Who Killed Teddy Bear

"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.

Filmed entirely in real New York locations (much of it on the fly, by the look of it) and dripping with sordid Times Square atmosphere, this is a cheap, sensationalistic, slightly arty psycho-sex-thriller with a startling cast drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the Borscht Belt. Elaine Stritch is unforgettable as a lesbian in furs, and the camera drools over Mineo and Prowse in various degrees of undress amidst acres of risibly salacious dialogue. If all this weren't tempting enough, three original songs by Al Kasha and Bob Gaudio grace the very 60's soundtrack (and is that an unbilled Joanie Sommers singing the haunting title theme?) Director Cates is Phoebe's dad, and had done much classier stuff on TV before it fled west.

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...

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.

This film is truly a work of art of the highest magnitude and no, I am not kidding. Shot in glorious, high-contrast black-and-white, it reeks of exploitation from the note of the cheesy theme song all the way through the strobe-cut ending and every horn-blaring, high-heeling, hip-grinding moment in between. Sal Mineo plays a busboy obsessed with aspiring actress/club DJ Juliet Prowse (and Prowse is at her foxiest in this one, with her pencil skirts, kitten heels and cat eyes), coming off like a perverted puppy dog.

The obscene phone call bits--all heavy breathing, bulging tighty whiteys and sweat--will make you want to leave the theatre and take a shower. Or, if that isn't nasty enough for you, how about the scene with bulldyke Elaine Stritch fondling Prowse's fur (so to speak), or the retarded kid sister locked in the closet or the policeman obsessively playing audio tapes of various twisted criminal's confessions as his daughter listens wide-eyed from the other side of the door? Or how about the "twist lesson" that brings the film to it's climax (no pun intended)? Another asset of this great piece of cinema are its New York City location shots, especially when Mineo goes walking the city at night, looking for filth in scenes that must've influenced "Taxi Driver" (also love the W.S. Burroughs titles in the window of the "dirty bookshop"). I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. It's not available on video (Curses!), so if it's ever screened at the theater or on TV in your area, be there.