse as Norah Dain woman”—which resulted in Edie suffering the staircase accident which left her mentally and emotionally frozen at roughly the age of her trauma. Jump ahead several years: Lawrence is an adult with a crippling attraction/repulsion attitude toward sex, the silent recrimination of his sister's blameless, childlike dependency inflaming in him a neurotic prudishness which seeks to suppress her natural (sexual) maturation. As for that lost teddy bear—a lingering symbol of his guilt—Lawrence tells Edie that it has been killed in an accident, when in actuality, he has secreted it away. Clearly, Edie wasn't the only one damaged that night.
Elaine Stritch as Marian Freeman
What's also clear is the fact that Who Killed Teddy Bear?, in being a film exhaustively preoccupied with presenting sex in only its most tawdry and squalid contexts, has a sizable attraction/repulsion issue of its own. Like a movie adapted from Travis Bickle fan fiction, Who Killed Teddy Bear? paints a picture of New York as a singularly seedy hotbed of latent and manifest degeneracy. There's scarcely a character in the film left unslimed by its sewer-eye-view of humanity. CASE #1 Lawrence
Jan Murray as Lt. Dave Madden
A waiter at a NYC discothèque, Lawrence's sexual molestation at the hands of an older woman (that’s what it was, although they didn’t call it that back then) leaves him with a staggering catalog of sexual hang-ups; not the least of 2/12
them being voyeurism, making obscene phone calls, stalking (another word they didn't use back then), scopophilia, and sex attraction/repulsion. When not engaged in one of these extracurricular pursuits, he spends his time dry-
The original, uncut version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? runs 94 minutes and can be distinguished from slightly truncated copies by the unblurred imagery shown in the title sequence
humping his pillow, thumbing through his extensive porn collection (French Frills, When She Was Bad), trolling Time Square, or homoerotically working out at the gym. CASE #2 Norah Since we’re introduced to Norah at precisely the moment she’s at the business end of a dirty phone call, there’s no way of telling how much of her frosty demeanor and almost paranoid level of apprehension is Margot Bennett as Edie Sherman her usual personality or the result Bennett (former wife of personal crushes Keir Dullea AND Malcolm McDowell) is very good in a role which appears to have inspired both Taliah Shire's costuming and performance in Rocky of suddenly finding herself one of New York’s premiere creep magnets. An aspiring actress and part-time DJ at the very same dance club where Lawrence lurks...I mean, works...Norah can barely get through a day without being hit on by randy patrons—“You hungry? Let me buy you a frankfurter”—or having the status of her virginity become the central topic of conversation: “Every scrawny broad thinks she’s the only one entrusted with the crown jewels, and then she’ll die if she loses them!” CASE #3 Marian 3/12
Tough-as-nails (aka, lesbian) manager of a discothèque which seems to do a pretty decent business given they only have three records. Marian’s a brassy, calls-‘em-like-she-sees-‘em, survivor type whose weakness for fur—literal and figurative (“I dig soft things…don’t you?”), plays a significant part in her propriety-mandated, horizontal early departure from the film. CASE #4 Lt. Madden Striving for hard-boiled but landing at Borscht Belt, police Lt. Madden is every bit the sex-obsessed porn junkie as
Where should I be looking? Sal Mineo's toned, always-on-display body does most of his acting in Who Killed Teddy Bear? Right now I'd say it's acting like a compass needle pointing north, subtly(?) identifying the guilty party
Lawrence, but fiery moral rectitude over the loss of his wife to violent assault has allowed this self-styled expert on deviant sex to place his own behavior above the pale. Behavior which includes working clinically gruesome details of sex crimes into the most casual of conversations, and turning the apartment he shares with his 10-year-old daughter Pam (Diane Moore, comedian Jan Murray’s reallife daughter), into a virtual vice squad reading room. Who Killed Teddy Bear?’s themes of innocence corrupted are repeated in Madden’s daughter falling asleep each night to the sound of her father listening to his collection of audio tapes of sex assault victims. Talk about your grim fairy tales.
"Who is this? Who IS this?" For films like this to work, it's necessary for it never to occur to the recipient of an obscene phone call to merely hang up.
These are the players in Who Killed Teddy Bear?; less a cast of characters than a police blotter of victims and would-be assailants in service of a familiar, somewhat rote, woman-in-peril crime thriller. The plot is simple: someone has their eyes on Norah and embarks on an escalating campaign of harassment to get her attention. It's a race with the clock as to whether or not the police can find the caller before he makes good on his many threats. The film takes a weak stab at trying to drum up a little suspense as to the identity of Norah's peeping tom/stalker by casting a wide net of suspicion over everyone in her skeevy circle: a lecherous maître d'; a young Daniel J. Travanti
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as a deaf-mute bouncer with piercing eyes; the cop who takes a too-personal interest in her case—but the choice to shoot the caller from the neck down, calling attention to his impossibly taut backside and wasp waist, swiftly narrows the field of probable suspects to a comical degree. No, what truly distinguishes Who Killed Teddy Bear? is its lewd-yet-arty exploration of aberrant sexual development; its overheated, almost documentary look at New York's seamy side (it could pass for an anti-pornography propaganda film); and a tone of suffocating bleakness that feels positively surreal when one realizes this film was made the same year as The Sound of Music. Honestly, Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a dark film that takes a head-first dive into the sewer and never comes up for air. Were it a better film, it would probably be unwatchable WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Imagine John Waters making one of those overheated erotic thrillers from the '80s and '90s. Films with sound-alike titles along the lines of Body of Evidence, Guilty as Sin, Crimes of Passion, and Fatal Attraction. Imagine Waters' absurdist brand of debauched urban squalor played straight and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Who Killed Teddy Bear? is like. As twisted a work of mid-century pseudo-mainstream cinema as was ever screened at a Times Square grindhouse theater. Hollywood’s hypocritical nature is rarely Being just a simple girl from Rochester, NY, Norah can't be faulted for mistaking shown to such brilliant advantage as when it Marian's offer of succor to be as dirty as it sounds has worked itself into a sanctimonious lather over some social-ill it wishes to expose. The makers of Who Killed Teddy Bear? (director Joeseph "She's very pretty...is she a hooker?" Decades before this became a common question posed by pre-teens of their favorite pop stars, Cates little Pam Madden's (Diane Moore) presumptive appraisal of house-guest Norah Dain betrays signs of a troubling sexual precocity [Phoebe’s father] and writer Arnold Drake) obviously decided that the best way to comment on the pernicious threat of degeneracy is to make a film any self-respecting degenerate would love. As a fan of '60s go-go movies, I love all the scenes set in the discothèque (seedy dance club, really), but it blows my mind that a hunk of sleaze this oily could have been made at a time when Hullabaloo, Shindig, and The Patty Duke Show were all over the airwaves. Nostalgia fans love to think of the '60s as this kinder, gentler era, but a movie like
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Who Killed Teddy Bear? suggests that the decade was perhaps just more skillful in sweeping its social debris under the rug. PERFORMANCES I haven't seen the-late Elaine Stritch in many films, and I'm not sure her range extended far beyond some variation of the tough-old-broad type she plays here, but within that range, she is untouchable. She gives the best performance in the film (arguably the only performance in the film), turning a "type" into a dimensional, fleshedout character. She enlivens the proceedings and raises the film's quality bar each and every moment she appears. And speaking of tough, personal fave Juliet Prowse is perhaps one of the least-helpless looking women I've ever seen, but her innate brassiness is a major asset in a film as focused on female victimization as this. I can't really vouch for her performance, which seems a little superficial, but I like that her character is depicted as independent-minded and often more pissed-off than scared by what's happening to her. Hers is a huge departure from the kind of cowering, passive women common to womenin-jeopardy films (like Doris Day in 1961's Midnight Lace). As public tastes in movies changed, many '50s boy-next-door types sought to extend their careers by taking on roles which challenged Corruption of Innocence their squeaky clean images: James In profiling the home lives of Lawrence and Lt. Madden, Who Killed Teddy Bear? parallels the Darren - Venus in Furs, Troy similar damage that can arise from dissimilar obsessions Donahue - My Blood Runs Cold . Who Killed Teddy Bear? is structured as an against-type breakout role for teen heartthrob and two-time Oscar-nominee (Rebel Without a Cause, Exodus) Sal Mineo, but the truth is that, while fine in the part, the actor is consistently upstaged by his physique. You'd have to watch a Raquel Welch movie to see a film where the exposure of a physique is favored so deferentially over a performance. An actor’s body is obviously their instrument, but when that instrument is puffed out with ornamental muscles, it runs the risk of actually inhibiting expression, not assisting (think Channing Tatum’s neck). Such is the case with Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear?. I image we are supposed to glean that Lawrence channels his sexual repression into a fetishistic preoccupation with working out, but Mineo's body and shrink-wrap wardrobe seem to encase and inhibit him. He seems overly aware of his muscles, as though he were getting used to wearing a new garment, resulting in his pants beginning his performance a good 30 seconds before he does. For many, a question far more pressing than Who Killed Teddy Bear? is how did the careers of Mineo (a talented actor) and Prowse (a talented dancer and singer) sink to this level of grindhouse sleaze? 6/12
THE STUFF OF FANTASY Who Killed Teddy Bear? would be a feature film with a running time of 60minutes if it excised all the footage devoted to filming the dancers of discotheque doing The Watusi and the The Frug. Serious padding there. But happily, along with this film being a perfect time-capsule of New York at its grimiest, it's also a movie which offers Movies Are Your Best Entertainment fans of '60s go-go, ample Lawrence treats himself to a picture show. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is worth checking out opportunity to see it in for its scenes of '60s-era Times Square alone. Amusingly, this dive of a theater has a uniformed doorman! action. The film's erotic set-piece, one precipitated by Lawrence's observation that the way people dance is "Very suggestive!" is a twominute dance-off by the statuesque Prowse and slim-hipped Mineo that is both hilarious and terribly, terribly sexy. Suggestive, indeed!
"You look like a whore!" Remarkably, Edie isn't the character delivering this line
Daniel J. Travanti of Hill St. Blues appears as Carlo, the bouncer
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For a film marketed to the heteronormative exploitation market, no physique in the film comes under quite the same degree of close-up camera scrutiny as Mineo's. Not that I'm complaining.
A few of the shows running on Broadway at the time
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The songs used in the film (all three of them) are composed by Bob Gaudino of The Four Seasons and Al Kasha, the Best Song Oscar winner for The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS I saw Who Killed Teddy Bear? for the first time when I was about nine or ten. Bad idea. It aired on TV in the wee small hours of the morning on something like the The Late, Late, Late Show, and I was excited at the prospect of staying up late and seeing what I thought would be a fun/scary B-movie like Die! Die! My Darling! or Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (the latter, playing in the theaters at the time). Of course, what I got was this weird, terribly dark movie about depravity, porn, rape, and murder. Needless to say, this headtrip of a movie disturbed the hell out of me (Mineo with his magic pants and action torso played no small part), and for the longest time Who Killed Teddy Bear? occupied a place in my psyche reserved for kindertrauma. The ending in particular--how it was shot, that dream effect that black and white film can create--gave me lingering nightmares.
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Unable to simulate masturbation onscreen back in 1965, Mineo is shown stroking his thighs while making an obscene phone call. According to Mineo, this was the first American film to feature a man in jockey shots
It’s a curious thing, kids and scary movies. Monsters and ghouls engaged in simplistic struggles of good vs. evil played out against low-budget backdrops of drafty castles and decaying mansions have a strangely comforting, distancing artificiality. The scares they supply are fun because the worlds depicted are so reassuringly false. Less easy to shake off is a grim treatise on the corruptibility of innocence shot in grainy, news-bulletin black and white, set in a grimy, claustrophobic New York teeming not with easy-to-identify monsters, but the flesh and blood kind that look just like everybody else. For a young person, a movie like Who Killed Teddy Bear?—a film that offers few likable characters, little in the way of hope, and no happy ending—is particularly disturbing because it’s just too real. The technical gloss of a bigbudget picture can actually held keep what's happening onscreen at a safe and comfortable remove. The lowbudget black and white of Who Killed Teddy Bear? looks disconcertingly like reality as depicted in documentary. I recall it was one of the earliest films to give me the feeling that the world wasn't a safe place.
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Who Killed Teddy Bear? popped up frequently on TV when I was young, then just seemed to disappear. Sometime in the '90s it resurfaced at a local revival theater here in LA, allowing me the opportunity to see it with an audience for the first time. By now, what I'd once thought of as disturbing looked hopelessly camp, overwrought, and overemphatic, but the film somehow retained all of its edge (it was banned in the UK until very recently). After all these years Who Killed Teddy Bear? holds up as one of the strangest films to come out of the so-called swinging '60s. And that’s saying something.
BONUS MATERIAL (Spoilers) The version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? available on DVD overseas is a slightly edited version from the 94-minute original. Here is what can be found in the uncut version (spoilers): 1. The bodies in the title sequence are visible. 2. Scene with Stritch and Prowse in her apartment is lengthier, including Stritch relaying this information: “I never wore a bra until I was 28. And then for a fast ten This Teddy Bear's No Picnic minutes. Some quack convinced me it helped firm the muscles. I don’t like being fenced in. It’s a hang-up of mine.” 3. Flashback of Mineo's seduction by older woman is longer and slightly more explicit (his body, not hers). 4. Scenes of Mineo at Times Square porn shops and in front of porno theater are longer. 5. Mineo kisses and embraces Stritch after killing her in the alley. 6. There's a brief scene of Mineo humping his bed in his BVDs. 7. Final assault is slightly more explicit The full (edited) version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? is available on YouTube. Depending on the source the voice singing the title song over the film's opening credits has been attributed to either Rita Dyson or Claire Francis (Mikki Young). Until that mystery is cleared up, there are several cover versions floating around the net; Hear Leslie Uggams sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear? 11/12
Hear 80s pop singer Josie Cotton sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear? In 1965, the same year Who Killed Teddy Bear? was released, Juliet Prowse debuted in her own TV sitcom, the short-lived (and rather terrible, as I recall) Mona McCluskey. Sal Mineo appeared as a guest on an episode. See Mona McCluskey opening credits on YouTube.
Copyright Š Ken Anderson
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