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Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)

Have you seen this movie?

Yes

I've seen parts of it

No, but it's on my watchlist

No, but I've seen gifsets of it

No, but I've heard of it

Voting ended onOct 6, 2025

#obscure movie poll #who killed teddy bear #who killed teddy bear 1965 #who killed teddy bear movie #sal mineo #juliet prowse #jan murray #elaine stritch

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Trailer for ‘Who Killed Teddy Bear’, playing at Film Forum

With Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Elaine Stritch, Jan Murray (as a hard-boiled cop?), and directed by Joseph Cates (Phoebe’s father)

I’ve never heard of this movie before, but the trailer is very New York in the ‘60s

#sal mineo #juliet prowse #elaine stritch #Jan Murray #Joseph Cates #film #film forum #New York city #nyc #1960s #Youtube

Who Killed Teddy Bear

Quick, name a film directed by Kevin Kline’s father-in-law. If you have a taste for failed sleaze you’ll come up with the third film in my “stalker trilogy,” Joseph Cates’ WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965, Prime, Plex, YouTube). The other two are SCREAMING MIMI (1958) and SATAN IN HIGH HEELS (1962), and though the middle one is clearly exploitation, the other two are more exploitation adjacent. SCREAMING MIMI exists to display the physical endowments of Anita Ekberg without showing any naughty bits. WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR is more exploitation in the C.B. DeMille tradition of wallowing in decadence while seeming to condemn it. It’s altogether possible that Cates, writers Arnold Drake and Leon Tokatyan and producer Everett Rosenthal were seriously concerned with the culture’s growing sexualization, and you could hardly accuse its talented stars — Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse and Elaine Stritch — of spreading smut. Yet it still has a smarmy feel about it, compounded by the low budget and unfortunate, choppy editing that seems to indicate they ran out of money before shooting everything in the script.

Prowse is an aspiring dancer making ends meet as a platter spinner at an early disco. She starts receiving obscene phone calls, but who is it? The vice cop (Jan Murray) who takes a particular interest in the case seems somewhat preoccupied with sexual perversion (he plays tapes of victim interviews while his ten-year-old daughter listens from the next room). But he doesn’t have the body displayed in the shadows as the man calls her. When the stalker calls while Murray is there, the camera cuts to reveal it’s the club’s busboy (Sal Mineo). Meanwhile, Prowse’s boss (Elaine Stritch) seems to have her own designs on the woman’s body.

This is all shot rather primitively, with cameras following Mineo as he prowls 42nd Street, ogling suggestive lingerie in a shop window, looking at porn magazines and entering a theater showing CALL GIRL 77 (1962). The dancing at the disco is shot from a low angle to make it seem somehow sinister and hyper-sexualized. There’s also a flashback to Mineo’s past, when his seduction by an older woman led to an accident that left his young sister with brain damage. It’s all very sex-negative, yet for some reason there’s also a scene — beloved by gay men, their magazines and their porn sites — in which the camera makes love to Mineo as he works out in a tight Speedo. Is this to associate working out with sexual perversion, or does it possibly include our gaze in the film’s attack on sexuality?

The film’s main virtue is that it was shot in New York, offering a glimpse of the pre-Disney Times Square and theater actors like Rex Everhardt, Frank Campanella, Bruce Glover, Tom Aldredge and, of course, Stritch. She fares the best of the four stars, possibly because her part is too short to be burdened with the inconsistencies facing the others. Her pain when Prowse rejects her advances is touching (she had been directed to play the scene angrily but suggested what she considered a more realistic approach). Mineo probably suffers the worst from the inconsistent writing. He has solid moments, but there are other places where he doesn’t seem sure of where the part is taking him. Murray is unspeakably bad, not endowing his lines with much of anything so his painful story about his wife’s murder is almost funny. The role needed a George C. Scott, and they got a stand-up comic and game-show host, though I doubt even Scott could salvage the moment in which the detective suddenly remembers how mirrors work. Prowse is so beautiful it almost doesn’t matter how good she is. She gets a nice moment of dancing toward the end, and in her final shots, her body language is devastating. Just before the climax, she’s putting away records at the disco while humming “My Desire.” It’s an almost poetic comment on the action with a lot more resonance than the film’s usually shrill attacks on sexuality. If it was her idea, it suggests that, absent any directorial artistry, the actor sometimes has to function as auteur.

#thrillers #exploitation film #juliet prowse #sal mineo #elaine stritch #jan murray