PRETTY POISON

Noel Black's darkly comic masterpiece "Pretty Poison" may owe quite a debt to"Psycho", (Anthony Perkin's Dennis is cut from the same cloth as Norman Bates), and in turn would influence the likes of Malick's"Badlands". What's even more surprising than the failure of the film to be better known than it actually is, (it's certainly a 'cult' movie), is that Black never went on to anything like a real cinema career though his direction here is exemplary. The plot, about a gormless sap being lead very badly astray by a femme fatale, (in this case, a very young femme fatale), is as old as the cinema itself and has served many a film-noir and gangster movie very well indeed though this is a lot more off-the-wall than most genre pictures.

Perkins is Dennis Pitt, recently released from a correctional institution where he has been incarcerated for arson and Tuesday Weld is the high-school senior who latches onto him. Dennis may be as nutty as a fruitcake but it's Weld's Sue Ann who is the film's pretty poison and it's she who eggs Dennis on and leads down much more dangerous roads than even he might have gone by himself. 

Both players are superb, Weld particularly so and there are brilliant supporting turns from Beverly Garland as Weld's tramp of a mother and John Randolph as Perkins' probation officer. The source material is a novel by Stephen Geller and the brilliant adaptation is by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Cult movie it may be; Noel Black's only real film of note it may be but this is still a small classic.