WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR? 1965

I suppose there's a kind of tinpot triumph in making a film about the dark underbelly of human sexuality which succeeds in being, in itself, a work of astounding sleaze and prurience. Such is Who Killed Teddy Bear?, a high-pedigreed '60s exploitationer whose interrogative title suggests another entry in the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? "hag horror" sweepstakes, but is, in fact, an example of what I call "cesspool cinema." Cesspool cinema is a '60s exploitation sub-genre of low-rent, reactionary, social-commentary films preoccupied with the alleged rise in sexual degeneracy. These films dedicate themselves to exposing (in as prurient a way possible) the threat that drugs, pornography, and delinquency pose to a civilized society.

Tackling the kind of material David Lynch would later build an entire career upon, these movies sought to lift the sewer lid off of life, offering a dark, bleakly nihilistic glimpse into the twilight world of depravity and violence seething below the surface of so-called normalcy. Posing ostensibly as tell-it-like-it-is cautionary tales warning against the dangers of unchecked morality and wanton sexual license, "cesspool cinema" films tend to tip their sincerity hand by actually being every bit as skeevy as the world their narratives purport to condemn. A good example of cesspool cinema that runs a close second to Who Killed Teddy Bear? on the sleaze-o-meter is the sensationalistic 1964 Olivia de Havilland shocker Lady in a Cage.

Sal Mineo as Lawrence Sherman

Juliet Prowse as Norah Dain

Elaine Stritch as Marian Freeman

Jan Murray as Lt. Dave Madden

Who Killed Teddy Bear? is first posed as a musical question crooned melodramatically (not to mention, over-eloquently, given the character whose thoughts its lyrics are meant to convey) over the film's tantalizingly lurid title sequence. A sequence which, depending on the copy you see, features a woman in bra and half-slip and a man in incredibly tight, white underwear—the latter being something of a motif in this movie—locked together in an impassioned, touchy-feely embrace. Bearing witness to all this in the bedroom's doorway is an understandably wide-eyed little girl clutching a teddy bear. A little girl who, upon fleeing the scene too swiftly, loses her balance and tumbles down a flight of stairs. Cue the psychosexual dysfunction and guilt.

The original, uncut version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? runs 94 minutes. Uncut copies can be distinguished by unblurred original title sequences (top screencap). Edited versions (there are several of varying lengths) blur the bodies behind the credits. 

When Who Killed Teddy Bear? is posed as a question a second time, it's by the inconsolable Edie (Margot Bennett)—the hapless little girl on the stairs, now a brain-damaged 19-year-old—inquiring of her older brother, Lawrence (Mineo), the fate of her beloved lost childhood toy. You see, the sordid events unfolding under the film's opening credits turn out to have been Lawrence's guilt-ridden nightmare/flashback to the time when Edie was left in his charge.
The siblings are orphaned (there being a brief allusion made to their parents' deaths, with Edie going so far as to call her brother "mommy-daddy"), and it was Lawrence's momentary neglect—as a then-underage boy surrendering to the seduction of an unidentified "sexually experienced older woman"—that resulted in Edie suffering the staircase accident which left her mentally and emotionally frozen at roughly the age of her trauma.

Margot Bennett as Edie Sherman
Bennett (former wife of personal crushes Keir Dullea AND Malcolm McDowell) is very good
in a role that appears to have inspired both Taliah Shire's costuming and performance in Rocky

Jump ahead several years: Lawrence is an adult with a crippling attraction/repulsion attitude toward sex, the silent recrimination of his sister's blameless, childlike dependency inflaming in him a neurotic prudishness that seeks to suppress her natural (sexual) maturation. As for that lost teddy bear—a lingering symbol of his guilt—Lawrence tells Edie that it has been killed in an accident when, in actuality, he has secreted it away.

Clearly, Edie wasn't the only one damaged that night.

What's also clear is the fact that Who Killed Teddy Bear?, in being a film exhaustively preoccupied with presenting sex in only its most tawdry and squalid contexts, has a sizable attraction/repulsion issue of its own. Like a movie adapted from Travis Bickle fan fiction, Who Killed Teddy Bear? paints a picture of New York as a singularly seedy hotbed of latent and manifest degeneracy. There's scarcely a character in the film left unslimed by its sewer-eye-view of humanity.

CASE #1 Lawrence

A waiter at a NYC discothèque, Lawrence's sexual molestation at the hands of an older woman (that's what it was, although they didn't call it that back then) leaves him with a staggering catalog of sexual hang-ups, not the least of them being voyeurism, making obscene phone calls, stalking (another word they didn't use back then), scopophilia, and sex attraction/repulsion. When not engaged in one of these extracurricular pursuits, he spends his time dry-humping his pillow, thumbing through his extensive porn collection (French Frills, When She Was Bad), trolling Time Square, or homoerotically working out at the gym. 

Where should I be looking? 

Sal Mineo's toned, always-on-display body does most of his acting in Who Killed Teddy Bear? Right now, I'd say it's acting like a compass needle pointing north, subtly (?) identifying the guilty party.

CASE #2 Norah

Since we're introduced to Norah at precisely the moment she's at the business end of a dirty phone call, there's no way of telling how much of her frosty demeanor and almost paranoid level of apprehension is her usual personality or the result of suddenly finding herself one of New York's premiere perv magnets. An aspiring actress and part-time DJ at the very same dance club where Lawrence lurks...I mean, works...Norah can barely get through a day without being hit on by randy patrons—"You hungry? Let me buy you a frankfurter"—or having her virginity status become the central topic of conversation: "Every scrawny broad thinks she's the only one entrusted with the crown jewels, and then she'll die if she loses them!"

"Who is this? Who IS this?"
For films like this to work, it's necessary for it never to occur to the recipient
of an obscene phone call to merely hang up.

CASE #3 Marian

Tough-as-nails (aka, coded lesbian) manager of a discothèque that seems to do a pretty decent business given they only have three records. Marian is a brassy, seen-it-all, calls-‘em-like-she-sees-'em, survivor type whose weakness for fur—literal and figurative ("I dig soft things… don't you?"), plays a significant role in her propriety-mandated, horizontal early departure from the film.

Being just a simple girl from Rochester, NY, Norah can't be faulted for mistaking 
Marian's offer of succor to be as dirty as it sounds

CASE #4 Lt. Madden

Striving for hard-boiled but landing at Borscht Belt, police Lt. Madden is every bit the sex-obsessed porn junkie as Lawrence, the phone-sex junkie. But fiery moral rectitude over the loss of his wife to violent assault has allowed this self-styled expert on deviant sex to place his own behavior above the pale. Behavior that includes working clinically gruesome details of sex crimes into the most casual of conversations and turning the apartment he shares with his 10-year-old daughter Pam (Diane Moore, comedian Jan Murray's real-life daughter) into a virtual vice squad reading room. Who Killed Teddy Bear? 's themes of innocence corrupted are repeated in Madden's daughter falling asleep each night to the sound of her father listening to his collection of police interview audio tapes of sexual assault victims. Talk about your grim fairy tales.

"She's very pretty...is she a hooker?"
Decades before this became a common question posed by pre-teens about their favorite pop stars,
little Pam Madden's presumptive appraisal of house-guest Norah Dain betrays early signs of a troubling sexual precocity 

These are the players in Who Killed Teddy Bear?; less a cast of characters than a police blotter of victims and would-be assailants in service of a familiar, somewhat rote, woman-in-peril crime thriller. The plot is simple: someone has their eyes on Norah and embarks on an escalating campaign of harassment to get her attention. It's a race with the clock as to whether or not the police can find the caller before he makes good on his many threats.
The film takes a weak stab at trying to drum up a little suspense as to the identity of Norah's peeping tom/stalker by casting a wide net of suspicion over everyone in her skeevy circle: a lecherous maître d'; a young Daniel J. Travanti as a deaf bouncer with piercing eyes; the cop who takes a too-personal interest in her case—but the choice to shoot the caller from the neck down, calling attention to his impossibly taut backside and wasp waist, swiftly narrows the field of probable suspects to a comical degree.

No, what truly distinguishes Who Killed Teddy Bear? is its lewd-yet-arty exploration of aberrant sexual development; its overheated, almost documentary look at New York's seamy side (it could pass for an anti-pornography propaganda film); and a tone of suffocating bleakness that feels positively surreal when one realizes this film was made the same year as The Sound of Music.
Honestly, Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a dark film that takes a head-first dive into the sewer and never comes up for air. Were it a better-made film, it would probably be unwatchable.

Corruption of Innocence
In parallelling the home lives of Lawrence and Lt. Madden, Who Killed Teddy Bear?
 alludes to how dissimilar circumstances can create similar psychological damage

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Imagine John Waters making one of those overheated erotic thrillers from the '80s and '90s. Films with sound-alike titles along the lines of: Body of Evidence, Guilty as Sin, Crimes of Passion, and Fatal Attraction. Imagine Waters' absurdist brand of debauched urban squalor played straight, and you've got a pretty good idea of what Who Killed Teddy Bear? is like. As twisted a work of mid-century pseudo-mainstream cinema as was ever screened at a Times Square grindhouse theater. 

Hollywood's hypocritical nature is rarely shown to such brilliant advantage as when it has worked itself into a sanctimonious lather over some social ill it wishes to expose. The makers of Who Killed Teddy Bear? (director Joeseph Cates [Phoebe's father] and writer Arnold Drake) obviously decided that the best way to comment on the pernicious threat of degeneracy is to make a film any self-respecting degenerate would love. 

Movies Are Your Best Entertainment
Lawrence treats himself to a picture show. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is worth checking out
for its scenes of '60s-era Times Square alone. Amusingly, this dive of a theater has a uniformed doorman! 

As a fan of '60s go-go movies, I love all the scenes set in the discothèque (seedy dance club, really), but it blows my mind that a hunk of sleaze this oily could have been made at a time when Hullabaloo, Shindig, and The Patty Duke Show were all over the airwaves. Nostalgia fans love to think of the '60s as this kinder, gentler era, but a movie like Who Killed Teddy Bear? suggests that the decade was perhaps just more skillful in sweeping its social debris under the rug.

"You look like a whore!"
Remarkably, sister Edie isn't the character delivering this line.

PERFORMANCES
I haven't seen the late Elaine Stritch in many films, and I'm not sure her range extended far beyond some variation of the tough-old-broad type she plays here, but within that range, she is untouchable. She gives the best performance in the film (arguably the only performance in the film), turning a "type" into a dimensional, fleshed-out character. She enlivens the proceedings and raises the film's quality bar each and every moment she appears.

Daniel J. Travanti of Hill St. Blues appears as Carlo, the bouncer

And speaking of toughness, in a film as focused on female victimization as this, I really appreciate that personal fave Juliet Prowse radiates so much brassiness behind her good-postured air of self-reliance. I don't know that I can say much about her performance, which feels surface and superficial. But I like that her character is depicted as independent-minded and worldly. Indeed, Norah often comes across as more pissed-off than frightened by what's happening to her. Hers is a huge, welcome departure from the usual cowering, helpless leading ladies common to women-in-jeopardy films (for example: Doris Day in 1961's Midnight Lace).

As public tastes in movies changed, many '50s boy-next-door types sought to extend their careers by taking on roles that challenged their squeaky-clean images, such as: James Darren in Venus in Furs and Troy Donahue in My Blood Runs Cold. Who Killed Teddy Bear? is structured as an against-type breakout role for former teen heartthrob and two-time Oscar-nominee (Rebel Without a Cause, Exodus) Sal Mineo. But the truth is that, while Mineo gives as good a performance as possible given how sketchily the character is conceived, the actor allows himself to be consistently upstaged by his physique. You'd have to look to a Raquel Welch movie to see a film where the human form's display and exposure are favored so deferentially over a performance.

For a movie marketed to the heteronormative exploitation market,
no physique in the film comes under quite the same degree of ogling,
close-up camera scrutiny as Mineo's. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

An actor's body is obviously their instrument, but when that instrument is puffed out with ornamental muscles, it runs the risk of actually inhibiting expression, not assisting (think Channing Tatum's neck). Such is the case with Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear?. I imagine we are supposed to glean that Lawrence channels his sexual repression into a fetishistic preoccupation with his appearance and working out. But Mineo's body and shrink-wrap wardrobe seem to encase and inhibit him. He seems overly aware of his muscles and moves about stiffly, like someone getting used to wearing a new garment. 

A few of the shows running on Broadway at the time 

For many, a question far more pressing than Who Killed Teddy Bear? is how did the careers of Mineo (a talented actor) and Prowse (a talented dancer and singer) sink to this level of grindhouse sleaze?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Who Killed Teddy Bear? would be a feature film with a running time of 60 minutes if it excised all the footage devoted to filming the dancers at the discotheque doing The Watusi and The Frug. Serious padding there. But happily, along with this film being a perfect time capsule of New York at its grimiest, it's also a movie that offers fans of '60s go-go dancing an ample opportunity to see it in action.
Who Killed Teddy Bear? has a single erotic set-piece. One precipitated by Lawrence's observation that the way people dance at the discotheque is "Very suggestive!" It's a two-minute dance-off by the statuesque Prowse and slim-hipped Mineo that is, at once, both unintentionally hilarious and terribly, terribly sexy. Suggestive, indeed!

The songs used in the film (all three of them) are composed by Bob Gaudino of The Four Seasons and Al Kasha. The latter, a two-time Best Song Oscar winner for The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

I saw Who Killed Teddy Bear? for the first time when I was about nine or ten. Bad idea. It aired on TV in the wee small hours of the morning on something like The Late, Late, Late Show, and I was excited at the prospect of staying up late and seeing what I thought would be a fun/scary B-movie like Die! Die! My Darling! or Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (the latter, playing in the theaters at the time). Of course, what I got was this weird, terribly dark movie about depravity, porn, rape, and murder. Needless to say, this head trip of a film disturbed the hell out of me at that age. It actually gave me nightmares. For the longest time, Who Killed Teddy Bear? occupied the place in my psyche reserved for kindertrauma.

Mineo, with his magic pants and action torso, played no small part in my inability to shake this movie, but the film's ending, particularly, bothered me the most. Shot in grainy black and white and utilizing freeze frame, it simultaneously looked like a documentary and a dream. The combination struck means being every eerie and macabre. 

Though not easy to make out in this image, that's Mineo languishing on his side by the phone in his tighty-whiteys. Prohibited from simulating masturbation onscreen back in 1965, Mineo is instead shown stroking his thighs while making an obscene phone call. According to Mineo, this was the first American film to feature a man in jockey shorts

It's a curious thing, kids and scary movies. Monsters and ghouls engaged in simplistic struggles of good vs. evil played out against low-budget backdrops of drafty castles and decaying mansions have a strangely comforting, distancing artificiality. The scares they supply are fun because the worlds depicted are so reassuringly false.

Less easy to shake off is a grim treatise on the corruptibility of innocence shot in grainy, news-bulletin black and white, set in a grimy, claustrophobic New York teeming not with flesh and blood monsters that look just like everyone else. 

For a young person, a movie like Who Killed Teddy Bear?—a film that offers few likable characters, little in the way of hope, and no happy ending—is particularly disturbing because it's just too real. A big-budget picture's technical gloss can keep what's happening onscreen at a safe and comfortable remove. The low-budget black and white of Who Killed Teddy Bear? looked ominous, making this one of the earliest films I can remember that made me feel the world wasn't a safe place. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear? popped up frequently on TV when I was young, then just seemed to disappear. I don't even know if it ever had a VHSrelease. But sometime in the mid-90s, it resurfaced at a local revival theater in LA, allowing me to see it on the big screen and with an audience for the first time.

With time, what I'd once thought of as disturbing looked almost quaint and reactionary, but the film hadn't lost its edge (it was banned in the UK until very recently). After all these years, Who Killed Teddy Bear? holds up as very enjoyable sleaze and stands out as one of the strangest films to come out of the so-called swinging '60s. And that's saying something.

This Teddy Bear's No Picnic

Sal Mineo made a personal appearance and signed autographs when the film premiered at
The Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 3rd, 1965.

BONUS MATERIAL (Spoilers)
The version of Who Killed Teddy Bear? available on DVD overseas is a slightly edited version from the 94-minute original. Here is what can be found in the uncut version (spoilers):
1. The first telltale sign of an edited copy is that during the title sequence, the caressing bodies behind the credits appear blurred & fully obscured. In the uncut version, the intertwined bodies in the title sequence are clear and visible.
2. The scene with Stritch and Prowse in her apartment is lengthier in the uncut version, including Stritch relaying this information: "I never wore a bra until I was 28. And then for a fast ten minutes. Some quack convinced me it helped firm the muscles. I don't like being fenced in. It's a hang-up of mine."
3. A flashback sequence featuring Mineo being seduced by an older woman is longer and slightly more explicit (his body, not hers) in the uncut version.
4. The scenes of Mineo at Times Square porn shops and in front of the porno theater are longer.
5. The uncut version features a brief moment when Mineo kisses and embraces Stritch after killing her in the alley.
6. The uncut version features a brief deleted scene where Mineo is seen humping his bed in his BVDs.
7. Final assault on Prowse is slightly more explicit in the uncut version.

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Who Killed Teddy Bear? detective Bruce Glover (l.) can be seen exercising a similar smirk nearly ten years later as Jack Nicholson's associate in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).  

Depending on the source, the voice singing the title song over the film's opening credits is attributed to either Rita Dyson or Claire Francis (Mikki Young). *Update: In 2016, a reader found that both Variety and Billboard credited singer Vi Velasco with singing the title song.

Here are a couple of the cover versions of the title song floating around the net;

Hear Leslie Uggams sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965)

Hear 80s pop singer Josie Cotton sing the haunting theme to Who Killed Teddy Bear? (2007)

In 1965, the same year Who Killed Teddy Bear? was released, Juliet Prowse debuted in her own TV sitcom, the short-lived (and rather terrible, as I recall) Mona McCluskey. Sal Mineo appeared as a guest on an episode. See Mona McCluskey opening credits on YouTube.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2014