criterion the honeymoon killers


Kastle preferred the classical symmetry of an ending in which the couple does what comes naturally—trying out one last con on each other. There’s a lot of desperate sex or near sex, but the real eroticism occurs between Martha and a pretzel (she sighs with contentment), Martha and a box of chocolates (she is recumbent, as if battered by orgasms), Martha and a cookie (she bites into it as a reward for getting Janet to admit that she’s got the dough). This might be just enough to convince owners of the Criterion DVD to pony up the cash … Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or an afterlife of distribution and free-agency. Here you will find no glitz, sex appeal, fiddle music, or Aesopian moral about the dehumanization of violence. Neither man had ever worked in film. Desperate for affection, she joins Aunt Carrie’s Friendship Club and strikes up a correspondence with Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), a charismatic smooth talker who could be the man of her dreams—or a degenerate con artist. Steibel asked Kastle to research the story and devise a treatment. The prolific Lo Bianco had a few turns on Broadway and in television before, at thirty-four, he got his breakthrough role as Ray Fernandez. Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) is sullen, overweight, and lonely. Gary Giddins is a critic and biographer who has written about jazz and film in such books as Visions of Jazz: The First Century; Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong; Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker; Jazz (with Scott DeVeaux); Natural Selection; Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema; and his two-volume biography of Bing Crosby, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—the Early Years, 1903–1940 and Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star—the War Years, 1940–1946. Each is a long master shot without inserts, the first a receding pan that picks up Martha with a slight zoom and follows her toward the site of the unexplained explosion, the second a mobile survey of the room as Martha dresses down the staff. Less respectable but more influential were George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which resuscitated an anemic genre; John Waters’s Multiple Maniacs, made to “glorify carnage and mayhem for laughs”; Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the launchpad for blaxploitation; and, most mysteriously and perhaps most enduringly, Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers (1969)—the anti–Bonnie and Clyde true-crime tabloid shocker. A tragedian at heart, Shirley Stoler found her Medea in the role of a glowering bandit on the run in Leonard Kastle’s seedy true-crime drama. Directed by Leonard Kastle • 1969 • United States Yet in the seedy moral tableau of The Honeymoon Killers, we are encouraged to roll our eyes in solidarity with them—that is, until Martha raises the hammer or, drawing on her nursing background, helpfully offers a tourniquet, by which time we (like Janet) are begging for a mercy that the filmmakers (like Martha and Ray) have no intention of providing. Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) is sullen, overweight, and lonely. Grafted together from a wide array of sources, Claire Denis’s most acclaimed film combines cerebral rigor, sensorial intensity, and a powerful meditation on masculinity and foreignness. Most successful was John Cassavetes’s Faces, a triumph of the autonomous glamour-free cinema. The Honeymoon Killers is frequently placed in a lineage of films about criminal couples, from the romanticized They Live by Night (1948) to the overwrought Natural Born Killers (1994). Much of the humor is visual, notably Ray’s pretend seduction of Martha’s mom, his ass wriggling across the screen, or Martha—played by Shirley Stoler with a wily mixture of infinite hurt and infinite disdain—eating. See more in our Cookies Policy.

I’m always a bit leery when a studio takes something that’s pre-existing on DVD and gives it the Blu-ray treatment, but Criterion does it right adding new supplements and giving it a new 4K restoration.

Tectonic cultural shifts atomized the audience, as legendary directors faltered, stars faded, and producers hustled T&A for art’s sake. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray are a chilling pair in Double Indemnity, but not for a moment do we forget that they are familiars cocooned in glossy Hollywood starlight.

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