Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

 

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear is an unexpectedly haunting oddity, a rare mix of trashiness and delicacy, strangely dignified in its manipulativeness. A brief synopsis more easily evokes the trashy aspect: a nightclub worker, Norah, starts to receive vaguely threatening phone calls, a chance event bringing her to the attention of a police detective, Madden, who oscillates between rumpled charm and a seeming unnatural interest in, if not affinity for, such aberrant behaviour (eventually attributed to his wife having been murdered); the threat escalates in familiar genre fashion, right up to the killing of a co-worker mistaken for Norah after borrowing her coat. The film is documentary-like in its surveying of New York’s seamier side, providing loving pans over long rows of nudist magazines, “dirty” books, porn theatre marquees and the like; as if to illustrate its underlying duality though, there’s an extended, equally fascinated sequence following Norah through the theatre district, taking in marquees and posters for the likes of Any Wednesday and Golden Boy. As Norah, Juliet Prowse radiates crisp intelligence and engagement; the frank presentation of her character contrasts with that of the perpetrator, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), often photographed half-naked and in extreme close-up, the imagery both sensual and aberrant. The theme of damage and danger runs through Lawrence’s younger sister, her development hampered by a childhood accident, Lawrence seeking to suppress her sexual identity even as he can barely control the expression of his own; Norah’s employer (Elaine Stritch!), whose comforting of Norah suddenly evolves into an attempt at seduction; the deaf nightclub bouncer, injured early on in an unrelated confrontation: even in its more straightforward moments, in its staging of the activity on the nightclub dance floor for instance, the film often feels oddly compulsive or desperate. The ending is again broadly unsurprising in narrative terms, but feels as pathetic and forlorn as it does cathartic.