The 40th anniversary of his mysterious death
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Sal Mineo
PrometheusTree64 — 10 years ago(February 09, 2016 07:07 AM)
February 12th
People should go watch not only REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE but also the way underappreciated WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR.
A sharp review of WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR picked up by DVD Beaver:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/dvd_reviews_62/who_killed_teddy_bear.htm
"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."
LBJ's mistress on JFK: -
PrometheusTree64 — 10 years ago(February 12, 2016 08:42 AM)
It really is. An unsung, years-ahead-of-its-time little classic. The copy you posted from Youtube is a little edited, but not as badly as some prints (which remove the pool scene and the Times Square porn shop montage entirely).
It's is a remarkable film, albeit a "small" one, and much better than I'd anticipated (I'd never seen it before recently).
And for any number of reasons.
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 Its B&W photography is as haunted and moody as any PSYCHO-era film, but WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR has an organic quality about it most Hollywood movies don't have today and didn't yesterday and it r5b4eminds us of how the cities, from the mid-'60s (and into 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 droves even in "nice" business districts beside Tiffany's, creating a tense and fascinating shabbiness that helped define the schism which
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.
If it had been made just a couple of years later, and in color as it would have been, it just wouldn't have been the same effect.
Good acting, taut direction, and a lot of lab68yers going on at one time
(And why don't some audiences understand the difference between a film addressing sleazy subject matter, and a film
itself
being sleazy?? There's nothing sleazy about TEDDY BEAR except for what it's portraying).
At any rate, in WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR, Sal Mineo certainly gives us the sexiest pervert in cinematic memory. -
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PrometheusTree64 — 10 years ago(February 19, 2016 07:53 AM)
I thought of that, too, LADY IN A CAGE. Another mid-'60s film about urban meltdown that mainstream Hollywood wasn't really covering.
EDIT:
I went over to the LADY IN A CAGE board, and found posters aying things like this:
Another hearty agreement here. Often unfairly dismissed as a shabby expoloitation film, LADY IN A CAGE transcends its freak show roots through artful direction, a wonderfully eccentric score, a sweaty claustraphobic atmosphere (you can almost feel the humidity in the midsection of the film) and bravura performances by Caan and especially brave Olivia, who is unafraid to give a go-for-broke melodramatic performance, which stops just short of caricature. When I finally got around to watching this movie, I was staggered to learn what an unfairly maligned masterpiece it truly is.
In a way, LiaC is the first movie of the 60's (the real, cultural 60's; not the chronological 60's of course). The subtext of this movie is the utter helplessness induced by the Cuban Missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination* . . . . which eventually led to the palpable nihilism that we're all familiar with in the late 60's.- With a June '64 American release, it's no stretch to suggest that it was produced in the winter of '63-'64.
For much the same reasons they did this to LADY IN A CAGE, the critics savaged TEDDY BEAR, unable to handle the candor of either film and the ugly view of the current zeitgeist they were offering up, dismissing both pictures as "exploitation" and "sleazy" because both movies were showing
sleazy people in sleazy situations
(which isn't the same thing) a dismissal made all the more enticing given their obvious low budget flavor.
In that sense, both movies were ahead of their times not that they were to be confused with a Hitchcock or Kubrick production. But they were interesting, well-acted, tautly-directed period pictures with lots of layers and something 2000to say.
But Hollywood didn't want to hear it then. And if there hadn't been such A-listers connected to WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, it would have received a similar drubbing from the reviewers. (And did, from some).
LBJ's mistress on JFK:
- With a June '64 American release, it's no stretch to suggest that it was produced in the winter of '63-'64.