Who Killed Teddy Bear

There is a 94 minute cut out there someplace....

Yet this is a remarkable film, and much better than I'd anticipated (I'd never seen it before until recently). Shot in the winter of 1964/65, it's 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 reminds those of us old enough to remember of how the cities, from the mid-'60s to the '70s, were beginning to fall apart in the wake of JFK's death and the rise of the incomprehensible Vietnam war (where all our tax dollars were going) -- when peep shows and adult "book stores", with their wares on 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 most industry films of the time, and serves to remind us 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.

Good acting, taut direction, and a lot of layers going on at one time...

I couldn't believe how this unrecognized unheralded film of the mid 1960s captured the sleaziness & the downfall of NYC during that time The photography is amazing.. the score capturers the early disco era... Sal Mineo is unbelievably sensuous, erotic, neurotic, as is Elaine Stritch who plays the Lesbian, Marian wonderful performances.. Juliet Prowse is good in this role..Plot is a bit confusing.. and why did they cast Jan Murray (great TV comic game show host of that era) in this role? Ill never know.... But as I stated before, this film captures the sleazy, unclean, dark, cold snowy sado masochistic, days of NYC in the mid 1960s when that city was on the decline.. Broadway might have been booming, Babs was on B'WAY live in Funny Girl, The Merm was still around. ETC .but the side streets, the crime, the sex shops were running abound..this film captures it all..worth seeing and or buying if it becomes .. available, Bravo ,Sal Mineo. Elaine Stritch, and the director...

When you think of movies about New York from this period in time, what comes to mind to me as a foreigner is a woodwind instrument blowing in the background while Jack Lemmon (or a lookalike) in a shiny suit neurotically babbles away something insignificant. Who killed Teddy Bear comes along and sticks its fingers up at the Hollywood system and is a break thru movie in every sense. This flawed, creaky, creepy and cranky movie is a delight. Not forgetting that you are led into the wonderful atmosphere by the wailing and unforgettable theme tune, which sounds like an old 45rpm record where the center hole has not been cut quite right.

IMHO due to Hollywood, American Independent film makers were just not taken seriously enough at this time, because of this, films like this have been unfairly over looked as great examples of low budget, gorilla technique( getting the shot before the police arrives etc). Taxi Driver was classic, but you know it was meticulously planned, every location permission was got and sums agreed, shots were retaken until they got it right. Well Who Killed Teddy Bear is wild and untamed and surely a minor classic?

Every now and again, a movie washes up on the fringes of the industry that's unlike anything else of its time – or any time. Who Killed Teddy Bear (no question mark) certainly qualifies; rarely discussed or even mentioned, it's not quite forgotten, either – it's hard to forget.

By 1965, the barriers were starting to be breached in what could be shown, or even implied, on the screen (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf dates from that year). But Who Killed Teddy Bear rubs, brusquely and suggestively, against just about every taboo obtaining then or now. It's a New York story, but of the grotty 1960s, when Manhattan led the nation as an example of how American cities were surrendering to crime and vice and ugliness at the core.

Spinning platters in a seedy discotheque, Juliet Prowse starts getting obscene phone calls then finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment. Police detective Jan Murray takes the case, which holds an obsessive interest for him. Four years earlier his wife had been raped and murdered; now the world of perversion and fetishism has become his life, both professionally and privately (despite a young daughter, who listens to him listening to his lurid tapes from her bedroom). Prowse becomes so shaken by the stalking that she can't quite trust him, or for that matter her tough-as-nails boss Elaine Stritch, who, invited home to serve as protection, makes a pass at her. Shown the door, Stritch, in a slip and fur coat, wanders the dark streets and back alleys, where....

Top billing goes to Sal Mineo, 10 years after his debut as Plato in Rebel Without A Cause, as a waiter in the club. Back home he has a child-like grown sister, whom he locks in the closet when he's making the rounds of the porn shops and peep shows near Times Square. Though his character isn't gay, he's served up like prime, pre-Stonewall beefcake, halfway between raw and blue; towards the end, when Prowse teaches him to dance, he erupts like a go-go boy.

The movie bears all the marks of a starvation budget, but for once the saturated photography and jumpy cutting seem just right. The odd but savvy cast – even the young Daniel J. `Travanty' makes his debut as a deaf-mute bouncer – brings from Broadway and east-coast television a rough edge that's far from Hollywood's buffed and smooth product. But it's the vision of the TV-reared director, Joseph Cates, and writers Arnold Drake and Leon Tokatyan that makes Who Killed Teddy Bear so hard to shake. Neither a tidy thriller nor a nuanced character study, it nonetheless has a trump card to play: It's the real McCoy,a genuine creepshow.

"Who Killed Teddy Bear" is irresistible trash, an utterly sleazy film that wallows in B-movie murk without apology. The performances are fine (with the camera leering at the often half-dressed Mineo and Prowse), the script is the stuff of now-extinct 42nd Street grindhouses, and the cinematography seems right out of an early '60s voyeuristic fantasy. This one is guaranteed to touch a salacious chord in anyone with the nerve to sit through.