Movies: Pretty Poison

Pitt’s given a singularly uninteresting job at a chemical factory, which involves peering at an endless row of vials of red fluid (like blood) through a giant magnifying glass. At night he holes up in his trailer, listens to foreign radio broadcasts, and studies maps of the town; at dawn he runs out and snaps pictures of things with a spy camera. Is he deranged, or just trying to spice up his boring life with a little fun? The movie never comes out and says which, but there are strong hints of both — and it’s impossible not to be reminded of all the lonely losers in history who ended up killers because they couldn’t find any other way for people to pay attention to them.

It isn’t long before he runs into Sue-Ann (Tuesday Weld), as clean-scrubbed and all-American a girl as you could expect to find, even in a movie like this. She’s a majorette, an A student, and she thinks Pitt is the neatest thing since Wonder Bread. Even if he isn’t a real spy, he sure sounds like one — and in a town this boring, what’s wrong with livening things up a little bit? Pitt likes her too, but can only communicate his affection through his dementia, and soon enough he’s “recruiting” her for various “missions” around town that start off as timewasting larks and eventually escalate into real troublemaking.

The plot’s only part of the fun. The real joy of the movie is in watching Perkins and Weld play off of each other. Early on in their relationship, there are strong hints that she may have more of the cards than he does: she’s more sexually experienced than him, for one, and uses that to cement things between them at unexpected moments. It’s also clear that she’s turned on by danger — not that he isn’t, but that up until now he’s never savored it with anyone except himself. Leave it to Weld to utter one of the more telling statements about their relationship: “When grown-ups do it [meaning sex], it’s kind of dirty. That’s because there’s no one to punish them.” The reaction on Perkins’s face is priceless.

Any movie where sexual tension forms part of the story is always going to be fodder for endless interpretations. The surprise of Pretty Poison is that it has room for interpretation in many other places, too. The factory where Pitt works spews reddish filth (like blood) into the nearby river, but its contamination goes largely unnoticed until it’s too late. Likewise, the truly dangerous characters in the movie operate in plain sight, and can do so because people see what they choose to see. Pitt’s never been anything but a psycho (much as Perkins himself became in his career) and Sue-Ann’s nothing but apple pie and smiles. The two of them also see what they want to see in each other … at least at first.

Pretty Poison never had a chance. It was made and released at the worst possible time — right when both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, so a movie about two disturbed sociopaths was ostensibly not going to find an audience. Fox dumped it into theaters mostly to get it out of their hair. It did snag the attention of the critics, particularly Pauline Kael, but they couldn’t keep the film from disappearing almost instantly. It unfairly joined the ranks of many of Fox’s other late-Sixties duds — like the horrific Myra Breckenridge, the grotesque Sound of Music cash-in Star!, or the hideously ill-conceived Doctor Doolittle.

After its crash-and-burn theatrical release Poison didn’t even make it to home video, although it was remade for TV (badly) in 1996, and it’s only surfaced since then through the occasional cable broadcasts and now on DVD in the United Kingdom. Fox should do themselves a favor and give this a release here. It’s even more timely — and funny, and creepy — than it probably was ever intended to be.

Since this review was published, a domestic DVD edition has been released.