Review of Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965) by James C — 08 Feb 2009

A long out of circulation cult film, Who Killed Teddy Bear is a kind of stepping stone between Hitchcock's excavation of the warped mind in psycho, with its final psychiatric classification of Norman Bates, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, with its disturbed lonely man lost amongst the newly permissive urban landscape.

The primary focus of Joseph Cates' 1965 film is a sometime dancer and barmaid (Juliet Prowse) who has been receiving obscene and threatening phone calls from an unknown person. Yet as the case unfolds, the film becomes more intrigued by the characters surrounding her â?? the possibly lesbian manageress of the bar (Elaine Stritch), the investigating detective who is obsessed by abnormal psychologies (Jan Murray) and the disturbed busboy who turns out to be the caller (Sal Mineo). Each of the characters seems alone and immersed in the modern urban condition. Throughout the film, a preponderance of mirror shots (the "solving of the case even involves a mirror) suggests a world in which everyman and everywoman's sickness reflects everyone else's. The detective seems to have become so obsessed with his quarry that he almost crosses the line into psychosis himself, the manageress might have her own sexual agenda in wishing to help her victimized employee and each of the seem as much of a threat as the unknown caller. Prowse does not know who to trust, even whether to trust herself, and although the film descends into a "get the culprit" finale, even this traditional end fractures into a private turmoil lost in an alienating environment.

The film offers a series of very strong character studies, all remarkably well acted, but often seems concerned to conjure the feel and sound of the times through montages to music, of dancing, walking and wandering, and its black and white footage cut to pop hits makes it seem like a greyscale Kenneth Anger at times. One of the montages involves Mineo drifting through the fleshpots, bookshops and cinema foyers of Times Square, an eerie presentiment of Travis Bickle. Mineo is particularly strong in the role of the tormented busboy, tortured on a rack between the unfettered expression of carnal nature he sees all around him (and has the potential for within) and the last psychotic jerks of a Puritan sexual consciousness. Mineo proves what a remarkable actor Hollywood wasted when it underused him, and his physical presence â?? often showing his toned body in swimming trunks or flaunting his butt in the tightest of Chinos â?? suggests a bridge between mainstream Hollywood and underground stars like Warhol's Joe Dallesandro and Pink Narcissus' Bobby Kendall.

Who Killed Teddy Bear isn't a perfect film â?? there's something missing structurally and a tendency towards melodrama â?? but its picture of a world fallen from a childhood Eden into an adulthood of sticky and strange sexual dramas, it was way ahead of its time and still stands head and shoulders above most of the so-called sophisticated cinema of today.