Who Killed Teddy Bear

Plot synopsis:
Norah Dain (Juliet Prowse), a nightclub disc jockey and aspiring actress living alone in a Manhattan apartment, receives a series of obscene phone calls from someone who seems to be watching her on a daily basis. She also finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment. At first it is not clear to either the viewer or Norah who is making the calls. A police detective, Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), whose own wife was raped and murdered, takes a personal interest in Norah and her case. Lt. Madden engages in suspicious behavior such as suggesting to Norah several times that he himself could be the caller, secretly tape recording his discussions with Norah, listening to tapes of Norah and other women talking about obscene phone calls, and obsessively studying pornography and the behavior of sex perverts, despite the fact that he is exposing his ten-year-old daughter to such adult concepts and he is being reported to his superiors at work.
However, midway through the film, it is revealed to the audience (but not to Norah) that the obscene caller is actually Lawrence Sherman (Sal Mineo), a waiter at the nightclub where Norah works. Lawrence lives with and cares for his 19-year-old sister Edie (Margot Bennett), who is brain damaged and has the mind of a child. Edie's brain damage is apparently the result of an accident when she was a little girl and saw her older brother, Lawrence, having sex with an unidentified older woman (possibly their mother, although this is not made clear); she ran away in horror or fear, and fell down the stairs. Lawrence is unable to have a normal romantic or sexual relationship due to his guilt over the accident and his duty to look after Edie following the death of their parents. He is also frustrated when Edie dresses up in an adult dress, high heels and makeup and seems to make advances towards him. He tries to get rid of his frustration by visiting adult bookstores and movies in Times Square, but still is obsessed with watching and calling Norah. Despite Lt. Madden's warnings that the caller might be someone Norah knows, Norah never suspects Lawrence until it is too late. Instead she is friendly to him and even attracted to him, complimenting him on his body when they meet at the gym, and offering to stay late after work to teach him to dance.
Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch), the older, experienced manager of the nightclub where Norah works, also takes a personal interest in Norah and tries to advise and protect her. She offers to spend the night with Norah at her apartment so Norah won't be alone and afraid. While Marian is visiting, Norah receives yet another telephone call and starts to cry. Marian consoles her, but Norah senses that Marian is actually making a lesbian pass at her and, revolted, asks her to leave the apartment immediately. Marian leaves in a huff, still wearing Norah's coat, which she had been using as a bathrobe. Lawrence, who is outside, sees Marian leaving in Norah's coat, and mistaking her for Norah, chases after her and kills her.
Lawrence finally attacks Norah after closing time in the empty nightclub and violently rapes her, but does not kill her. Lt. Madden, who has just figured out that Lawrence was watching Norah through the reflection of a mirror, arrives too late to save Norah from the rape. He beats Lawrence and then, inexplicably, lets him leave the club. Lawrence runs through traffic in Times Square imagining that he is running through Central Park towards a welcoming Norah. Police officers chase him and ultimately gun him down as the film ends.

Tags: neo noir, murder, cult, violence, flashback, melodrama

Review:
So I consider myself fortunate to have been exposed to this sleaze-ball of a movie.The highlight for me was in one of the final scenes where Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse shimmy to one of the sassiest, silliest 60s dance tunes ever invented.
Sal Mineo plays a busboy obsessed with aspiring actress/club DJ Juliet Prowse (and Prowse is at her foxiest in this one, with her pencil skirts, kitten heels and cat eyes), coming off like a perverted puppy dog.The obscene phone call bits--all heavy breathing, bulging tighty whiteys and sweat--will make you want to leave the theatre and take a shower.
Or, if that isn't nasty enough for you, how about the scene with bulldyke Elaine Stritch fondling Prowse's fur (so to speak), or the retarded kid sister locked in the closet or the policeman obsessively playing audio tapes of various twisted criminal's confessions as his daughter listens wide-eyed from the other side of the door?
Another asset of this great piece of cinema are its New York City location shots, especially when Mineo goes walking the city at night, looking for filth in scenes that must've influenced "Taxi Driver" (also love the W.S. Burroughs titles in the window of the "dirty bookshop").
Who Killed Teddy Bear, Sal Mineo shines in a brilliant performance ahead of its time, in an ignored masterpiece.
Coming at a time in his career when he was frustrated with very little roles to choose from, came this harrowing film from director Joseph Cates.
Pakula's Klute (1971).First, it is important to note how much "Teddy Bear" resembles the great Italian films from the late '50's, early'60's.
Mineo's character certainly would have made movie legend, like DeNiro had done with Driver, if Teddy Bear had been accepted by theatergoers in the first place.
The apex of 60s exploitation pix, with Sal Mineo, painted into over-exposing pants, as a proto-Travis Bickle: a pornophilic, body-building Times Square (filmed in its seedy heyday!) habitué fixated on disco dj/dancer Juliet Prowse.
"Who Killed Teddy Bear" is irresistible trash, an utterly sleazy film that wallows in B-movie murk without apology.
Filmed entirely in real New York locations (much of it on the fly, by the look of it) and dripping with sordid Times Square atmosphere, this is a cheap, sensationalistic, slightly arty psycho-sex-thriller with a startling cast drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the Borscht Belt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not forgetting that you are led into the wonderful atmosphere by the wailing and unforgettable theme tune, which sounds like an old 45rpm record where the center hole has not been cut quite right.IMHO due to Hollywood, American Independent film makers were just not taken seriously enough at this time, because of this, films like this have been unfairly over looked as great examples of low budget, gorilla technique( getting the shot before the police arrives etc).
Sal Mineo is unbelievably sensuous, erotic, neurotic, as is Elaine Stritch who plays the Lesbian, Marian wonderful performances..
Sal Mineo at his sexiest in this 65 thriller.This film must have really made shock waves when it was released.Although,sleazy,campy and exploitive,it is also compelling,and a dirty pleasure to watch.Juliet Prowse plays the victim.This film offers an ending that would still shock viewers in the 90's.
Everybody who wants to see a great black and white movie with intelligent story, very good acting and sexy Sal Mineo should watch this one....
Pretty, young Juliet Prowse is a NYC discotheque DJ being stalked by sex-psycho Sal Mineo in this flawed but ahead-of-its-time shocker, a film perched on the median between arthouse and grindhouse which might appeal to enthusiasts of Sam Fuller's contemporaneous work.Performances are strong from the key players(especially Elaine Stritch as Prowse's inured lesbian boss, Jan Murray as the solicitous investigator, and Mineo...a deeply disturbed but ultimately pitiable predator).
Unfortunately, the film is marred significantly by the comically written and overplayed character of Mineo's little sister, doomed to eternal childhood as the result of a tragic accident.Though there is intermittent creative camera-work at hand, production values are pretty low overall.
Joseph Cates "Who Killed Teddy Bear" is a dark, seedy, and sex obsessed oddity that must have unnerved audiences in it's day.
Taking visual cues and a raucous jazz score from French New Wave, and predating the Times Square Sleaze of 'Midnight Cowboy' and 'Taxi Driver' by several years, 'Who Killed Teddy Bear' is a thoroughly bizarre time capsule offering both a rare and fascinating glimpse into the sleazy porno subculture of sixties New York and an early cinematic attempt to provide a psychological motivation for mental instability.A movie well worth seeking out that captures a disturbing time and place that is genuinely lost forever..
It's B&W photography is as haunted and moody as a PSYCHO-era horror film, but TEDDY BEAR has an organic quality about it most Hollywood movies don't have today and didn't have yesterday --- and it reminds those of us old enough to remember of how the cities, from the mid-'60s to 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 even "nice" business districts beside Tiffany's, creating a tense and fascinating shabbiness that helped define the schism that 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).
Harassed by an obscene phone caller, a young woman begins to wonder if the detective assigned to her case is behind the calls in this strange little mystery thriller starring Juliet Prowse.
The supporting characters are refreshingly different too from those of the typical noir thriller, from Jan Murray's policeman, unhealthily obsessed with perverts, to Elaine Stritch in a terrific turn as Prowse's lesbian boss with designs on her, to Margot Bennett as a brain injured teenager.
'Who Killed Teddy Bear' gives an interesting glimpse of what gialli would have looked like had they been made just a few years earlier when a modicum of taste still prevailed, and male dress sense (an oxymoron if ever there was one after the late sixties) hadn't yet been wrecked by the bizarre notion that flares and sideburns looked cool, and sharp suits, thin ties and short back and sides were still standard male apparel (it's nice to see Dan Travanty (sic) and Bruce Glover, for example, looking so young and clean-cut; the former playing a deaf mute, the latter an unnerving security adviser).
That goes for the women too: I've never seen Elaine Stritch look more chic and glamorous than she does as the elegant lipstick lesbian she plays here.Most of the conventions of the giallo are present and correct in this movie: including voyeurism, transvestism, flashbacks depicting childhood sexual traumas, the stalking of women, weird camera angles making us complicit with the killer, obtrusive musical accompaniment and cops who make the Keystone Kops look like Maigret (the unprofessional way the detective behaves at the end has to be seen to be believed!).
But 'Who Killed Teddy Bear' could only have been made at that fault-line in the mid-sixties when censorship was being rapidly eroded and subjects that would have been absolutely taboo just a couple of years earlier could even be hinted at; but before the descent into full-frontal crudity that makes so much modern cinema almost unwatchable.
According to a recent biography of Sal Mineo he was going through a lot of professional and personal angst at the time he was making Who Killed Teddy Bear.
Normally I might applaud the fact that lesbianism even got a hint on the screen, but in such a crass and a exploitive film as Who Killed Teddy Bear.It's one weird film, shot totally on location in New York with what looks like someone's Bell&Howell home movie camera.
By far Sal Mineo's finest and at the same time most haunting performance.
**SPOILERS** Sal Mineo lets it all hang out in this psychological thriller as the sex crazed and obsessed busboy Larry Sherman who's fixated on beautiful Norah Dain, played by tall and leggy Juliet Prowse, a disk jockey in the midtown Manhattan disco that he works at.Larry had it rough in his attempts in striking up relationships with women over the years which for the most parts ended up just being one night affairs.
It just so happens that Norah lives across the street from Larry's apartment in a walk-up she just recently sublet from a friend of hers!We also get a glimpse of one of the many reasons that makes Larry tick very early in the movie as we see Larry having sex with-what seems to be-a hooker as his little sister Edi,Margot Bennett, catches him in the act.
It's when Larry starts to get personal with Norah and knowing things about her-like where she works and lives-that makes her feel threatened by his constant and unwanted phone calls.
But in fact it,the X-rated books magazines and scantly clad women, get Larry even more turned on towards Norah whom he thinks, after the incident at the gym, is hot for him!Shocking and extremely sexually explicit for its time the film "Who Killed Teddy Bear" and its star Sal Mineo are some ten years ahead of the equally shocking psychological thriller "Taxi Driver" with Robert De Niro playing the crazed and sex obsessed cab driver Travis Bickle!
A part very similar to Mineo's Larry Sherman!In fact Sal Mineo is far more believable then De Niro in that the film doesn't clean up his acts of violence and depravity like the movie "Taxi Driver" did with Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle!
This action in his mind and in the minds of those who made the movie supposedly proved to the audience that the mentally unstable and criminally driven Bickle was actually fit to live in a civilized society!***SPOILERS*** The films ending has Larry really lose it as Norah, not realizing that he's the person who's been unmercifully harassing her on the phone, invites him to dance with her at the now deserted disco.
Let. Madden who had his suspicions about Larry's, whom he met with Edi in Central Park, mental state soon realizes, by checking Larry's apartment, that he's making the obscene calls and rushes down to the disco where both Larry and Norah are!Not all that surprise of an ending with Larry paying for his crimes which includes the murder of his and Noarh's boss at the disco lesbian Elaine Stritch, Marian Freeman, who had earlier made an unwanted pass at a totally turned off Noarh.
It turned out that Larry's ultimated fate was for him to end up in a place that he's very familiar and at home with: The sleazy and red light Times Square District of New York City..
Even before you see his face, you can feel the sensuality of Sal Mineo thrusting its way off the screen, wearing nothing but tighty whities as he makes several obscene phone calls at 6 O'clock in the morning.
Of course, that is assuming that you're planning on making it on your feet, so to speak!" That's how you're introduced here to the legendary "Ladies Who Lunch" diva Elaine Stritch, playing an extremely glamorous lesbian who has the hots for D.J. Juliet Prowse.
She reminds me a great deal of Grayson Hall's character in the cult movie "Satan in High Heels", although this was obviously made on a bit of a higher budget even if it's still down the scale on its vision of a lack of polite society.As for Mineo, don't let his polite on the surface nature fool you; He disguises his voice on the phone as you see only his bare chest and the tip of his jockeys, and this is where the perversion takes on a sexual film noir story, pre-dating "Basic Instinct" and "Fatal Attraction" by more than two decades.
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 – 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).
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, working out and wandering, and its black and white footage cut to pop hits makes it seem like a greyscale Kenneth Anger at times.
Mineo proves here what a remarkable actor Hollywood wasted when it underused him, and his physical presence – often showing his toned body in swimming trunks or flaunting his butt in the tightest of Chinos – suggests a missing link 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 – there's something missing structurally and a tendency towards melodrama – 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..
There are a lot of problems with the story; mainly, it really isn't about an obscene "Telephone Psychotic" caller; rather, it is about a stalker who uses to phone.Sal Mineo (as Lawrence "Larry" Sherman) creates an interesting character; but, his considerable abilities as an actor do not equate with the inferior material.
Ms. Stritch has been quoted as explaining, "I was a lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled on 93rd Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal Mineo.
Prowse's character overreacts, which leads directly to Stritch's death.Also disturbing (probably intentionally) is officer Murray's 10-year-old daughter listening in on her father's sex tapes.
The dancing of Sal Mineo and high-heeled Juliet Prowse during the "It Could Have Been Me" song is a swimming classic (or, should have been).
******* Who Killed Teddy Bear (9/65) Joseph Cates ~ Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Elaine Stritch, Jan Murray.
An inept film that represents a major come down for its leading actor, "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" tries to be a moody psychological thriller, but ends up a seedy confused melodrama that dribbles to an unsatisfying finale.
In contrast, the second half of the film lurches and jumps from one unrelated scene to another, leaving enormous plot holes and dangling threads in its wake.As Lawrence Sherman, a nightclub busboy, Sal Mineo, whose credits include Oscar-nominated performances in "Rebel without a Cause" and "Exodus" does well with what little he is given by Arnold Drake's inadequate script.
Jan Murray's performance as Lt. Dave Madden is best left unmentioned, and Margot Bennett is embarrassing as Mineo's sister.The moody black and white cinematography is often effective in capturing the seediness of 1960's 42nd Street, and near abstract close-ups suggest an unrealized artistic intent on the part of director Joseph Cates.
Evidently, the writer just ran out of ideas, and the director yelled "cut." "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" would be better titled "Who Killed Sal Mineo's Career?" The film is a sad late entry for an actor who began with such promise..
It's lurid and gritty to the point of exhaustion...unfortunately WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR isn't a very good movie.
Sal Mineo, wearing tight pants, a tight shirt and a tight jacket, is a busboy obsessed with record spinner Juliet Prowse.
Prowse suspects cop Jan Murray of being the perp and her lesbian boss Elaine Stritch thinks she's just plain crazy.