Elizabeth Taylor wears the role of Zee Blakeley, a Machiavellian temptress, who is married to the wealthy yet miserly, miserable, and misogynistic architect Robert, played deftly by Michael Caine who partakes every bit in the nasty psycho-sexual game playing their afflicted marriage has manifested over the years.
Life and love are cutthroat in this film, and Taylor’s portrayal of Zee is unnerving and difficult to watch at times, as she fluctuates between venomous seductress and wounded little girl. York as always is like a fawn from the eldritch woods with those dreamy eyes. But talk about eyes, no one has a pair that arrests you quite like Elizabeth Taylor.
Elizabeth Taylor as the beautiful, tumultuous Zee Blakeley…
Once Robert decides to play house with Stella and leave Zee to wallow in her jealous vitriol, Zee goes on an orchestrated rampage to try and destroy their burgeoning romance, uncovering the shell of sweet Stella exposing that she has some secrets of her own. Written by Edna O’Brien, and directed by Brian G. Hutton who also directed Taylor in the thriller, Night Watch 1973, another equally disturbing film about the deep-rooted ugliness and danger of an ill-fated marriage.
“The little black book that became a national bestseller.”
Based on the novel by Lois Gould, with a screenplay by Elaine May using her pen name Esther Dale, and an uncredited Joan Didion (A Star is Born 1976, Panic In Needle Park 1971) Directed by the omnipotent Otto Preminger.
The Great Otto Preminger
Dyan Cannon is Julie Messinger a New York housewife who finds out that her husband magazine editor Richard (Laurence LuckinbillBoys In the Band 1970) has been cheating on her because he ‘doesn’t like her feet.’ She stumbles onto his little black book with the names of several ‘women.’
Nina Foch, plays Julie’s mother an annihilating, narcissistic harpy who criticizes her about everything.
When Richard winds up in a coma from complications stemming from a simple mole removal, Julie’s good friends gather around her for support. Including an impromptu cocktail gathering in the blood donor ward of the hospital…
It’s a biting, black comedic sexual romp through the self-explorative 70s, with a fabulous cast of characters.
Co-starring the wonderful James Coco as Dr. Timothy Spector, Jennifer O’Neill, as Miranda, Ken Howard as photographer Cal Whiting, Louise Lasser, Burgess Meredith, Sam Levene, William Redfield, James Beard, Rita Gam, Lawrence Tierney, and Doris Roberts. And an uncredited Salome Jens as a Blood Donor at the hospital and Joseph Papp and his Shakespeare Theatre.
Henry Jones as the slimy, snoopy and salacious Leroy in Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed 1956
Agnes Moorehead as Charlotte’s fierce protector Velma in Aldrich’s Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964
Jack Warden as Judge Francis Rayford in Norman Jewison’s… And Justice for All (1979)
Maidie Norman as the righteously concerned, Elvira Stitt in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Miriam Hopkins as Mrs. Lily Mortar in Lillian Hellman’s in The Children’s Hour 1961 directed by William WylerWilliam Wyler and Miriam Hopkins on the set of The Children’s Hour (1961)Mildred Dunnock as Aunt Rose Comfort in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956) with the screenplay by Tennessee Williams
Michael Pate as Detective Chris Gillespie in The Killer is Loose 1956
Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde 1967
Director Robert MulliganDirector Robert Mulligan’s masterpiece, based on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
Based on actor/author Thomas Tryon’sbest-selling novel, about the duplicity of innocence and evil in the incarnation of twin boys. Set in the Depression era during a hot and dusty summer of 1935. The atmosphere of rural quaintness is painted beautifully by cinematographer Robert Surtees.
Niles and Holland Perry (Chris and Martin Udvanoky) live with their extended family on a rural farm. The boys are looked after by their old-world loving Russian Grandmother Ada (the extraordinary icon Uda Hagen).
The sagely mysterious and angelic Ada has taught the boys a special and esoteric gift from the old country, she calls ‘the game.’
When several inextricably grotesque accidents beset the town, the clues start to point toward Niles’ wicked brother, Holland, who may be responsible for the gruesome deaths.
Also starring Diana Muldaur as the boy’s hapless mother, Alexandra.
Norma Connolly plays Aunt Vee, Victor French co-stars as the drunken swarthy handyman Angelini, Lou Frizzell is Uncle George, Portia Nelson as the uptight Mrs. Rowe, Jennie Sullivan as Torrie, and a young John Ritter as Rider.
Tryon’s story is a most hauntingly mysterious journey through the eyes of a child, a macabre and provocative psychological thriller from the 70s that has remained indelible in triggering my childhood fears, filled with wonder and the impenetrable world of the supernatural. I plan on doing a broader overview of this film as I am prone to being long-winded. But for now, The Film Score Freak would like to focus on the film’s hauntingly poignant score contributed by one of my favorite and in my opinion one of THE BEST composers of all time, Jerry Goldsmith.
Amelia van Zandt in Women’s Prison Ida Lupino’s first incarnation as a brutal prison matron.Chief Cell Block Matron Claire Tyson is portrayed by the steely Ida Lupino The Iron Maiden extraordinaire.
Now, it’s 1972 and IDA LUPINO reprises her role as brutal chief matron of her cell block, the new distinction is that of Claire Tyson. Tyson is a modern transformation from her original role as Amelia van Zandt in Women’s Prison 1955.She is as wicked as her last incarnation as cruel prison Matron, possessing that reptilian stare that could smack down the orneriest of Glory Stompers, Cycle Savage, Devil’s Angel, or Mini Skirt Mobber, on a rampage, with just one look from those cold-blooded eyes.
Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski(Attack of The Giant Leeches 1959), produced by Edward K Milkiand, and written by Rita Lakin (Peyton Place, Mod Squad) With a collection of 7os actresses to fill up the septic green environs of the prison system with their archetypal guises, The sage, and kindly old timer, the tough loner black female outsider, a woman, but a ‘black woman’ doing time for her old man, in the pecking order there’s also the disturbed sylph who wanders aimlessly until provoked by any random act, and of course, let us not forget the essential queen bee who has a direct pipeline to the savage Claire Tyson. New in the mix is the bewildered new fish who has to learn the ropes fast if she’s to survive, and the renegade newcomer undercover, who dares to challenge the system’s status quo.
Parole officer Sandra Parker/ Sally Porter played by the unsung wonderful Lois Nettleton
This ABC Movie of the Week entry stars the great Lois Nettleton as Sandra Parker an employee of the parole department who decides to go undercover as Sally Porter, so she can infiltrate Tyson’s den of maltreatment and sadistic foreplay that she wages over and engenders in the inmates of her cell block. After witnessing the result of a brutal beating death of one of Sandra’s parolees a returning inmate at the prison, Sandra plants herself undercover to try and unearth the prison brutality and bring it to light. She wants Claire Tyson prosecuted for the death of Ginger Stratton.
Edwina Williams with little Rose and Tennessee.Catherine Holly:“Cut the truth out of my brain… is that what you want Aunt Vi ? Well you can’t. Not even God can change the truth that we were nothing but a pair of-“ Mrs. Venable:“Doctor! “ Catherine Holly: “It’s the truth! “ Mrs. Venable: “See how she destroys us with her tongue for a hatchet? You’ve got to cut this hideous story out of her brain. “ Catherine Holly:“How much are you willing to pay for that, Aunt Vi?”
“She’s right about that, I failed him, I wasn’t able to keep the web from breaking, I saw it breaking, but I couldn’t save it or repair it.”“There, now the truth is coming out, now maybe she’ll admit what really happened.” “How she killed him, how she murdered him at… ask her!!”“Catherine, what did really happen?”
Mervyn LeRoy’sbold psychological thriller adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s play.
Nancy Kelly confronts her crispy clean dress wearin’ skipping little psychopathic child Rhoda (Patty McCormack) in a scene where both mother and child devolve into the realm of ‘hysterical’ over the truth behind poor Claude Daigle’s brutal death, prompted by his winning the penmanship medal.
“I have the prettiest mother in the world”
I was going to use Eileen Heckert’scompelling performance as the besotted mournful Hortense Daigle, but I couldn’t resist this climactic scene instead…
What’ll you give me for a basket of kisses?, I’ll give you a basket of hugs -MonsterGirl
“Most people’s lives what are they but trails of debris, each day, more debris… more debris, all long trails of debris. With nothing to clean it all up. Finally death.”
To me, no other playwright manifests more compelling characters, turns a phrase, or extracts a poignant moment quite like Tennessee Williams. I want to continue discussing Suddenly, Last Summer, however sensationalist the films climax chooses to eradicate any trace of the central albeit unseen character’s transgression of homosexuality, Tennessee Williams the tormented, sensitive genius who’s homosexuality informed much of his work, also wrote short stories that explore isolation and disconnection within the family dynamic and fringe collections of misfits and loners, somewhat comparative to the characterizations by Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Aldrich.
Tennessee Williams, Paris, 1959 photo by Gisèle Freund.
In a 1948 essay in The New York Times, Williams wrote about the questions that people would ask him about his plays and his characters: “Why do you always write about frustrated women?”
“To say that floored me is to put it mildly, because I would say that frustrated is almost exactly what the women I write about are not. What was frustrated about Amanda Wingfield? Circumstances, yes! But spirit? See Helen Hayes in London’s Glass Menagerie if you still think Amanda was a frustrated spirit! No, there is nothing interesting about frustration, per se. I could not write a line about it for the simple reason that I can’t write a line about anything that bores me. Was Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire frustrated? About as frustrated as a beast of the jungle! And Alma Winemiller? (Summer and Smoke) What is frustrated about loving with such white hot intensity that it alters the whole direction of your life, and removes you from the parlor of the Episcopal rectory to a secret room above Moon Lake Casino?“
Geraldine Page as Alexandra Del Lago and Paul Newman as Chance Wayne in Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth 1962
I think it’s such a seminal piece of work by Williams because it places the conversation in the mainstream of a very culturally conservative 1957. So to continue with my thoughts and impressions about this nuanced melodrama that at times behaves like Grande Guignol.
Party grotesque because of its dealings with American psychiatry and asylums, Williams’ struggle to embrace his homosexuality while entering into psychoanalysis with the famous Dr.Lawrence Kubie whose work included many closeted writers of that time period, it’s been said that it was playwright William Inge who actually made the introductions to Kubie who had also held a position as a military psychologist in the 1940s working to keep homosexuals out of the service.
Tennessee Williams scaring the pigeons in Jackson Square, New Orleans – thank god it’s not a flock of vicious devouring black birds going for the soft underbelly!
It was during the arduous therapy sessions that Kubie urged Williams to not only give up his sexual proclivities but to abandon his writing as well. Williams ignored the advice of his analyst and remained with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo. In fact, as I stated in Part I, he actually finished Suddenly, Last Summer at the end of their work together. It was ultimately his writing that served as catharsis, rather than any prescribed deprivation by Kubie. The one positive by-product of their discussions about William’s dysfunctional family life helped spark a re-energized creative force that proved prolific.
Williams does seem to charge his story with a negative view of American psychiatry. Using the threat of a lobotomy as a weapon is pivotal to the narrative. It is not only William’s condemnation of neurosurgery as a tool of eradicating the identity of the self, his sister Rose and Catherine Holly, but it goes to the argument that the mental health establishment was attacking homosexuality by wiping out the ‘desire’, his choice to live his life the way he wanted to, and was too comfortably supported by the norms of a society that would rather have ‘homosexuals’ just disappear, ‘the cure’ essentially being the same as wiping out the ‘disease’ from the soul. Violet insists that Sebastian was “chaste.” In death, he could remain so.
The incarnation of Sebastian Venable- A white silk suit with no face
Suddenly, Last Summer’s unseen protagonist, Sebastian, is literally and figuratively absent. He has died before the film begins. There is something to the narrative that makes him somewhat of a blank page, not unlike or symbolically like the empty pages of his yearly poetry notebook that Mother Violet carries around with her like the bible. She assaults Catherine with it, furiously, as a testimony to his inability to write his last Poem of Summer without his mother there to support his creative force. The very books of poetry themselves are ambiguous.
In this story, Sebastian’s persona, his physical body haunts the narrative, veiled, disambiguate, and elusive. As Violet describes him to Dr. Cukrowicz it is as if she is discussing a ‘work of art’, almost unreal, inhuman, superlative, and divine.
Sebastian Venable is not present as a stable or unifying entity, he merely represents the fragmented consequence of his desires, therefore you cannot assign any definitive boundaries around his identity. The one constant that is pervasive is that he is an absolute symbol of ‘desire’. He and it are one and the same.-though veiled in secrecy and only revealed at the end. The only evidence or declaration of his existence is his white silk suit, cultured accouterments, and objets d’art cluttering his Atelier.
Since Williams ceased working with Kubie, and he continued to self-identify as a queer man, it has to conflict with Williams’ detractors who claim that Suddenly, Last Summer was a condemnation of his own homosexuality. The film creates too much of a negative and sinister environment surrounding Lions View, demonizing lobotomies and their inherent medieval barbarism, and rallying against the self-denial of Violet Venable. All factors explore how the world imposes it’s will on an individual’s personal freedom.
THE SELF-LOATHING HOMOSEXUAL AND WILLIAM’S STORY OF THE VENABLES.
THE TRUE MONSTERS OF SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER. The Hollies, Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader: head of Lions View Sanitarium who seeks funding for barbaric surgeries, the Devouring Mother Violet Venable, the Natural World, the Lady Venus Fly Trap, and God himself.
Norman Bates’s mom. An archetypal devouring mother, based on a historical serial killer from Wisconsin, Ed Gein’s domineering yet stuffed mother.
So this leads to another lurking question about the play, the story, and the film’s adaptation. Is Suddenly, Last Summerthe ultimate example of The Self Loathing Queer? While Sebastian Venable is a character who might be considered a predator, a parasite, a procure, or a user, who ‘baits’ the objects of his desire with the women in his life. The truth is, he is not the only focal point of the story; he is the impetus, the catalyst, with which the story sparks.
“Blondes were next on the menu,” Catherine explains to Dr Cukrowicz, “He was fed up with the dark ones and was famished for blondes….that’s how he talked about people, as if they were – items on a menu. – ‘That one’s delicious looking, that one is appetizing’…”
He is also a figure manifested and manufactured by a devouring mother, incestuous and domineering, who taught her son well how to use his social capital to manipulate, exploit, and ultimately consume. Even to the exclusion of her deceased husband, whom she abandoned while he was dying, just so she could be with her son when he had considered renouncing all his worldly possessions and becoming a Tibetan Monk. We see through a spectrum of maternal monologues the tenuous line between motherly love and oedipal internment. A devouring mother with a goddess complex who intones the ritualistic invocation of his name – “My son, Sebastian” – throughout the film, setting forth a solid declaration of ownership to her son as well as giving him a place in the framework of her life’s meaning.
“Sebastian always said, ‘Mother when you descend it’s like the Goddess from the Machine’… it seems that the Emperor of Byzantium – when he received people in audience – had a throne which, during the conversation, would rise mysteriously into the air to the consternation of his visitors. But as we are living in a democracy, I reverse the procedure. I don’t rise, I come down.”
In fact, William’s portrayal of mostly all the heterosexual characters in the story radiates a nature that can be qualified as reprehensible, greedy, vicious, and downright morbid. Violet Venable is as much or more a grotesque character than Sebastian’s homosexuality; she is the striking monster of the story, if you will.
Catherine Holly is literally raped surrounded by the wild Oaks, the image evoked as if it were a rite performed by evil spirits emanating from the ancient Oaks themselves, although she was violated by a married man of low stature in the community, no less. Catherine’s violation itself is a monstrous aspect of the story and might harken back to the accusation of rape that William’s sister Rose made toward her own father, the reason Edwina wanted her daughter quieted.
Catherine’s own mother and brother easily tune out the reality of the invasive and irreversible brain damage that drilling into her skull would cause, just so they can grab their piece of the Venable fortune. The Hollies are all too eager and willing to sign commitment papers from the malevolent Aunt Violet, not only to confine her to Lion’s View but also to subject her to a lobotomy in order to get their hands on Sebastian’s inheritance. Monstrous.
Directed by Barry Shear, (Wild in the Streets 1968,Across 110th Street 1972) written by Joel Oliansky, Dennis Murphy and Mann Rubin. It stars Robert F. Lyons  as the infamous true life serial killer (Charles Schmid) Skipper Todd. The film hosts an incredible cast of actors, Richard Thomas, Belinda Montgomery, Sherry Miles, Joyce Ames, Holly Near, James Broderick, Gloria Grahame, Fay Spain, Edward Asner, Barbara Bel Geddes, Michael Conrad and Meg Foster.
Based on the real life character of 60s thrill killer, Charles Schmid also dubbed the Pied Piper of Tucson who was found guilty of murder in 1966 and sentenced to death, but wound up getting 50 years to life, when the state of Arizona temporarily abolished the death penalty in 1971. Eventually Schmid himself was murdered in prison.
Lyons worldly ruthlessly inhospitable persona channels a charismatic young philosophical misanthrope who embodies the 60s attitude of the anti establishment credo, taking it to a violent level of psychotic abandon. Todd becomes an anti- hero to the local youth who worship him, in particular the very young women he easily beds, who treat him like a deity. He exhibits the qualities of a Svengali as he manipulates both male and female devotees. Todd is cool and urbane, charming his way into the lives of several high school teenagers in a small California town. There is a jaundiced atmosphere to this community, as the complacency and rumbling undercurrent of disturbed restlessness paint a very uneasy portrait of American life off kilter.
When the film opens, Todd has killed a 16 year old girl named Sue Ellen Mack, having recruited two other teenagers to help cover up the crime by burying the body in the vast and ceaseless desert, the perfect place to lose a body. One teen is an overweight girl Norma (Holly Near) who hangs on Skipper like a minion, clinging to him like a swooning groupie and the other a scraggy termite called Andy.
Shear directs each scene with a heartless realism. The three while leaving the desert just having buried Sue Ellen, pick up Billy Roy ( Richard Thomas) who is hitchhiking, just having been released from reform school. There is the sensibility to the film that exposes a mob mentality. This heightened sense of a younger fringe craving to dwell aimlessly outside of society, the phrase used often to signify an opposition to society or being a ‘citizen’ is prevalent in sub genre films, such as the biker genre. In this environment it is feasible that an awakening adolescence would be mesmerized by an outlier, a bad boy, and therefore aide in concealing the crime. It’s conceivable that a flock of youths could be present at the scene of a murder, not only do nothing to stop it, and in fact, help in it’s surreptitious design to cover it up, and allude the police. The unrepentant complicity to the crimes bares a similarity to the working dynamic of the 1986 film The River’s Edge
Robert Thom wrote Angel Angel Down We Go. He envisions the anti hero as a guitar strumming Svengali-Here Robert F.Lyons is the songwriting/psychopath Skipper ToddJordan Christopher portrays the similarly brutal misanthropic sociopath Bogart Peter Stuyvesant in Robert Thom’s Angel Angel Down We Go 1969. Both peddlers of sex and death, wielding guitars as their weapon of seduction.
Skipper Todd manipulates Richard Thomas‘ character Billy like a master puppeteer, dangling the potential for romance with his former classmate Amata. Billy has been obsessed with Amata since High School. Unfortunately Amata only has eyes for Skipper, and poor naive Billy is so easily influenced and blinded by his attraction to this girl that he doesn’t see how Todd is using him as yet another pawn in his coterie.
Belinda Montgomery plays Roberta a pretty 16 year old girl from an affluent family, who is less pliant and impressionable at first. It is her rebellious attitude and her blatant defiance toward Skipper’s malevolent magnetism, which charge his advances which become more potent, as he becomes drawn to her the more she resists.
She’s the one female who appears immune at first to Skipper’s charms. Although she restrains from falling into the same infatuated vapidness like the other girls, ultimately after Skipper breaks into her house one night, beats and rapes her, she finally breaks down and succumbs to his control and decries that she loves him. The manifest use of violence against women as sexual stimulation, and the tenet of annihilating women’s power through control, not love is another inherent trope of the story. Skipper mother as a role model only teaches him to take, to make money, and skews the boundaries of love for him by bestowing upon him an odd, underlying sexualized affection.
We are clued into Skipper Todd’s evolution as a misogynist, as an Oedipal nightmare, who fancies himself an elitist an Ãœbermensch, Friedrich Nietzsche’s superman who poses as anti-hero, bemoaning the state of society and it’s lemmings who conform, yet ironically depending on the very thing he condemns in order to suck the life force out of it. This he needs for his egoist dogma to be able to thrive, feeding off the susceptible, and violating the vulnerable, just as Mrs. Todd picks the bones clean of the elderly men she is charged to take care of.
Though living as an outsider, he needs followers to facilitate his crimes. To help him bury the bodies. He espouses that people have ‘stale dreams’ and that society is riddled with lying and selfishness. In this he is a true Sociopath, as he is the most selfish phony of them all. As self deluded as was Charles Manson who consider himself to be a songwriter and profit, Todd also writes songs on his guitar, recording himself singing glorifying lyrics about his strangulations of the girls he kills. A minstrel madman, strumming and fucking his way through Tucson.
As I’ve said earlier, Todd’s followers include a young Richard Thomas as Billy Roy a guileless yet loyal young man, who unwittingly enables Todd to continue his blood lust and ravaging of young girls. Billy remains naive until the end, when he finally sees the true evil nature of his friend Skipper Todd, and ultimately turns on him.
Shear’s The Todd Killings conveys the feeling of hopelessness and hollow confinement which pervade much of the film and the collective scenes of impulsive brutality. Whether or not the story is historically accurate to the events that led up to Scmid’s capture is unclear, regardless the narrative is a somber, chilling mood piece about society and the attractive monsters it sometimes breeds.
The film creates an eerie, often brutally unsettling tone that unleashes a sense that there is no way out of conformity. You either live an existence of an ugly sterile complacency or wind up being sacrificed on the altar of individual freedom.
The use of the desert as a playground/killing field for Todd and his followers creates an alienating environment. Todd’s compulsion sets the tone for a fraying wire of isolation, in which a barren land of free love and reckless idolatry ultimately lead Todd and his followers to devolve by the film’s tragic end.
At the root of Todd’s twisted nature lies that hint of Oedipal fixation, as his relationship with his mother portrayed by Barbara Bel Geddes bares the reflections of an incestuous partnership. Todd’s conflation of sex and violence, his natural adeptness at manipulation and psycho-sexual violation ultimately make him a serial killer who thrives on destroying that which he is fixated on. The film provides us with an insight into his hatred of women, American motherhood, and the society that engenders both to be simple offerings for the slaughter.
Bel Geddes as Mother Todd –“I could use a little of your help around here you know” Skipper-“robbing the cadavers?”Mrs. Todd’s unbounded greed in one single minute-“now that juice comes to forty cents a quart young man so drink up “Mrs Todd-“the lord put me on this earth, just to support you”"¦. Skipper “If I do not get my allowance in four seconds flat I’ll (he whispers in her ear, then she smiles ) Mrs Todd- “uh hum, I think you’re capable of that.”Mother giving her little angel his milk money for the week
Mrs. Todd’s, Skipper’s money hungry mother owns a nursing home for elderly men running it like a military complex, all of who’s family members never visit. She manages this ‘institution’ like a waiting room for decaying livestock, providing minimal comforts, she’s more militant in her administrations than compassionate as a care giver. For her this is nothing but a business arrangement that supports her simple lifestyle. She shows no emotional connection to the elderly men in her care, nor for her son, who visits periodically, skulking around for hand outs. No emotional maternal outpouring, yet a queer romantic sort of banter.
Skipper tells her that he would ‘rather die than make my living that way.’ She tells him that he is in fact ‘living off them…We all make our lives that way, that’s what life is all about.”
Skipper treats her more like one of the many girlfriends he uses in order to cop some ready spending money. Mrs Todd spouts off about life like an unemotional puritanical hen, urging him to find employment or at least help her out there at the home, which he violently rejects.
The entire atmosphere of the old age home and the town, is disparaging of the human condition and gives us a little insight into Skipper Todd’s lack of empathy, largely pronounced by the contrasting verve of the youth culture shown asphyxiating by the small -town’s conservatism.
Todd’s mother is a clinically acidic detached, and cold-blooded ‘mother figure’ and a reminder that though Skipper seems repulsed by the way the old men have been abandoned by their families, it is still their money that he virtually parasites off of when he comes calling for a hand out from his confederate mother.
Without giving away the climax of the film, I will say that there is a particular scene towards the end that is so savage, framed with such a starkly simple realism, that it is utterly jarring.
The Todd Killings creates a story telling that fuses together our very real fears of the social boogeyman who lurk amidst all us ‘normal’ seeming folk, and although filmed in the 70s, it makes a timeless leap into a contemporary arena without loosing any of its thrust. It tells the story of a monster like Charles Schmid, without feeling outdated or hazy around the edges due to lack of a more graphic or gore drenched narrative.
The film also doesn’t rely on police procedural to fill us in on the details, it is told partly from the perspective of Todd’s own dystopian psyche and partly from the victims themselves. In particular Montgomery’s portrayal of Roberta which is nuanced, strikingly dramatic and ultimately heart wrenching.
The film also stars one of my favorite unsung actresses Gloria Grahame as Billy Roy’s mother. It also co-stars the wonderful Edward Asner, Fay Spain, James Broderick, Michael Conrad as Detective Shaw, and good old Holly Near as Norma ( just can’t forget her in Angel, Angel Down We Go 1969)as one of Skippers nubile sycophants.
Holly Near as Norma
“Teenage girls looking for the body of Alleen Rowe, in connection with murderer Charles Schmid.” Photo from LIFE magazine., via Sweetheart of the Rodeo’s blog post: Hell among the yearlings
On March 10, 1975, Schmid was stabbed 47 times by two fellow prisoners, he died almost a month later.
Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson killer of teenage girls-Charles Schmid
Skipper Todd: I try not to. But sometimes there’s a guy who’s really sweet… it’s so easy. We’re both men… we both know where it’s at. Personally, you’re not giving anything away.
Skipper Todd: I can sleep with them once because it degrades them. It makes them dirty. The worst thing about it is… you meet a chick who isn’t… bad. You can’t screw her because you don’t want to make her “dirty.”
Belinda J Montgomery 70s staple television actress and film star. Giving a brilliantly nuanced performance as Roberta, the object of Skippers affection/annihilation desire.
Roberta: You actually came to see me without any of your baby-pimps? Wow. How do I rate that honor?
Skipper Todd: I just loved your performance at the pool.
Roberta: So, you’re the one who rides the dune buggy and “services” the little girls huh?
Skipper Todd: Oh yes… and speaking of little girls, how old are you?
Doreen Lang designated ‘the Hysterical Mother in the diner’ on IMDb. From Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) A cautionary tale based on friend Daphne Du Maurier’s book about nature gone wild. With the screenplay penned by Evan Hunter.
Watch the hysterical woman in the diner accuse Tippi Hedren’s character Melanie Daniels of practically being the Whore of Babylon, having brought upon this flying wrath from the sky, as all the winged mayhem began the moment she stepped onto the dock of the pristine and pious sleeping fishing village of Bodega Bay.
Bette Davis plays Alicia Hull a librarian who is labeled a Communist by local politicians when she refuses to remove a controversial book from the library’s shelves. Directed by Daniel Taradash who wrote the screenplay for From Here To Eternity 1953, Picnic 1955, Don’t Bother To Knock 1952Â and Bell, Book and Candle 1958. Also starring Brian Keith and Kim Hunter.
