Leonard Kastle's fetid The Honeymoon Killers is like something growing under a flat rock -- it's not something you want to look at, but it has its own relentless vitality. If nothing else, the film never swerves from its grisly perception of corrupt human nature. The picture is a freak show of cruelty, in some ways a black comedy so bleak that it dares you to laugh with it. Simply stated, everyone in The Honeymoon Killers is repulsive to a greater or lesser degree; the film's strength is that it doesn't forbid you from sympathy for its repellent characters -- in fact, some scenes achieve considerable, if nightmarish, force from our concern for the victims of the murderous protagonists. The 1969 picture, shot in black and white that somehow manages to seem garish (as if comprised of tabloid photographs), the film's plot is simple and pitiless: a fat woman and a smarmy Latin lover haphazardly murder lonely middle-aged women that they have swindled into marrying the man. The couple, who are lovers, pose as brother and sister. They don't really intend murder until the end -- rather, they sort of drift into killing the victims of their heartless fraud. This can't end well and it doesn't.
Martha Beck is a vicious nurse, a sort of Uber-Nurse Ratched working in a hospital where, for some reason, explosions seem to be common. Her neighbor Bunny, an officious interloper if there ever was one, encourages her to join "Aunt Carrie's" Lonely Hearts Club. Through this club, she meets Ray Fernandez, a wannabe gigolo who preys on middle-aged women. He writes them love letters, then, travels to seduce them, bilks them of their money and jewels and, then, vanishes. At first, Ray thinks that Martha has something worth stealing. This turns out to untrue, although he consoles himself with having sex with her before vanishing. Martha is both possessive and resourceful. She tracks down Ray and has Bunny call him with the claim that the poor nurse is half-dead due to an attempted suicide. Ray is weirdly flattered by this -- presumably, no one ever cared enough about him to display any real emotion, let alone an attempted suicide at being jilted. Martha joins Ray and becomes his accomplice. Pretending to be his sister, Martha accompanies Ray on his criminal forays and, in fact, encourages his thefts. Martha's only rule is that Ray must remain sexually faithful to her -- he's not allowed to consummate the phony marriages that he contracts with the hapless women from whom he is stealing. Martha is remorseless and efficient. She deposits her owns elderly mother in a nursing home (and, probably, doesn't pay fees for her care) and helps Ray with his criminal enterprise. Invariably, however, Ray's victims demand sex with him and, although he tries to hide these encounters from Martha, he's generally willing to make love to his victims. Ultimately, Martha can't control her jealousy and, after another feigned suicide attempt, she revenges herself on Ray by turning him into the police. This is self-destructive and both Martha and Ray die in the electric chair on March 8, 1951. (The story is based on facts and has been filmed, at least, two more times -- in 2006 as Lonely Hearts with Jared Leto and Salma Hayek and in a notable version directed in 1996 by the great Mexican film maker, Arturo Ripstein, Deep Crimson; there is a Belgian version as well and, no doubt, several additional iterations are in the works right now.)
The portraits of Ray and Martha's victims are the best thing in the movie and this material is very disturbing indeed. The victims are all repellent in one way or another and the film doesn't attempt to sentimentalize them. The foibles of Ray's prey are obvious and, even, disgusting, but by virtue of those flaws these women are humanized to the extent that their murders are actually extremely troubling. Everyone wants to be loved not in spite of, but, indeed, because of our flaws and these poor women are ridiculously enamored with the sleazy Ray. Ray's modus operandi before emboldened by the more ruthless Martha, was to love 'em leave 'em. But Martha's jealously leads to far more dire consequences. Ray's first victim in the film is a spinster school teacher, a scrawny old maid who chortles "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in her bubble-bath. She and Martha bicker over the fat woman's protective and intrusive relationship with Ray. The couple don't kill her but simply leave with all her money and jewelry. Ray, then, hooks up with a lecherous Southern belle who needs a husband so that her unborn child will have a father -- she got knocked-up by a married traveling salesman. This woman schemes to get Ray in bed with her. Martha gives her a handful of sedative pills that poison her. Ray puts her on a Greyhound bus to Little Rock and, in the first of several really ghastly scenes, leaves her to die as she pleads with him for help. (We see her sprawled on the bus seat with her eyes protruding and her tongue sticking out of her rigid jaws.) Martha and Ray, then, go to Massachusetts where a athletic-looking widow runs a boarding house catering to musicians performing at Tanglewood.) When Ray makes love to her at a picnic by a lake, Martha swims out into the deep water and tries to commit suicide. The widow senses that something is amiss in the relationship between Ray and Martha and, apparently, escapes. Next, Ray goes to Albany and seduces an older woman, a pious Catholic widow. (The woman is miserly and vicious in her own right.) Ray and Martha lure the woman to their cheerless home, tract housing on Long Island, where they beat her to death with a claw hammer. We have every reason to despise this woman who is vain, extremely cheap, and a religious bigot. But when she hears Martha calling Ray by his real name and discovers that she is trapped and in the clutches of vicious killers, we feel some real horror at what occurs -- the old woman pathetically begs to be allowed to leave the house, but Martha is remorseless. After beating her to death with a claw hammer (and strangling her for a good measure using the handle of the hammer and nylon stockings as a garrot), Ray tosses his underpants on the dead woman to cover her face and, then, naked walks into the bedroom to have sex with Martha. Then, Ray and Martha proceed to Michigan where Ray is corresponding with a war widow. (She has a small daughter and they celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday complete with a cake and candles.) On Valentine's Day, Ray goes out to buy a puppy for the little girl. Martha, who learns that the woman is pregnant with Ray's child, flies into a rage and poisons the woman. She's paralyzed and can't move, listening as Ray and Martha plan to "get rid" of the little girl. Ray shoots the war widow in the head and Martha drags the screamng child to the basement where she kills her. Then, Martha calls the police. In the final scene, we see Martha being lead to Court by a nasty-looking prison matron. Ray has written her a letter from Sing Sing in which he expresses his undying and eternal love for her. A title tells us the date of couple's execution.
The movie is very unpleasant but effective, a grim work of art that I'm not willing to watch again. Everyone is vain. Ray's victims are emotionally needy and whine in an irritating way. There are many poignant or sardonic details. One of Ray's victims gets him a hairpiece, a toupee because he is losing his hair over his temples. Later, when Ray courts a much older woman -- she is 65 -- Ray puts some dye in the hairpiece, creating ersatz stands of grey in his black hair. (It doesn't occur to him to just lose the hairpiece, which Martha hates anyway -- just before turning him into the police, she pulls the toupee off his head and announces that "(she) never liked it.") The pious Catholic widow has pictures of Jesus of the most tasteless sort on her wall and, when she's killed, Ray and Martha throw the images into the hole in the basement where they are burying her. When Martha quits her job at the hospital, she bellows "Hitler was right about you people" to the Hospital Administrator. The two murder scenes in the last third of the picture are extremely harrowing -- we have the sense that the victims are completely at the mercy of people who have no concept of mercy whatsoever. This creates in the film a particularly lonesome and forlorn atmosphere. Everything is scrupulously mean, cheap, and in poor taste. The houses are decorated with ghastly art. When the widow from Albany splurges, she takes Ray and Martha out to a dismal cafeteria and bickers with the fat woman when she orders veal cutlets as opposed to the much cheaper pork chops. Manny Farber, the renowned critic, invented the concept of "termite art", a disorderly improvised way of making films that devours itself and leaves no trace except evidence of its "unkempt activity." Farber is highly acclaimed although much of his writing is deliberately unclear I think -- but The Honeymoon Killers is claimed as exemplary of "termite art' in his understanding and one can see the vivid, squalid energy in the film that aims at making no grand statement but simply and relentlessly proceeds down its appointed path. (Farber thought that films like The Honeymoon Killers were best thought of as archaeological artifacts, unintentional evidence of the sensibility and aesthetics of the time in which they were made. Certainly, the dismal interiors in the film and the ugly furniture creates a strong impression of lower middle class life in the 'fifties. In one scene, the characters are in twin beds with big backboards that seem to made of polyvinyl plastic -- one of the backboards is torn and the rip in the fabric creates a strange point of emphasis in the compositions, never exactly central but a troubling defect that marks the images and makes them indelible.) There is an esthetic of ugliness just as there are are canons of beauty. The elderly widow aspires to be a hat-maker and to sell her creations in Manhattan. A bulbous white hat, pimple-shaped, and sporting a few bird's feathers worn by the widow when she is killed is one of the most hideous things ever seen in movies. Shirley Stoler became famous for her performance as Martha. Tony Lo Bianco plays the weak, corrupt Ray Hernandez -- he speaks with an accent and claims that he was raised in Spain. All performances in the film, including the hapless victims, are memorable. Leonard Kastle, the director, made only one movie -- he used to say that "he never made a bad movie" after The Honeymoon Killers. The film was financed, just barely, by Warren Steibel the producer of Public Tv's Firing Line with William Buckley -- the movie was intended as a sort of neo-realist riposte to what Kastle and Steibel regarded as the specious glamor of Bonnie and Clyde. Kastle was an opera writer and professor of music in upstate New York. He took over direction of the film, after writing its script, when Martin Scorsese proved to be too exacting and slow in his approach to making the movie. (Scorsese later admitted that his firing was probably warranted). Kastle died with three unproduced scripts in his files that sound interesting. You can read his obituary on-line. He played organ at an Episcopal Church until a few months before his death. Francois Truffaut claimed that The Honeymoon Killers was his favorite contemporary American film.
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