Excellent but underrated film

Captivating movie !

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Blistering performances.

Plot-- An outpatient uses his fantasy skills to entice a blonde cutie into his dream world, but gets more than he bargained for, to say the least.One of the squirrliest pairings in movie history. Weld and Perkins are darn near perfect as the young couple from heck. And to think that the sweet-faced little Sue Ann (Weld) turned up at random out of a highschool drill team. No wonder Pitt (Perkins) wants back into the safety of an asylum. If she's the outside world, we'd all better hide. He may be a James Bond fantasist, but at least he doesn't straddle corpses in ecstatic delight. In fact, he's got a social conscience when it comes to what his employer is doing. And that's the problem. He's got a sense of limits, but she doesn't.So why does he go along with her betrayal of him. I can understand why he wants back into confinement, but why turn seductive Sue Ann back loose on society. After all, he's trying to keep mill gunk out of the stream. Maybe it's because, unlike the ugly river poison, she's a pretty poison.Really original premise, expertly played out. No doubt the screenplay couldn't have been produced ten years earlier. The sixties lifted the lid on the exotic, and this one goes about as far as any. I like the working class locations that lend both realism and flavor. And get a load of the stream that's used as everyone's dumping ground. No wonder the two kids are weird. Stodgy old Hollywood would never give awards to a movie like this. But in my little book, I'd give one-eyed Oscars to both Perkins and Weld, and a real one to screenwriter Semple. Meanwhile, I'll never look at a girls drill team the same way again, and you may not, either.

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.

Out-on-parole arsonist Anthony Perkins (as Dennis Pitt) gets a job in a small Massachusetts lumber yard, which turns out to be a polluting chemical plant. He's not a good worker, daydreaming about the high school majorettes in mini-skirts he enjoys watching. While at "Pete's" outdoor eatery, Mr. Perkins meets mature-looking 17-year-old Tuesday Weld (as Sue Ann Stepanek), probably the prettiest of the marching cheerleaders. Perkins intrigues Ms. Weld with secret agent-type behavior. Believing Perkins works for the CIA, she asks him to investigate her typist mother Beverly Garland, who is "not queer" but "mixed up" with a mysterious man. "He could be subversive," Weld explains. Perkins tells Weld suspect enemy agents are plotting a terrorist attack through the water supply. Perkins may be playfully psychotic, but Weld could be deadly..."Pretty Poison" is perfectly cast. Looking ten years younger, Perkins pulls off a different psycho characterization; he is not the man you're expecting. Weld counterpoints beautifully; she polled at #2 in the annual "Best Actress" contest held by The New York Film Critics. If the film were a hit instead of a sleeper, Ms. Garland might have received some "Supporting Actress" attention. The east coast helps provide a great extended cast. Three day players from "Dark Shadows" appear, with the show's "Mrs. Johnson" Clarice Blackburn (as Mrs. Bronson) offering the usual good support. Dick O'Neill (as Bud) and Joseph Bova (as Pete) are likewise perfect. There is also a good role for intuitive John Randolph (as Morton Azenauer), a parole office pivotal in imagining what might happen between Weld and gullible Ken Kercheval (as Harry Jackson).******** Pretty Poison (7/19/68) Noel Black ~ Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Beverly Garland, John Randolph

This is a very unusual and quirky movie with great performances from Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. It is also a bit of a worrying film in that everybody seems a bit unbalanced or at least not quite up to scratch and we are never quite sure where it is going to go. At first things seem straightforward enough, in fact Perkins' fantasies/make-believe tales for Weld are becoming just that much too silly when the whole thing takes off when the little lady gets a bit bigger. Not just a little bit bigger, either because she begins to dwarf Perkins. All very well done for no sooner have we begun to write Perkins off as an out and out psychopath, he becomes all vulnerable and we are forced to begin to re-evaluate Weld. My only criticism is that the film should have either been more hard nosed or played the whole thing for laughs more. Listening to the director at the start of the commentary on the DVD it seems that there was a deliberate attempt by the studio to soften the effect following the real life assassinations of the time. Well worth watching.