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The preamble introduces the combustible tone, a reverse track down a hospital corridor followed without pause by pan and zoom after an explosion in one of the rooms. The rotund nurse (Shirley Stoler) takes up lonely-hearts correspondence and meets "the Latin from Manhattan" (Tony Lo Bianco), a balding gigolo who specializes in separating biddies from their savings. The two continue the trade together, posing as siblings and adding murder to the proceedings. Suburban America as "one jail after another with ten feet of grass separating them," with the victims comprising a scabrous travesty of desperate middle-class womanhood: Premature spinsters, knocked-up bachelorettes and dotty widows, all seeking escape from solitude and getting poisoned, throttled and shot for their trouble. Leonard Kastle seizes the tabloid item of plug-ugly l'amour fou as a rebuke to Bonnie and Clyde's glossy criminals, his vehement denunciation of "beautiful" shots—more Frederick Wiseman than Diane Arbus—is bracing. A pregnant belle expiring on a bus with tongue out, the crunch of a hammer blow to a night-capped skull, horrified eyes in close-up as a revolver is cocked, not the exaltation of violence but its clumsiness and ludicrousness. A born filmmaker of beautifully judged camera movement and imagistic seediness, a mise en scène of light bulbs and bonbon wrappers and cellar burials worthy of Ulmer. Stoler's fleshy fury and Lo Bianco's sly vacillations like "chlorine and ammonia," unforgettably attuned to Mahler's vertigos. (Kastle started out in opera.) The downfall is filmed under the sign of Baudelaire's "Madrigal Triste" ("You cannot, slave and queen / Who love me only with terror / In the unhealthy night's horror / Say to me, your soul full of cries / I am your equal, O my King!"), and makes one regret that Stoler never got to play Medea. With Doris Roberts, Mary Jane Higby, Marilyn Chris, and Kip McArdle. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |