Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)

I.

Of the many knock-offs inspired by the artistic and financial success of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, none are as twisted or perverse as the deliriously delicious 1965 creep-fest Who Killed Teddy Bear.

This terrific looking film – particularly in its 2018 region-free Network Blu-Ray release – isn’t as sleazy as it could have been but is positively provocative and terrifically transgressive in many ways. Teddy Bear showcases one of the few leading feature roles taken by prolific film, TV and theater actor Sal Mineo (1939-76), best known then and now as Plato in Rebel Without a Cause from a decade before.

Here, Mineo stars as Lawrence, a socially awkward waiter at a discotheque (of all places) who, when he’s not perving out, cares for his younger sister Edie (the Broadway actress Margot Bennett, who was actually four years older than Mineo and was married at the time to Kier Dullea, who factored in his own twisted brother-sister thriller, Bunny Lake is Missing, released the following month).

The discotheque setting is no accident. Such places were considered by many at the time (pro and con) as being a den of in-thing, mod-mad debauchery and depravity. The frenzy seems to drive the lonely and repressed Lawrence to suddenly obsess over the pretty but unaccountably naïve and frigid Norah (Juliet Prowse).

Prowse (1936-96) – pretty much at the end of her brief feature-film career here – plays Norah, an unlikely DJ and wannabe actress, as a vapid mannequin: a fantasy of Venus in Furs, enslaving men and women alike. Their attention seems to mystify and repulse her, much the way Catherine Deneuve bewitched and bothered to her dismay in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, from the same year.

Her character seems to have wandered into a soul-sapping urban nightmare that Edgar Wright turned into the fantasy-horror of Last Night in Soho half a century later. Although where Soho’s Sandie is initially enchanted by the razzle dazzle of an idealized swinging sixties Soho, Norah navigates the black-and-white chill of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square like a zombie – frustrated and unimpressed.

Teddy Bear presents a city teeming with selfish and indifferent people clustered in tight spaces, rubbing each other all wrong – much like Hitchcock (courtesy of Saul Bass) comically chronicled in the main-titles sequence of the 1959 classic North by Northwest. This film takes it one step further by portraying New Yorkers who are mostly, at best, pathologically selfish or sexually dysfunctional or, at worst, ravenous or murderous predators.

Pretty much everyone we see in Teddy Bear acts oddly or is just plain weird. For a post-#MeToo viewer, so much of the behavior and dialogue in Teddy Bear comes off as icky and offensive. It’s as though each relationship here is fraught with underlying tension and every exchange is an assault.

Indeed, everyone misreads everyone else: Lawrence doesn’t know how to negotiate the fact that Norah already finds him attractive – probably because he recognizes she sees him as a boy and not a man. The cop, Dave Madden (Jan Murray), “studies” or obsesses over sexual pathologies within earshot and eyeshot of his precocious preteen daughter (Murray’s real-life daughter Diane Moore). And when Norah invites the unapologetic Marian (Broadway actress Elaine Stritch) to share her bed, she’s horrified to realize that that’s exactly what Marian wanted all along!

In addition to Murray and Stritch, Teddy Bear also boasts a fine cast of notable character actors including Daniel J. Travanti (The Stone Killer, Hill Street Blues), Frank Campanella (Mannix, The Stone Killer, Death Wish II), Bruce Glover (Diamonds are Forever, Chinatown) and Tom Aldridge (The Sopranos and one of my favorites, Barbarians at the Gate)

II.

Teddy Bear’s most audacious aspect is the way the camera eroticizes not the female body but the male body – Sal Mineo’s body in particular. This was highly unusual for a film of the period but it is likely that the openly bisexual (read that however you like) Mineo was totally up for it.

At a time when Hollywood actively suppressed its homosexuals' otherness, Mineo was surprisingly open about his bisexuality. He often spoke about sleeping with both women and men - although he never confirmed whether he slept with James Dean – and probably had little to no fear of appearing as a sexualized male, something which undoubtedly killed his career as a leading man.

Indeed, in 1969, Mineo produced, directed and starred in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play that takes place in a men’s prison and featured (in Mineo’s staging) frequent nude scenes. The play also showcased one of actor Don Johnson’s earliest roles.

Most striking of all in Teddy Bear is the Vaseline-lensed scenes of Mineo dressed only in his tighty whities (!), simulating masturbation by stroking his torso or his leg. That must have seemed positively scandalous in 1965.

Although Norah gets several underwear scenes herself, they have none of the erotic frisson – or the highly suggestive use of Vaseline – of Lawrence in his underwear, the many shots of his rear end in tight pants, working out in the gym – and most provocatively of all, emerging at the pool in a Speedo in all his hardened glory. (Imagine if Paul Morrissey remade Teddy Bear several years later with Joe Dallesandro!)

While the cop accuses Norah – without any evidence – of being “virginal” and Marian says something is wrong with her (frigid? asexual? celibate?), Lawrence is sexualized right off the bat – but by all the wrong women and, suspiciously, considering how homoerotically Lawrence is portrayed, no men at all.

The homo-eroticization of Mineo, however unbelievable it may sound, was very likely unintentional: a happy accident, if you will. Teddy Bear’s makers were ostensibly all straight men making a film about a psychosexual heterosexual. Very few actors in Hollywood would have – or could have – taken the role of Lawrence in 1965. But Mineo’s outspoken preferences made him a good fit. And there’s little doubt Mineo knew exactly what he was getting into by playing Lawrence.

I think the camera’s fixation on Mineo’s body is meant to convey the disparity in Lawrence’s dual nature. Outside, he is all man: seemingly mature and engaging in adult activities (working, exercising, caring for his sister, smoking, even going to “adult” movies). Although he is still boyishly attractive, his hairy arms, his shaven face, his tight abs – and other such features – mark him very much as a man: to be seen, “all man.”

But inside, he is broken, lonely, troubled and pathologically immature. It’s pretty clear that Norah recognizes this too, for in each of her (pre-attack) encounters with Lawrence, she speaks to him as if he were a willful child – in need more of a sitter than a girlfriend.

Likewise, the older adults – like Marian and Dave, the only other characters he interacts with – treat Lawrence as though he were a naughty youth, neatly (or intentionally) recalling his Plato from a decade before. Even as Lawrence nervously scours the windows of the adult stores in Times Square, his demeanor is that of the newly pubescent male, awkwardly coming to terms with what he desires, craves or obsesses over.

III.

Lawrence has effectively internalized the (typically Freudian) trauma that has infantilized his sister. That trauma, revealed in a flashback, finds Lawrence being lured to bed by an older woman - who is, in all likelihood, his and Edie’s mother. While Norman Bates never scored with his mother that we know of, the oblique reference back to the twisted mother-son relationship in Psycho suggests that Lawrence may also have done away with his mother.

Witnessed by Edie, their lovemaking shocks the young girl into a perpetual childlike state. Now at 19, Edie, too, desires or seeks to attract the (sexual?) attention of her older brother.

When Lawrence realizes what Edie’s up to, he’s appalled not as much by her intentions as by her sloppy mimicking of other women’s wiles, Norah’s in particular: the hair, the jewelry, the makeup, the slinky dress and heels. This suggests that Mineo’s character sees all – for lack of a better phrase – “dolled up” women as much the same: dolls mercilessly teasing awkward overly horny males.

This may well explain how Lawrence could later mistake Marian for Norah. But this is where the film goes a bit off the rails into utter incoherence. We are reminded here that the film takes place over the course of only a few days. Indeed, a mere two days after Lawrence’s first obscene call to Norah, he’s moved up to wanna-be rapist and full-fledged strangler.

How could Marian not recognize Lawrence? Maybe she was ashamed after Norah rejected her. And why did Lawrence – even throughout their scuffle – not recognize Marian? Maybe he was too horny to notice. Certainly, Marian was wearing Norah’s fur and the two sport similar coifs. Perhaps Marian’s initial resistance and ability to fight back (the attack is staged like a fight scene from West Side Story) inflamed his anger.

Despite the conjecture, Marian’s murder seems utterly senseless (unless Lawrence has already killed his mother, as previously suggested) – and unaccountably inconsequential to everyone in the film. Also, Lawrence’s modus operandi with the woman he thinks is Norah is the exact opposite of his attack on the real Norah.

Lawrence, who recognizes Marian only after she’s dead, doesn’t appear to rape Marian before killing her. Meanwhile, he doesn’t kill Norah after apparently raping or attempting to rape her (both struggle against each other while fully clothed).

For that matter, it makes little sense why the cops shoot Lawrence in the end. All they can know at that point is that he stalked and (possibly) raped Norah. They have no evidence tying Lawrence to Marian’s death and no other reason to shoot a fleeing, unarmed man. One wonders how the street cops that kill Lawrence know he’s done anything bad at all.

IV.

While Lawrence’s death spares us some doctor’s meaningless Psycho mumbo jumbo, it doesn’t do much to “explain” Lawrence and what made him tick.

Neither does all the sleaze that Dave, the film’s creepy deviance sleuth, appears to be “studying”: Teenage Nudist magazine (!), “Sex, Culture, and Myth,” “Sadism and Masochism Vol. 1, Raw sin slashed by Lupo Sebreng’s “Slash of Lust,” and the adult comic “Nurse in Rubber.” Does any of this provide insight into anybody other than Dave, who, in another of the film’s bouts of bad parenting, leaves all this material out for his pre-teen daughter to peruse?

Might Lawrence’s apparent fascination with and repulsion of women’s clothing be in some way a repressed interest in what was known then as transvestism? This would further link Lawrence to Norman Bates, who wore his mother’s clothes when he took on his mother’s persona. Indeed, Lawrence seems obsessed in all ways by the sort of slinky clothes the older woman who seduced him wore and the way the dancers at the club move in them.

On the other hand, Lawrence’s hyper masculine apparel – like Brando in The Wild One or James Dean in Rebel - suggests, perhaps, that he was repressing something else: his homo- or bisexuality.

Apart from the blatant (homo-)eroticization of Mineo, the film neither hints at nor alludes to homosexuality in any way. If the film or its makers didn’t know to do so (Hitchcock would have made the case by doubling Lawrence the way he did with Norman and Sam Loomis), perhaps it’s because Lawrence didn’t recognize it himself.

His obscene calls and swim suit appearance more than amply suggest he’s not impotent. But his odd encounters with and later attacks on both Marian and Norah also imply he doesn’t really know what to do with a woman.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he prefers men, but his regard of his own body – notably evident in his highly-charged workout scene – suggests he is more than a little aware of the appeal of the male body, if not to others than surely to himself. Mineo, in particular, ably implies that Lawrence would know what to do with a man. Perhaps that is why he had to die: society killed teddy bear.

V.

Teddy Bear was directed by Joseph Cates (1924-98), best known today as father of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) star and actor Kevin Kline’s wife, Phoebe Cates. He was also a Broadway producer, notably the first stateside presentation of A Day in the Life of Joe Egg (1968) with Albert Finney and Joan Hickson. Later, Cates went on to produce and direct many TV specials, including several for Steve Martin, Johnny Cash, the Berenstain Bears (of all things) and the Tony Awards.

Here, Cates makes the most of his compact spaces. While most indoor spaces look like sets, they have an appropriate NYC claustrophobia about them. Cates prowls these rooms like a cat, taking in the tension and discord that fill the spaces. Even in the particularly drab club – which, though we are told has recently converted to a discotheque, still looks like an old person’s idea of a place where young people hang out – Cates manages to stage a number of interesting set-ups.

The dancers, in particular, are well considered: although they seem superfluous to the story, watch the angles distort as the story’s (or Lawrence’s) frenzy mounts. Interestingly, Cates never sexualizes the dancers (or really even Norah), suggesting that whatever demons they’re feeding throb only in Lawrence’s vivid imagination.

Much of the credit for the look of Teddy Bear properly goes to cinematographer Joseph C. Brun (1907-98), who shot such gorgeous, gritty and NYC-based films as Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Bruns also lensed Cates’ previous feature, the drama Girl of the Night (1960), and his next, the spoof The Fat Spy (1966).

Here, Bruns does his best work outdoors, particularly during Norah’s chilly-looking rounds of auditions in the teeming Theater District and, especially later, in Times Square at night. The night scenes in particular make New York City look like a circus of vice and corruption, even though things look pretty orderly and for the most part family friendly (catch the funny scene where two little kids watch Lawrence buying a ticket for an “adults only” film).

Teddy Bear’s story is by Arnold Drake (1924-2007), a golden-age comic-book writer best known for co-creating Deadman and Doom Patrol for DC Comics and characters in the Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel. Nothing else in Drake’s (or co-writer Leon Tokatyn’s) filmography looks or sounds anything like Teddy Bear.

Drake’s only other film credits include writing and producing the comic romp 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing) (1963 – directed by William Rose, who also helmed the giallo The Girl in Room 2-A) and writing, producing and storyboarding (!) the proto-gorefest The Flesh Eaters (1964 – directed by Jack Curtis, a voice artist best known for Pops Racer on TV’s Speed Racer).

VI.

Teddy Bear’s surprisingly Bond-ish main-title theme is a compelling ballad (prefiguring “You Only Live Twice”) written by composer Al Kasha and the Four Seasons’ main songwriter, Bob Gaudio (“Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” etc.). It’s a haunting tune that provocatively mourns the death or disappearance of an overly-idealized and abusive lover.

The song is credited to vocalist Rita Dyson, who seems not to have recorded anything else under that name. In July 1964, Cash Box and Record World reported that Ivan Mogull discovered a Rita Dyson, “songstress at the Concord Hotel in upstate New York,” who was slated to record an LP on 4-Star Records to be produced by Belford Hendricks and Dick Hyman – that apparently never happened. She was reported to be doing a club date at the Scene in Los Angeles around the time the film that features her lone vocal credit opened.

The actress and singer Lessie Uggams covered the Teddy Bear theme in December 1965 on an Atlantic single that, surprisingly didn’t seem to chart. There was also a version of the song released shortly thereafter by little-known Brit vocalist Mikki Young (a.k.a. Claire Francis) and, later, a terrific version of the theme by singer/actress Tami Tappan-Damiano on the now hard-to-find 2003 Kritzerland compilation Jeepers Creepers: Great Songs from Horror Films.

Teddy Bear is the first of only a few film scores composer Charlie Calello (b. 1938) ever did (he later composed the Razzie award-winning score for 1983’s Pia Zadora bomb The Lonely Lady). His Teddy Bear is particularly effective, notably during the outdoor scenes. At the time, Calello was the Four Seasons’ bassist and musical arranger. Shortly thereafter, he left to become a staff arranger and producer for Columbia Records. Since then, he’s arranged or produced dozens of hits for Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, Barbara Streisand, Odyssey, Juice Newton and many others.

Calello’s score, however, plays second fiddle to the “discotheque” songs. While the film credits these to Gaudio and Kasha – who had previously collaborated on the songs “Now and Forever” and “The Gospel Truth” from Kai Winding’s 1964 album Mondo Cane #2 (an album partly arranged by Calello) – they were actually written by Al Kasha (1937-2020) and his regular writing partner, Joel Hirschhorn (1938-2005).

The prolific Kasha and Hirschhorn team scored many hits over the years but are probably best known for their award-winning hit theme to The Poseidon Adventure, “The Morning After,” in 1972. Here, they provide the terrific “Born to be Bad,” “It Could Have Been Me,” “Toothbrush and Comb” – all sung by Al Kasha himself – and a delightful “Watermelon Man”-ish instrumental.

This suggests there was probably enough material for a soundtrack album, but nothing official ever appeared. Not even the Rita Dyson song was released on record. However, there apparently exists a 45-rpm single version (presumably a promotional issue) of “Born to be Bad” (2:07) that appears to have been issued concurrent to the film on an unnamed label with a peculiarly specific catalog number of SK4M-3084 (possibly representing a score-cue matrix number). The record is so rare that it is not even listed in Discogs – making it one heck of a find.

A recent YouTube post of the Teddy Bear theme pictures an actual EP (with the same catalog number as the above single) that includes Dyson’s version of the theme, as well as Uggams and Young’s as well. This seems like a fan creation, albeit a well-designed and considered one, rather than a real thing. A comment on the video post by one Aaron Shore indicates that “Al Kasha told me a few years before he died he had the masters.”

VII.

New York City plays itself in several crucial and beautifully-shot Teddy Bear scenes. One is set in the Central Park Zoo, setting of many films and TV shows, including Edward Dmytryk’s dazzling noir thriller Mirage, from the same year. Other significant scenes are set in Times Square: one where Norah is followed as she makes the rounds of auditions in the Theatre District and two others follow Lawrence.

Based on all the ephemera on view, these sequences clearly seem to have been shot in mid to late February, 1965.

Norah (00:23:47-00:26:06): Upon leaving her surprisingly swanky midtown “walk up,” Norah makes the rounds of auditions in the Theatre District. This is largely from the perspective of Lt. Madden, who, following her in his large black and easily detectable 1965 model Ford Galaxie 500, is stalking her as much as her as-yet unknown caller.

Norah passes by the John Golden Theatre on W. 45th Street, presenting a revival of Victor Borge’s Comedy in Music, before her first audition then passes by the Royale (now Bernard B. Jacobs) Theatre, presenting the short-lived comedy All in Good Time. She drifts by the Music Box before heading up to an audition at the 54th St. Theatre, which was presenting What Makes Sammy Run with Steve Lawrence at the time.

After stopping for a burger at a White Tower restaurant, Norah again passes the Music Box, featuring Sandy Dennis in Any Wednesday, and the Majestic (on W. 44th), playing host to Sammy Davis, Jr. in the Tony-nominated Golden Boy. Finally exhausted, Norah heads to the Henry Hudson Hotel (later known as the Hudson, until 2020) to swim at the Hudson Health Club – where Lawrence also works out.

Lawrence #1 (00:54:41-00:59:06): On a night off from work, an agitated Lawrence wanders Times Square in search of something to alleviate (or wind up) his pent-up sexual tension. He heads down Broadway past the Embassy Theatre and Buitoni on Broadway, an Italian eatery whose patrons stare at him as he goes by, to nervously check out the clothing in the windows of the Benhill Shops next door.

He heads down to check out the marquee at the Latin Quarter club on Lexington (founded in 1942 by Barbara Walters’ father), then presenting the “Unusual Humor of George Matson,” a comedian and mime who performed at the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in Monaco in 1956 and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in 1962.

Lawrence then heads over to Seventh Avenue (across the street from the legendary Tad’s Steaks, which closed as recently as 2020) to check out the windows of a novelty clothing store whose hand-written signs indicate a Valentine’s Day sale and a “Riviera Bikini Set – All Sizes! Gay Colors!” Here, he crosses Seventh Avenue at 47th street where Lou’s Parlor Shoe Shine, the Mayfair Bar and the Hotel Ashley can be seen in the background.

Lawrence eventually finds himself at a book-store window looking at provocative titles like “Sex Crimes in History,” “Psychopathia Sexualis” and, not coincidentally, “Patterns of Incest” as well as then-controversial novels like “Tropic of Cancer,” “Deer Park” and “Fanny Hill.” At a magazine stand full of girlie magazines, Lawrence pages through Dave King’s gay-looking (but not) novella “Beach Stud.”

He is then enticed to some softcore fun at the World Theatre (on W. 49th Street), where he takes in a double-bill of the 1962 film Call Girl 77 (a film that is better known as Surfside 77) and the 1963 “documentary” Hollywood’s World of Flesh. Incidentally, the World Theatre, which was demolished in 1987, was home to the New York City premiere of the notorious Deep Throat in 1972.

After a brief scene between Norah and Marian, we return to a clearly agitated and confused Lawrence running down 7th Avenue, where the Brass Rail restaurant can be seen in the background. Across the street is the long-gone Calico Kitchen Restaurant, right next to the famed trad-jazz club Metropole Café, then featuring trombonist and actor Conrad Janis – only months before the club permanently closed.

These scenes briefly and beautifully suggest the mounting rage and frustration in Mineo’s Lawrence. They also prefigure the much more explicit, more pronounced and more violent aggression in Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle eleven years later (the year of Mineo’s tragic murder).

Lawrence #2 (01:28:09-01:30:00): After Lawrence attacks Norah, he runs out of the discotheque, emerging on 7th Avenue at about where the Taft Hotel (now the Michelangelo) was located at the time. He crosses the street, running downtown past Elpine Drinks (at 50th Street), the Golden Slipper Ballroom, the elegant Howard Clothes store (at 48th Street) and Castro’s Convertibles (at 47th Street) – all now gone, at least from those locations.

The police seem to appear out of nowhere at this point, forcing an awkward jump cut where Lawrence crosses Broadway into daylight. Here, he passes the Warner Cinerama Theatre (at Broadway and 47th Street), its marquee promoting the bombastic The Greatest Story Ever Told, starring, among others, none other than Sal Mineo himself! (“Everyone was in it,” Mineo later said of the film that opened in NYC on February 15, 1965.)

Lawrence then runs past the Astor Theatre, playing Billy Wilder’s 1964 comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (the theatre was later razed to make way for the Marriott Marquis) before being gunned down in front of the historic Hotel Astor, bounded by Broadway, Shubert Alley, 44th and 45th Streets (now the location of the high-rise One Astor Plaza).

These scenes are also oddly interrupted by flashing flashbacks or, more likely, delusions of Lawrence running toward – and never reaching – the illusory Norah. These scenes seem unnecessary, and while it looks like a snow-bound funeral, we are clearly in Central Park (the iconic art-deco Essex House hotel on Central Park S. can be seen in the background). Why…we just don’t know.

VIII.

While Taxi Driver’s “boiling cauldron” makes Lawrence’s Big Apple look positively PG-rated by comparison (at least by 21st century standards), it is a delight to wallow in Teddy Bear’s pre-“Disneyfication,” the much-criticized makeover of Times Square in the 1990s.

To be fair, though, Taxi Driver was not set in Times Square, but rather in the city’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, which experienced its own gentrification even earlier in the 1980s. But Teddy Bear is as much a precursor to Taxi Driver as both films are the spawn of Hitchcock’s Psycho.

All three films are paranoid nightmares, microcosms of ever-shifting norms and values. Each exploit – or comment on – the culture from which they emerge, like monsters slithering out of the ooze of the unknown.

Norman, Lawrence and Travis are all “the other,” the id personifications of what decent society fears most: modernity (consistently symbolized by some level of interest in pornography); absent parents (although mothers tend to haunt these films); women (represented by misogynist and/or sexually dysfunctional males); those unable or unwilling to fit in to the homosocial order (read: patriarchy); and the rage that transforms sad, young men into angry, murderous beasts.

Who Killed Teddy Bear’s title alone suggests not only the death of innocence but a longing for a sort of illusory childhood innocence; one that offers the comfort, security, reassurance and unconditional love that only a teddy bear can offer a child. Teddy Bear’s teddy bears are real, figurative (Norah in fur, for example) and symbolic (Lawrence, the pretty shell that hides an ugly self). They can also be cute and cuddly as well as sinister and sick – no mean feat for a 90-minute B-film.

This Teddy Bear is ultimately a remarkable little film: maybe not as grand, innovative or classic as either Psycho or Taxi Driver but certainly strong enough to hold its own in their esteemed company.

Sal Mineo delivers a strong and daring performance as Lawrence and consistently makes Teddy Bear compelling and worth watching. Juliet Prowse is fine and inexplicably frosty as Norah, though she is probably a bit too old and world-weary to play the film’s ingenue.

Jan Murray – who had, coincidentally, previously appeared in a January 1965 episode of Burke’s Law titled “Who Killed Mother Goose?” – plays Dave as the typical TV cop/dad in a part that is otherwise very strangely written. Elaine Stritch positively shines as the lesbian club manager Marian; her all-too brief scenes all have a natural sense of gritty realism. Dig the way she purrs “I dig soft things, don’t you?” to Norah and the pain and confusion she exudes when Norah finally rebuffs her.

Released in September 1965, Who Killed Teddy Bear holds up over half a century later. Although the film’s fears and concerns seem pretty tame by today’s standards, Teddy Bear is a worthy entry in the angry young (white) man cycle of films that eventually brought us Pyscho and Taxi Driver.