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Who Killed Teddy Bear /  USA  /  1965

“Tell me who killed teddy bear;
Doesn’t anybody care
That I miss him?”

“I found myself on the weirdo list.”

12;Sal Mineo

Five years after earning his second Oscar nomination, twenty-six year-old Sal Mineo starred in Who Killed Teddy Bear, a film that knowingly and penitently forced social taboos into the forefront of American cinema. The year was 1965, and the moment seemed ripe for newfound maturity. The national consciousness was dominated by the escalation in Vietnam, the American counterculture’s experimentation with drugs and free love, and the race to dominate space; the nation needed to confront its burgeoning identity, its future, never mind the theory that tragedy fostered escapism. Instead, the film was ignored by audiences, reviled by critics, and nearly destroyed Mineo’s career. Today, commercially unavailable, Who Killed Teddy Bear has mistakenly attained the mark of a cult film.

Appropriately, Joseph Cates’ film begins with a scene of sex. Blurred and slightly obscured by the opening credits, two writhing bodies accompany the lurid and over-orchestrated title song. As the scene proceeds, the music fades and we’re shown a young girl crouching in a doorway, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. Upset by what she sees, she turns and begins down a flight of stairs, only to trip and fall with a chilling scream. The camera isolates her face and the splayed body of her precious toy, and the song crescendos as the film’s title flashes onto the screen.

The camera cuts to a man laying in the shadows of early morning. Clad in only tight white briefs, he is awoken by an alarm clock. Rising, he lights a cigarette, feels himself up in a mirror, and makes a telephone call. What follows is his side of the conversation, a lewd testament to this unseen man’s character: “I know you don’t know me, but I know you‚Ķvery well. I know what you look like right now. I can see your skin.” The woman on the other end hangs up. Only later is she herself introduced to us as Norah Dain, the hostess at a fledgling new-wave discotheque managed by thick-skinned Marian Freeman, a closet lesbian. At the disco Norah dispenses drinks, stocks the jukebox, and fends off advances from drunken men. This day, shaken by the earlier phone call, she confesses her concern to Marian, who brushes them off as nothing. At her side is a timid busboy named Lawrence and the club’s deaf-mute bouncer Carlo, who is soon injured when an inebriated patron stabs him in the neck. Accompanying Carlo to the police station, Marian mentions the obscene phone call to police; again, Norah dismisses it as nothing—“just a phone call,” the first and only. Nearby, Detective Dave Madden overhears the exchange and approaches, offering to drive her home. It soon becomes apparent that Madden, an outwardly sarcastic man, finds Norah’s case especially interesting, so much so that Norah begins to suspect he’s the caller.

There is another phone call that night, after which Madden again meets Norah and offers her an impromptu lesson in the ways of the sexually perverse:

MADDEN: Well, we were discussing the telephone psychotic, which is generic, like saying “animal.” It’s a beginning, period. Then you start to break it down. Lions, your ant, mouse.

NORAH: That was no mouse that called me.

MADDEN: Some are fetishists, some are sadists, some are masochists. Then there are the simple voyeurs, the pedophiliacs. But even that’s too neat, too much like rules. So we have the combinations, and I’m not talking about your Uncle Charlie who buys pin-up calendars. I mean the complicated pairings. The sadomasochists, the voyeur-masochists, the exhibitionists, the necrophiliacs.

NORAH: You seem to know a lot about these things.

MADDEN: Someone should.

truth is much more distressing. A few years before, Madden’s wife—the mother of his only child, a daughter—was attacked, raped, and left for dead in an alleyway. Since then, Madden has devoted his entire life to understanding the minds of sexual deviants. Invited to stay at his apartment, Norah takes stock of Madden’s daily life: Strewn around a large desk are books and journals devoted solely to the sexual mind—Teenage Nudist, Slash Lust, Rubber, Sex, Culture, and Myth, Sadism and Masochism: Volume One—alongside a library of taped confessions from various victims. At night, Madden plays the recordings as if they were lullabies, all while his daughter sleeps in the next room; in one shoot, we see adolescent Pam lying awake in bed, disturbed by the graphic details she’s forced to hear in the throes of twilight.

Along the same lines, Lawrence the busboy lives with his sister, whose cognitive impairment is the result of an accident when she was younger. Curious, she happened upon her older brother having sex. Upset, she ran and fell down the stairs; at her side was her precious teddy bear. Now she has the cognizance of a child and relies solely on the aid of her brother, all the while clinging to the molding, threadbare relic of her childhood. To Lawrence, she’s a constant reminder of the repercussions of sex. He never dates, never goes out on the town, instead frequenting local porn theatres and adult bookstores for satisfaction. Yet his hunger is never appeased, so he resorts to spying on Norah, a neighbor across the alleyway. (His identity as the voyeur is revealed to us in classic melodramatic fashion—with the lighting of a cigarette.)

Lawrence and Detective Madden are distinguished by screenwriter Arnold Drake as contradictions in morality, yet they’re also depicted as equals in anguish. Both men are driven by devastating sexual episodes from their pasts that now dominate their lives—Lawrence’s existence outside the discotheque is haunted by what happened to his sister, while Dave Madden’s job is a continual reminder of what happened to his wife. Both men attempt to find answers, even solace, in text—Madden in various publications that are near pornographic in their presentation, Lawrence in the manuscripts of the local adult bookstores; near the film’s end, we find Lawrence in a downtown shop perusing the season’s new “sleaze” fiction, namely William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn.

But what undoubtedly kept this film from achieving any sort of renown are the various themes of sex and sexuality, all augmented by an underlying threat of violence: Lawrence’s feelings of devotion to Norah, his relentless and fatal voyeurism, his thriving shame over what his own sexual desire did to his sister; Madden’s home library of study, his underhanded habit of recording victims for personal scrutiny, the future his daughter will have to overcome alongside her father; and, perhaps most notably, the scene in which Marian attempts to seduce Norah, only to be strangled in an alleyway after Lawrence mistakes her for Norah. Decades after Who Killed Teddy Bear was released, Elaine Stritch was asked why she would take such a controversial role; she responded, “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. Now who’s not going to play that part?”

Released in an era when film censorship was a blistering topic, Cates’ film was criticized for its relentless depiction of Mineo in nothing more than a wardrobe of skin-tight jeans, T-shirts and, in perhaps the most controversial scene, groin-hugging swim trunks. (The scene, mentioned in many of the day’s gay-oriented magazines, was cut for video distribution and is absent from the True Gore DVD.) But by all contemporary standards, Who Killed Teddy Bear is a landmark. Not only was a television maverick and up-and-coming director concentrating the Hollywood cameras on the national psychosis—his first film, Girl of the Night, had focused on the world of call girls—he was doing so with a prominent cast. Along with Sal Mineo and Elaine Stritch, Cates directed famed dancer Juliet Prowse as Norah and comedian Jan Murray as Detective Madden. (Madden’s daughter Pam is played by Murray’s own daughter, Diane Moore.) The use of New York City serves not only as a great setting but an integral part of the paranoia, as the people are forced to live alongside one another in cold, exotic closeness; your neighbors could easily be your co-workers, your friends, your family, even your enemies, and an open window is an invitation to the world. But the film lacks greatly in cinematic proficiency. Many of the angles taken by Cates are simple and straightforward—there are no clever dissolves, no deep-focus photography or significant establishing shots, something usually meant to evoke realism but which ultimately leaves the pictures stale. When the camera moves—tilting upwards during a dance in the discotheque or down as Norah goes for a swim—the change is wasted. Much of the soundtrack composed by Charlie Calello and Joseph C. Brun, including the frantic music played in the discotheque, feels like bad adaptations of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll music.

Still, Who Killed Teddy Bear is far from a cult film, which are, by definition, widely available to the viewing public on video or in constant circulation at local theatres. Cates’ film, on the other hand, has been relegated to the catalogues of online retailers. And while Who Killed Teddy Bear is resurrected infrequently for special showings—at San Francisco’s Roxie and Castro Theatres in 1996 and New York’s Film Forum in 2000—it has never been given a formal release, even as an increasing number of film critics offer it praise. In 1996, Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The black-and-white film is highly stylized, and at times comes across as almost laughably contrived. But such a taunting, lurid atmosphere is unusual in Hollywood films even today.” The writers of VideoHound’s Independent Film Guide both laud the film for its brazen defiance of the dying Production Code and castigate it for its lack of cinematic flare. In Scarlet Street, George Haitch writes, “Shrewd direction, crisp dialogue, and exceptionally strong performances from an enthusiastic cast more than compensates for typically low-budget production values, but is the bold presentation of some provocative and downright lurid subject matter that gives this film its edge, and a sordid atmosphere of uncompromising tawdriness that makes it memorable….And the movie’s inherent momentum, twisted logic, and the star turn by Sal Mineo in one of his best, but least remembered, performances makes for riveting viewing.” In 1995, Jan Murray used an interview in the same magazine to voice his enduring satisfaction with the film. In fact, the film’s greatest detractor may be Leonard Maltin, who decries it as a “sleazy, leering low-budget suspenser” and “a waste of talent.”

When Joseph Cates died in 1998 he had, in a sense, joined Sal Mineo as a victim of the film’s reputation. After Who Killed Teddy Bear, Mineo took to the stage in New York and Los Angeles , while Cates made his third and final feature—a forgettable Jayne Mansfield vehicle co-starring Phyllis Diller and titled The Fat Spy—in 1966 and returned to television. His obituary in Time Magazine made no mention of his three feature films, all of which were produced in a six-year period, focusing instead on “The $64,000 Question,” which he co-produced, and the work he did on “more than 1,000 made-for-TV specials.”

Adam Balz | © 2007 notcoming.com

Comments / 2 total / Submit Comment

1. Sean / 1 April 2007 / 1:48 PM / URL

   Hello. Thank you for this highly informative article. I’m a huge Elaine Stritch fan and I just found out about “Who Killed Teddy Bear” earlier today, so this was very helpful. I was just wondering — is the True Gore DVD edition available for on-line orders?

2. Adam B. / 1 April 2007 / 3:09 PM / URL

   Yes it is, though the film’s scarcity means that the quality isn’t the best.

   http://www.rustedrare.com/home.html