All-American Medea: Shirley Stoler in The Honeymoon Killers

In contrast to Penn’s romantic, impossibly good-looking doomed bandits, Kastle wanted to make the lovers-on-the-lam of The Honeymoon Killers as earthbound and unglamorous as their real-life counterparts. Tony Lo Bianco, another man of the stage, who’d cofounded the Triangle Theatre, played Fernandez as a slightly past-prime Spanish-American gigolo with a receding hairline, which in fact is what he was, and Stoler played Beck as purse-lipped and glowering, a big baby convinced that life has snatched her candy, like a live-action Little Lotta. Together they are something like a grotesque parody of Ricky and Lucy Ricardo—Lo Bianco the low-rent Latin lothario who doesn’t mind doing a little fanny-shaking for a thirsty female audience, Stoler the entitled Anglo harridan, forever squalling about being left behind and the unfairness of her lot. Their victims, to whom they introduce themselves as brother and sister, don’t make out much better: a bony schoolteacher warbling “God Bless America” in the bathtub; a nasal-voiced old biddy in Albany; and a tartish faded Southern belle played by Marilyn Chris, later a star of ABC soap One Life to Live but then traveling in the same off-Broadway circles as Stoler, whom she recommended for the Beck part after she failed to secure it herself. The black-and-white images by DP Oliver Wood have the feel of tabloid newsprint, and the film almost looks as though it would smudge to the touch. Like the peripatetic, insatiable Fernandez and Beck, The Honeymoon Killers finds little to admire in the prosperous postwar American scene; looking out the window from the Long Island home in which they stop to play suburbanites, Fernandez contemptuously snarls: “One little jail after another with ten feet of grass between them.”

The Honeymoon Killers wouldn’t be of much interest if it offered nothing but undiluted misanthropy, which is never scarce either overtly, in fringe film, or in a disguised form, in mainstream movies. But Kastle doesn’t show disdain, pity, or hero-worship toward Fernandez and Beck. He instead offers a complex, multifaceted portrayal that makes for a rather more pungent and lingering piece of work, a stain that won’t rub out. Martha is the nearest thing that the film has to an identification character, and as she repeatedly takes pleasure in playing along with Ray’s subterfuges with a secretive smirk, right up until the point when she discovers that the joke’s on her as well, so does the movie encourage a viewer to take pleasure in complicity with this antisocial duo before reminding us of the implications of our coconspirator status. There is a thrill in watching Stoler’s unregulated tantrums: when her Beck first appears, head nurse at a Mobile, Alabama, hospital, she is a vision of puritanical rage, breaking up an illicit tryst in the workplace laboratory before stomping along a suburban sidewalk on her way home, kicking a Radio Flyer wagon out of her path. This is the rage of a woman who feels herself unjustly denied the impassioned clutches and the rug rats that she believes she deserves—unlike the real Beck, Stoler’s character is childless—though emotionally she’s little more than a child herself, entirely without impulse control, scarfing down a Whitman’s sampler box at 10 a.m. because, God damn it, she feels like it.

As soon as Martha is getting a little hanky-panky of her own, however, high-handed censoriousness turns to bitter possessiveness. The defining dynamic between Fernandez and Beck is encapsulated in a scene that occurs shortly before the movie’s midway point, and which possibly contains whatever remains of the contribution made to the movie by Martin Scorsese, who was originally hired as director but was replaced when his approach proved too painstaking for such a fast, loose, and cheap operation. The couple have removed to some sylvan woodlands—the setting is Onota Lake, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, while many of the locations were found in upstate New York—where Ray is staying with a kindly middle-aged woman who runs a boarding house (Barbara Cason), while Martha has been set up at a nearby hotel, an isolation that she bemoans while appreciatively watching Ray do his pushups, looking down on him imperiously from a lawn chair. (Shades of Seven Beauties here . . .) Martha displays what I believe to be one of the finest sullen pouts in film history as Ray goes to frolic in the water with his latest mark; when the two return, Martha tries and fails to leverage her way into Ray’s bed (“Well, I have slept in the same room as my brother before”), then goes out for a swim on her own, very much like a shunned little girl on the playground threatening to take her ball and go home. Ray, nothing if not a walking hard-on, uses the opportunity to canoodle with his hostess, but Martha is wise to what’s going on, letting out a betrayed shriek of “You promised!” before she begins to desperately paddle toward the middle of the lake and sweet oblivion. (Martha has a wide array of head-games for keeping her man in line, the suicide attempt—real or otherwise—being her last resort.) Arriving in deep water, Martha thrashes to stay afloat, buffeted by the waves and by aural flashbacks to an unhappy girlhood, as Ray dives in and slashes through the lake to get to her and haul her to shore. Once he’s done so, “brother” and “sister” let their roles drop and are lovers again, descending into kissing, cooing, and fondling while their hostess, in slow-dawning disgust, bathes her face in the water.

This scene, as you can see below, reminds us that the sexual chemistry between Ray and Martha is very real, even if nothing else they do or say is. Martha’s accusatory “You promised!” contains the full measure of her folly—she is a woman who so much yearns for True Love that she is willing to believe the oath of a man whose entire existence revolves around breaking his word. To the very last, in lockdown in Sing Sing, she continues to cling to her belief in his undying amour, and there is a real pathos in this faith. Though Stoler may never have had her Medea, no better proof of her chops as a tragedian is required than her Martha Beck.