''Pretty Poison'' is a 1968
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
black comedy
Black comedy, also known as dark comedy, morbid humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discus ...
film
directed by
Noel Black
Noel Black (June 30, 1937 – July 5, 2014) was an American film and television director, screenwriter, and producer.
Black was born in Chicago, Illinois. He won awards at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival for an 18-minute short subject filmed in ...
, starring
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins (April 4, 1932 – September 12, 1992) was an American actor, director, and singer. Perkins is best remembered for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller '' Psycho'', which made him an influential ...
and
Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld (born Susan Ker Weld; August 27, 1943) is an American actress and model. She began acting as a child and progressed to mature roles in the late 1950s. She won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960. Over t ...
, about an ex-convict and high school cheerleader who commit a series of crimes. The film was based on the novel ''She Let Him Continue'' by
Stephen Geller. It has become a
cult film
A cult film or cult movie, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a cult following. Cult films are known for their dedicated, passionate fanbase which forms an elaborate subculture, members of which engage ...
.
Plot
Dennis Pitt is a disturbed young man on
parole
Parole (also known as provisional release or supervised release) is a form of early release of a prison inmate where the prisoner agrees to abide by certain behavioral conditions, including checking-in with their designated parole officers, or ...
from a
mental institution
Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental health hospitals, behavioral health hospitals, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, dissociative ...
who becomes attracted to teenager Sue Ann Stepenek. He tells her that he is a
secret agent
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...
, and takes her along on a series of "missions". Things, however, turn out disastrously when Dennis takes Sue Ann along to sabotage a factory on imaginary orders from the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...
. When the couple encounters the factory's night watchman, Sue Ann knocks him unconscious and then drowns him. While Dennis is wracked with guilt over both what he has done and what he has allowed to happen, Sue Ann is excited by the "adventure" and entreats Dennis to run away with her to Mexico. First, however, they have to get rid of her disapproving mother. The couple return to Sue Ann's home for her clothes and are interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Stepanek. Sue Ann realizes that Dennis is incapable of actually killing a person, so she shoots her mother and orders Dennis to dispose of the body. But instead, he calls the police.
Dennis knows that the police will take Sue Ann's word over his, so he makes no effort to defend himself in court and takes the blame for their crimes. Sue Ann, meanwhile, betrays him without a second thought, sending him to
prison for life. Dennis is more than happy to be locked up, as it keeps him away from Sue Ann, of whom he is now quite frightened. While Dennis refuses to tell his skeptical parole officer Azenauer the truth, he asks him to "see what Sue Ann is up to" in hopes she will be exposed for what she really is. The film ends with Sue Ann meeting a young man and lamenting to him that the people who took her in after her mother's death won't let her stay out late; it is implied that she will use and destroy him just as she did Dennis. But Dennis's parole officer is indeed watching as she departs with her latest victim.
Cast
*
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins (April 4, 1932 – September 12, 1992) was an American actor, director, and singer. Perkins is best remembered for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller '' Psycho'', which made him an influential ...
as Dennis Pitt
*
Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld (born Susan Ker Weld; August 27, 1943) is an American actress and model. She began acting as a child and progressed to mature roles in the late 1950s. She won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960. Over t ...
as Sue Ann Stepanek
*
Beverly Garland
Beverly Lucy Garland (née Fessenden; October 17, 1926 – December 5, 2008) was an American actress. Her work in feature films primarily consisted of small parts in a few major productions or leads in low-budget action or science-fiction movie ...
as Mrs. Stepanek
*
John Randolph as Morton Azenauer
*
Dick O'Neill
Richard Francis O'Neill (August 29, 1928 – November 17, 1998) was an American stage, film and television character actor best known for playing Irish cops, fathers, judges and army generals. He began his acting career as an original company ...
as Bud Munsch
*
Clarice Blackburn
Clarice Blackburn (February 26, 1921 – August 5, 1995) was an American actress best-known for playing three characters on the cult series ''Dark Shadows''.
Early years
Blackburn was born in San Francisco, California, but because her f ...
as Mrs. Bronson
*
Joseph Bova
Joseph Bova (May 25, 1924 – March 12, 2006) was an American actor. He worked in early television, having a children's show on WABC-TV in New York, and played Prince Dauntless in the Broadway musical ''Once Upon a Mattress'', starring Carol ...
as Pete
*
Ken Kercheval
Kenneth Marine Kercheval (July 15, 1935 – April 21, 2019) was an American actor, best known for his role as Cliff Barnes on the television series ''Dallas'' and its 2012 revival.
Early life
Kercheval was born on July 15, 1935, in Wolcottville ...
as Harry Jackson
*
Don Fellows
Don Fellows (December 2, 1922 – October 21, 2007) was an American actor known for his roles in British theater and television.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Fellows served in the United States Merchant Marine ...
as Detective
Production
Development
The novel ''She Let Him Continue'' was published in 1966. The ''Los Angeles Times'' called it "an interesting if not overly impressive debut."
The novel was optioned for the movies.
Lawrence Turman
Lawrence Turman (born November 28, 1926) is an American former film producer.
Early life
Turman was born to a Jewish family.
Career
Turman was nominated for an Academy Award for ''The Graduate'' (1967). He has also produced such films as '' Pr ...
agreed to act as executive producer for producer Marshall Backlar and director
Noel Black
Noel Black (June 30, 1937 – July 5, 2014) was an American film and television director, screenwriter, and producer.
Black was born in Chicago, Illinois. He won awards at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival for an 18-minute short subject filmed in ...
, who had just made the short ''Skaterdater'' together. ''Skaterdater'' had been made for $17,000 and sold to United Artists for $50,000, winning the
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or (; en, Golden Palm) is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the festival's organizing committee. Previously, from 1939 to 1954, the festival's highest prize was the Grand Prix du Fe ...
for Best Short Film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, and being nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film.
Turman described the novel as "a hip horror story about today's alienated youth." Black said it was about "a
Walter Mitty
Walter Jackson Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber's first short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in ''The New Yorker'' on March 18, 1939, and in book form in '' My World—and Welcome to It'' in 1942. Thurber ...
type who comes up against a
teenybopper
A teenybopper is an early teenage girl who follows adolescent trends in music, fashion, and culture. The term may have been coined by marketing professionals and psychologists, later becoming a subculture of its own. The term was introduced in ...
Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth is a leading character in William Shakespeare's tragedy '' Macbeth'' (). As the wife of the play's tragic hero, Macbeth (a Scottish nobleman), Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes quee ...
."
Turman had just made ''
The Flim Flam Man
''The Flim-Flam Man'' (titled ''One Born Every Minute'' in some countries) is a 1967 American comedy film directed by Irvin Kershner, featuring George C. Scott, Michael Sarrazin, and Sue Lyon, based on the 1965 novel ''The Ballad of the Flim-Flam ...
'' for
20th Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
and obtained finance from the same studio. Lorenzo Semple Jnr was hired to write the screenplay. Turman says Semple turned in a "magnificent script in six weeks."
Semple says "we couldn’t get any money from Fox, I think we wanted $17,000 to write the screenplay and they said no, they couldn't afford it. I said I'll write the script on spec and we'd split all monies from it, which is what I did. I wrote the script on spec."
Casting
Tuesday Weld signed to play the female lead with Anthony Perkins as costar. It was the first film Perkins made in Hollywood since ''Psycho''.
Black later recalled he cast Perkins after seeing him on stage in ''
The Star-Spangled Girl
''The Star-Spangled Girl'' is a comedy written by Neil Simon. The play is set in San Francisco, California, in the 1960s.
Plot overview
The story is a love triangle, mixed with politics. Roommates and radicals Andy Hobart and Norman Cornell a ...
''. "He had enormous charm and intelligence, the very qualities I wanted to come through in the role he would be playing", said the director. "I was looking for the young Tony of ''
Friendly Persuasion'' and ''
Fear Strikes Out
"Fear Strikes Out" is a 1957 American biographical sports drama film depicting the life and career of American baseball player Jimmy Piersall. It is based on Piersall's 1955 memoir ''Fear Strikes Out: The Jim Piersall Story'', co-written with Al ...
'', not ''
Psycho'', although commentators naturally made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in ''Pretty Poison''."
Semple said "It was very hard to cast. Tuesday was excellent for it but Tony was much
too obvious for it. We really tried to find somebody young to do it. We never could find a new, young actor the studio would go with. "
Shooting
The film was shot on location at
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Great Barrington is a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 7,172 at the 2020 census. Both a summer resort and home to Ski Butternut, ...
, with ''She Let Him Continue'' as its working title.
Filming was difficult, with problems between Weld and Black. Actor John Randolph recalled that, "Noel knew how to set up shots, but he knew nothing about acting. Tuesday Weld was neurotic as hell. She would break down and cry. She hated the director, and she permitted that hatred to color everything she did."
Semple later said " I don't think the director used a good deal of imagination on it. I remember the first day of rehearsal. Tuesday Weld was reading her lines and she changed one little thing. Noel wanted her to do the script exactly as it was written. It was very inflexibly done, exactly the way it was written. The best way is somewhere in-between."
In 1971 Weld would call the movie her least favourite:
The least creative experience I ever had. Constant hate, turmoil and dissonance. Not a day went by without a fight. Noel Black, the director, would come up to me before a scene and say, 'Think about Coca-Cola'. I finally said, 'Look, just give the directions to Tony Perkins and he'll interpret for me.
Black later reflected:
Tuesday and Tony got on professionally, though she probably resented how much more in tune he was with me than she was. He was the quintessential professional. Even though he had made 20 or so movies and this was my first, he listened to everything I had to tell him. What he brought was a personal sense of humanity and dignity, which gave the character a sympathetic quality.
Beverly Garland was cast as Weld's mother. "I loved the part", she said later. "I felt it was one of the best things I'd done ... I thought it was a great movie, well directed. Noel Black did a great job. But the studios got very upset with him because it took a long while to shoot. Studio people kept arriving and saying, 'You're taking too long' and they had him under a lot of pressure ... Noel had some wonderful ideas and some camera stuff that took time. He went to great pains with that movie and the studio got very upset with him. But I think the movie shows that he took the time."
Reception
Original release
Fox had difficulty securing a release for the film in New York so instead opened it in Los Angeles in September 1968. The ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' reviewer called it "a small, stunning, thoughtful exploration of degrees of madness and of sanity."
However the film flopped. When Fox did secure a New York release, they claimed they had trouble getting critics to attend a screening, and persuading the two stars to promote the movie.
Black later claimed, "their unwarrantable action was partly explained by it being the year
968
Year 968 ( CMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place Byzantine Empire
* Emperor Nikephoros II receives a Bulgarian embassy led by Prince Boris (th ...
of the double assassination of
Robert Kennedy
Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, a ...
and
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
, and a corrosive tale of insidious madness in which a teenage girl shoots her own mother, seemed, to timid studio chiefs, excessive."
The film opened in New York on October 23, to poor reviews from the daily papers. ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' claimed that "everything that was spare in the novel somehow becomes overblown" and that while Perkins "is quite good ... Tuesday Weld is numbingly dull as the girl."
Critical acclaim
It received excellent reviews from magazines and Sunday papers – notably
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions oft ...
in ''The New Yorker'' – but that was not enough to save the film commercially.
A return engagement in Los Angeles in December was not successful.
"One of the best films of 1968 remains a pleasant memory for the few of us lucky enough to see it", wrote
Rex Reed
Rex Taylor Reed (born October 2, 1938) is an American film critic, occasional actor, and television host. He writes the column "On the Town with Rex Reed" for ''The New York Observer''.
Early life
Reed was born on October 2, 1938, in Fort Wort ...
, who thought it was "an offbeat, original, totally irreverent examination of violence in America, refreshing in its subtlety and intelligent in its delivery."
Gene Siskel
Eugene Kal Siskel (January 26, 1946 – February 20, 1999) was an American film critic and journalist for the ''Chicago Tribune''. Along with colleague Roger Ebert, he hosted a series of movie review programs on television from 1975 until his d ...
of the ''Chicago Tribune'' named the film as one of the ten best of the year.
Lawrence Turman
Lawrence Turman (born November 28, 1926) is an American former film producer.
Early life
Turman was born to a Jewish family.
Career
Turman was nominated for an Academy Award for ''The Graduate'' (1967). He has also produced such films as '' Pr ...
later said "the critics, of all people, rescued ''Pretty Poison'' by continually writing about it. It's easy to second guess a studio and it doesn't help. What matters is that the film came off the map from being nothing and nowhere to finding its audience. It's a special film. I'm very proud of it, but like all films it didn't satisfy all my dreams. The direct cost was $1.3 million and I think we'll turn the corner on the television sale."
Semple said "The critical acclaim the film got, Pauline Kael was responsible.
Fox opened it without critics screenings, which they do with very bad pictures. They felt it was a total disaster. They opened it on 42nd Street on some semi-porn theater. Pauline and
Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern (born October 3, 1932) is an American writer and retired film critic. He wrote for ''Newsweek'' from 1965 to 1983, and then for ''The Wall Street Journal'' from 1995 to 2022. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005. Morgen ...
(movie critic for ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'') said. 'Let's go see this one. What movie is so terrible Fox won't let us see it?" Kael decided to beat the studio over the head with it by saying, "This great classic, this wonderful movie..." She seriously over-praised it. "
Box office
According to Fox records the film required $3,600,000 in rentals to break even and by December 11, 1970, had made $2,075,000 so made a loss to the studio.
"I don't care if critics like it; I hated it," said Weld. "I can't like or be objective about films I had a terrible time doing."
For Perkins, however, the film further type-cast the actor once again in roles portraying disturbed, unhinged protagonists, denying audiences the opportunity to see an actor of tremendous range and ability.
There was a 1996 television film remake with the same title and plot.
Awards and honors
* 1968
New York Film Critics Circle Award
The New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) is an American film critic organization founded in 1935 by Wanda Hale from the New York ''Daily News''. Its membership includes over 30 film critics from New York-based daily and weekly newspapers, magazi ...
, Best Screenplay –
Lorenzo Semple Jr.
Lorenzo Elliott Semple III (March 27, 1923March 28, 2014) was an American screenwriter and sometime playwright, best known for his work on the campy television series '' Batman'', who also received writing credit on the political/espionage fil ...
See also
*
List of American films of 1968
This is a list of American films released in 1968.
'' Oliver!'' won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Top-grossing films
# '' 2001: A Space Odyssey''
# '' Funny Girl''
# ''Planet of the Apes''
# '' Rosemary's Baby''
# ''The Odd Couple''
# ' ...
References
External links
*
*
*
Review at Dread Central.com
{{Noel Black
1968 films
1960s black comedy films
1960s crime thriller films
1960s psychological thriller films
20th Century Fox films
American black comedy films
American crime thriller films
Films based on American novels
Films directed by Noel Black
Films scored by Johnny Mandel
Matricide in fiction
Films with screenplays by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
American neo-noir films
1968 directorial debut films
1968 comedy films
1968 drama films
Films shot in Massachusetts
1960s English-language films
1960s American films