WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR?




 These images are, left to right, Larry and Norah, Larry about to buy a book at a 42nd Street adult bookstore, and Norah, a victim of Larry's anonymous phone calls.     Source:http://www.5minutesonline.com/1D/WHOKILLEDTEDDYP.HTM

       The toy bear in this 1965 film belongs to Larry Sherman’s (Sal Mineo) kid sister;  in the opening shot it,  and the little girl, are seen tumbling down a flight of stairs. She dropped it after seeing Larry attacking
her older sister in bed. The experience left her with permanent emotional scars; Larry is  now her guardian. He is an intensely introverted person who harasses women with telephone calls (while fondling a headless teddy bear), spies on them from his midtown apartment window, and browses pornographic books and magazines on 42nd St. Like Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, he is strong, silent, and handsome, a lonely misfit seething with bottled-up libido. His relationship with his sister may be incestuous, despite the guilt he feels at having caused her injuries. He hates her dressing in a way girls her age usually would, because he cannot handle provocation any more than he can rejection.  The woman on whom he spies, Norah, played by Juliet Prowse, is a dancer in the night club at which Larry is a waiter. He seems a polite boy, and one night she dances the twist with him. She does not equate sexual expression with
seductiveness or sin. Her dancing is not a come-on, just fun, and her manner of dressing, unlike Mineo’s, who wears tight jerseys and even tighter jeans, is not suggestive. Larry (and the director) need to rivet attention on his seductiveness, because his desire is as powerful as it is self-destructive, for it has been and can be satisfied only by guilty action. The build up of emotional tension and frustration is very much like Travis Bickle's. Taxi Driver's score is its perfect expression. Off guard, Larry tries to kiss and caress Nora, and when rejected, says what many browsers of "one-handed" magazines, books, and films might have said, one time or another, to themselves or a sex object. Larry cries “Why with . . . every slob, and not with me?” He is helpless before his compulsions and his resulting self-hate.



    Larry is himself stalked, by Detective Bill Madden, whose wife was killed by a “sex deviate.” Madden’s apartment is full of sexology books, prurient magazines of the sort that he feels causes sex crimes, and tape recordings, which his daughter overhears, of people like Larry calling women to tell them why they are objects of their fantasies. Do the movie’s viewers root for this cat to track down Larry? If so, are they supposed to believe as he does about the evils of pornography? He believes that it whets the appetite of unbalanced people for sexual assault. “Nobody’s inviolate” as targets of these monsters. That in fact is what the era’s crime-fighters asserts: Billy Graham, Senator Estes Kefauver, Mayor Robert Wagner, J. Edgar Hoover. 

  But Madden is a bit of a voyeur himself, is as obsessive as his nemesis, and because of that provides a
somewhat unhealthy atmosphere for his daughter. As played by comedian Jan Murray, he is a camp figure, especially when he catches up with Larry. A skinny stand-up comic, trying to talk like Broderick Crawford, beating up on a wiry, muscle-bound man twenty years younger? Even if one is able to suspend disbelief, the film has a touch of  camp. The ending therefore might make one think. As described by the film’s press book, “Madden . . . almost beats Lawrence to death. He manages to stop himself just a split second short of becoming as much of a beast as the man he hunts.” Bluecoats’ bullets dispatch Larry. Crime doesn’t pay. As far as the movie industry’s decency code of the period is concerned, it’s that simple. The moral justifies all the juicy salaciousness that is the film’s cash cow.

    But the camp earnestness allows Director Joseph Cates to make the audience think about its point of view toward the characters, and also toward the film’s subject, which is the difficulty of handling basic needs sanely and healthily, when so much guilt is generated by expressing them. The character most assured about her sexuality is Norah’s boss Marian, a lesbian. When Marion expresses her preference to Norah, she is horrified. Perhaps Marian's death (at Larry’s hands) is one of the nods the producer had to make to the decency code of the period.  This B-movie (although the director makes it more than that) can easily pass muster as a warning of the dangers of sexual fascinations. 

   It is also a form of prurient entertainment. The press book suggests several headlines local papers might use to publicize its showing: “”Peeper Oggles Strip Dancer Taking Bath,” “Strange Sex Crime in New Film Shocker,” “Anonymous Calls Lead to Attack.” 

    We may distance ourselves from Larry, and Madden, but why did we see the movie? Is it going to affect our conduct? Only if we are as obsessive as the two adversaries, or the aforementioned political and religious leaders who must have seen more commercial sex and violence fare than the average man does. And what is pornographic, anyway? Norah learns “Even walking is provocative.” The preachers and senators seem as camp as Teddy Bear’s advertisements; they,  like Detective Madden, fall on you like such a ton of bricks that you have to stand back and laugh. If Who Killed Teddy Bear does nothing else, it should be admired for providing its audience with that distance. That’s a heck of an improvement over a hollow crusade against something as close to us as furtive sex. It makes it harder to take Rev. Graham seriously when he brings down the curtain on one of his New York crusades with a speech in Times Square saying its bookstores and movie houses should force a spiritual reawakening on the citizens of
New York. He’s got to be leaving something out. Who wants to be a Bill Madden?