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Pretty Poison (film)

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Director
  
Initial DVD release
  
September 5, 2006

Duration
  

Language
  
English

7.2/10
IMDb

Genre
  
Comedy, Crime, Romance

Budget
  
1.8 million USD

Country
  
United States

Pretty Poison (film) movie poster

Release date
  
18 September 1968 (US)

Based on
  
Writer
  
Stephen Geller (novel), Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenplay)

Cast
  
(Dennis Pitt), (Sue Ann Stepanek), (Mrs. Stepanek), (Morton Azenauer), (Bud Munsch), (Mrs. Bronson)

Similar movies
  
Spy
,
Mission: Impossible
,
Bridge of Spies
,
Mission: Impossible II
,
The Expendables 3
,
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Tagline
  
She's such a sweet girl. He's such a nice boy. They'll scare the hell out of you.

Pretty Poison is a 1968 psychological thriller/black comedy film directed by Noel Black, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, about an ex-convict and high school cheerleader who commit a series of crimes.

Contents

Pretty Poison (film) movie scenes

While not generally considered an example of neo-noir, the film does include certain elements of the genre, including a femme fatale, a character trapped into circumstances beyond his control, criminal protagonists and, of course, murder.

Pretty Poison (film) movie scenes

The film was based on the novel She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller; this was also the working title of the film.

Pretty Poison (film) movie scenes

There was a 1996 television film remake with the same title and plot.

Pretty Poison (film) movie scenes

Plot

Dennis Pitt is a disturbed young man on parole from a mental institution who becomes attracted to teenager Sue Ann Stepenek. He tells her that he is a secret agent, and takes her along on a series of "missions" that eventually end in murder. 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.

Dennis knows that the police will take Sue Ann's word over his, so he 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' parole officer is indeed watching as she departs with her latest victim.

Production

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 agreed to act as executive producer for producer Marshall Backlar and director Noel Black, 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 Palm d'Or 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 type who comes up against a teenybopper Lady Macbeth."

Turman had just made The Flim Flam Man for 20th Century Fox 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."

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. "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, not Psycho, although commentators naturally made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in Pretty Poison.”

The film was shot on location at Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

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."

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

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 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 [1968] of the double assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, 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 23 October, to poor reviews from the daily papers. The New York Times 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."

It received excellent reviews from magazines and Sunday papers - notably Pauline Kael 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, 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 of the Chicago Tribune named the film as one of the ten best of the year.

Lawrence Turman 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."

"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 typecasted the actor once again in roles portraying disturbed, unhinged protagonists denying audiences the opportunity to see an actor of tremendous range and ability.

Awards and honors

  • 1968 New York Film Critics Circle Award, Best Screenplay - Lorenzo Semple Jr.
  • References

    Pretty Poison (film) Wikipedia
    Pretty Poison (film) IMDb Pretty Poison (film) themoviedb.org


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