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"Study the girlfriend," the screwball is aware of the femme fatale mystique yet ignores his own advice. Out of the asylum and into polluted Nowhere, Massachusetts, the smirking fantasist (Anthony Perkins) with an incendiary past. Home is a trailer for eavesdropping on Russian radio broadcasts, work is a conveyor belt of bottled toxins through a distorting glass. A CIA agent in his own mind, "self-reliant," his object of desire is the blonde high-schooler (Tuesday Weld), restless, excitable, "empty" in her own words. His myth-making is catnip to the marching-band majorette with a sneering mother (Beverly Garland), they embark on a bit of amateur sabotage and the kitty's malevolent colors come out. "Boy. What a week. I met you on Monday, fell in love with you on Tuesday, Wednesday I was unfaithful, Thursday we killed a guy together." A noir comedy at the dawn of New Hollywood, juveniles and their lethal playacting. The tiny hamlet has a contaminating factory and a make-out spot in the woods and a stream for drowning luckless security guards, the old family house is a pyre glimpsed in subliminal flashes. Ooze spilled on the lens turns the screen red, though Noel Black mostly eschews shocks in favor of a placid eye on ingrown perversities. "Lascivious carriage" is the protagonist's albatross, too sneakily cocksure to notice he's a patsy until it's the middle of a murder scheme and the lass has to pull the trigger herself, smiling. (She lets out a witchy cackle in the aftermath, the camera frames her visage upside-down on a white pillow.) The joke is Perkins once again facing dark waters with a corpse in the trunk, "what a damn deceptive world." Fassbinder in Jail Bait offers an analytical anagram. With John Randolph, Dick O'Neill, Clarice Blackburn, and Ken Kercheval.
--- Fernando F. Croce |