Pretty Poison (1968)

Plot-- An outpatient uses his fantasy skills to entice a blonde cutie into his dream world, but gets more than he bargained for, to say the least.One of the squirrliest pairings in movie history. Weld and Perkins are darn near perfect as the young couple from heck. And to think that the sweet-faced little Sue Ann (Weld) turned up at random out of a highschool drill team. No wonder Pitt (Perkins) wants back into the safety of an asylum. If she's the outside world, we'd all better hide. He may be a James Bond fantasist, but at least he doesn't straddle corpses in ecstatic delight. In fact, he's got a social conscience when it comes to what his employer is doing. And that's the problem. He's got a sense of limits, but she doesn't.So why does he go along with her betrayal of him. I can understand why he wants back into confinement, but why turn seductive Sue Ann back loose on society. After all, he's trying to keep mill gunk out of the stream. Maybe it's because, unlike the ugly river poison, she's a pretty poison.Really original premise, expertly played out. No doubt the screenplay couldn't have been produced ten years earlier. The sixties lifted the lid on the exotic, and this one goes about as far as any. I like the working class locations that lend both realism and flavor. And get a load of the stream that's used as everyone's dumping ground. No wonder the two kids are weird. Stodgy old Hollywood would never give awards to a movie like this. But in my little book, I'd give one-eyed Oscars to both Perkins and Weld, and a real one to screenwriter Semple. Meanwhile, I'll never look at a girls drill team the same way again, and you may not, either.

The content and plot of this movie had much suspense. Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins were terrific. One thing that needs to be mentioned here was the fine filming of this movie,not the director so much but the way this was superbly shot by David L. Quaid. Hitchcock would have been proud. The shots down the stairway when when Sue shoots her mother and the subsequent collapse and fall backward with breakfast going all over the place. The scene at the bridge when the " bomb" is being placed. David Quaid must have been in the water for this shot.Then the collapse of a part of the bridge and the death of the worker.Even the shot at the outside diner car at an angle captures Sues' psychotic look near the end of the movie.

The film starts with Perkins being released from an insane asylum or some sort of confinement (as the plot is rather muddled, it is not clear who he is and what his past is). With Perkins playing a character much like Norman Bates, this could almost be seen as a sequel to "Psycho," except that some hack named Noel Black directed this instead of Hitchcock. The plot is nonsensical and the main characters don't resemble real people. There is no flow to the proceedings. It just rambles along aimlessly and bizarrely, unsure of whether it's a drama, a thriller, or a black comedy. The only thing the film has going for it is the mercifully short running time.

This is a very unusual and quirky movie with great performances from Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. It is also a bit of a worrying film in that everybody seems a bit unbalanced or at least not quite up to scratch and we are never quite sure where it is going to go. At first things seem straightforward enough, in fact Perkins' fantasies/make-believe tales for Weld are becoming just that much too silly when the whole thing takes off when the little lady gets a bit bigger. Not just a little bit bigger, either because she begins to dwarf Perkins. All very well done for no sooner have we begun to write Perkins off as an out and out psychopath, he becomes all vulnerable and we are forced to begin to re-evaluate Weld. My only criticism is that the film should have either been more hard nosed or played the whole thing for laughs more. Listening to the director at the start of the commentary on the DVD it seems that there was a deliberate attempt by the studio to soften the effect following the real life assassinations of the time. Well worth watching.