Speaking of WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (no question mark), it's a compelling little film, too lurid to be certified in the UK in 1965. But it reminds us that "dirty" things from the '60s -- and few were ever quite like this one -- possess and retain an innate capacity to shock in a way modern movies simply cannot, despite subsequent decades of excessive explicitness (also true of those late-'70s fetish films).
There is a 94 minute cut out there someplace....
This is a remarkable film, and much "better" than I'd anticipated (I'd never seen it before 2016). Shot in the winter of 1964/65, its rather ahead of its time and covers subject matter taboo even now, certainly for mid-'60s Hollywood... It's B&W photography is as haunted and moody as a PSYCHO-era horror film, but TEDDY BEAR has an organic quality about it most Hollywood movies don't have today and didn't have yesterday --- and it evokes memories (for those old enough) of how the inner cities, from the mid-'60s to the '70s, were beginning to fall apart in the wake of JFK's death and the rise of that incomprehensible morass of the Vietnam war (where all our tax dollars were going) -- when peep shows and adult "book stores," with their wares on full display in the shop windows, popped up in even "nice" business districts beside Tiffany's, creating a tense and fascinating shabbiness that helped define the schism that was "the '60s".
So the cultural meltdown wasn't just about the hippies and their drugs and the acid rock and the protests which would soon follow this movie (not that there was much of a reaction to the film itself, as few people saw it then); for all the romanticizing of that decade (some of which is understandable), Walter Cronkite wasn't entirely wrong when he called the 1960s "a slum of a decade" and TEDDY BEAR hints at that better than industry films of the time. And it functions as a reminder that the world of that era wasn't really all that innocent (even if it was a bit naive in other ways). Such was that echo chamber, filled with its cacophony of voices, that was the '60s -- where you had two decades seemingly shoved into one. And with this movie squarely on the cusp of both.
(Can you ever have a cacophony of voices inside an echo chamber??)
Goodish acting, taut direction, and a lot of layers going on at one time. It seems clear that Martin Scorsese caught this flick before undertaking TAXI DRIVER.
TEDDY BEAR's story focuses on a cheesy Times Square discotheque where charming aspiring-actress Nora (Juliet Prowse) is employed as a record spinner, overseen by her tough ladyboss (Elaine Strich) and working aside cordially cuddly waiter Laurence (Sal Mineo) who has a "retarded" sister who may have suffered brain damage as a child after falling down the steps following her catching her brother in
flagrantly incestuous delicto with what might be their mother... It also seems lovely Nora is being phone stalked, and then
physically stalked, by a mysterious onanistic pervert with eyes for her and a pair of binoculars... And then there's the paunchy NYC cop (Jan Murray) determined to protect her, who spews out every imaginable sexual perversion he's ever investigated with even the slightest provocation -- and there's
always plenty of provocation on hand: his late wife was once raped and slashed to death, her body dumped in a derelict building's stairwell; hence, his fixation. And his world-weary 10-year-old daughter hears it all. Repeatedly.
Young girls damaged in childhood, the shared carnal horror of staircases, etc...
Is this low-budget B-movie super-sleazy in itself? Or is it just an offbeat cinematic portrait of
people, places and situations that are super-sleazy? Somehow it hardly matters.
And Sal Mineo's seedy attractiveness just serves to make the viewer feel a wee bit like an accomplice.
Too bad they killed him. He was too swarthy and puckishly erotic to die. And yet it happened. On screen and off.
The Blu-ray came out in 2018, but it was an open-matte print in which the original widescreen release contained less visual data (the heads and feet are cut off) and this is from where the Blu-ray is derived. Unfortunately, the full-screen 1x1.33 version isn't used (luckily, I have a VHS copy -- the same as the version as posted above). And the Blu-ray is a smidgeon washed-out -- as they always are; a travesty given how starkly creepy the camerawork.
