THE HONEYMOON KILLERS

In the wake of BONNIE AND CLYDE, when Hollywood was busy turning murderers into glamorous countercultural heroes, Leonard Kastle set out to make a movie about criminal lovers without a trace of glamour. Based on the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, THE HONEYMOON KILLERS follows a pair of desperate misfits who travel the country seducing lonely widows, stealing their savings, and occasionally murdering them. Their romance unfolds in cheap boarding houses and dreary suburban interiors, photographed in grainy black-and-white that seems liable to leave ink on your fingers. Yet Kastle, an opera composer who never directed another film, scores the whole sordid enterprise to Mahler, insisting on the tragic grandeur of two people whose lives would otherwise be confined to the crime pages.

Shirley Stoler is extraordinary as Martha Beck, a lonely, furious nurse who falls hopelessly in love with professional swindler Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and insists on accompanying him as he romances his next victims. Stoler had always wanted to play Medea, but Hollywood had little use for a heavyset actress with ambitions toward classical tragedy. Here she finally found a role worthy of her talents, playing Martha as a woman whose longing for love has curdled into an almost infantile fury at being denied it. Posing as Ray's sister, she watches with mounting jealousy as the man she adores makes his living promising other women exactly what he's promised her. Their relationship is ridiculous, pathetic, and unmistakably passionate. The terrible joke is that Martha believes absolutely in the sincerity of a man whose only talent is lying to women.