User reviews

This criminally neglected film has a lot going for it, and is certainly well worth tracking down! The comparisons to the Alfred Hitchcock classic 'Psycho' are obvious due to the fact that the film stars Norman Bates actor Anthony Perkins in another off-centre performance, but other than that; Pretty Poison is a law unto itself, and not quite like any other film that I've seen. The first thing that struck me about this film was the cinematography; the film somehow manages to look old and dated, yet beautiful at the same time. The fact that it's set in a serene little town does it some favours also, but it's the plot that is the biggest standout here. Anthony Perkins is Dennis Pitt; a mentally disturbed man who is given a job in a lumber yard. He soon bumps into the beautiful Sue Ann Stepanek, and she learns that he is a CIA operative, working undercover and has chosen her to be his 'partner'. However, that is not really the case at all as Pitt lives in his own little fantasy world, and after the pair slip up with a murder, they find themselves under suspicion.

Anthony Perkins may not be the most diverse actor ever to grace the silver screen; but he certainly plays the disturbed young man well! Here, he has the beautiful Tuesday Weld as his co-star, and the two performances compliment each other excellently, as the pair have a great on-screen chemistry, and the plot is always interesting enough to ensure that the film succeeds. It has to be said that Pretty Poison has something of a low scope where plot and plotting are concerned; but this isn't a problem as the modest way that the film pans out is good in that it's interesting and also rather intimate, so the film feels more realistic. The film is excellently paced, and there aren't any moments where nothing is really happening. At just eighty five minutes, Pretty Poison still manages to get its story and character profiles across in a way that is interesting and exciting. The conclusion to the main plot line is good and something of a shock, while the ending itself is predictable, but still works well. Overall, Pretty Poison gets my HIGHEST recommendations and I hope this one doesn't stay buried for too much longer!

Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) is a young man who is being released from a mental hospital after having committed arson. He burned down his aunt's house at age 15. What he didn't know was that she was in the house at the time, and so she died in the fire.

Dennis has a job waiting for him at a chemical company, but it is mind numbingly boring work - sitting on an assembly line all day making sure that bottles of chemicals are OK and that they proceed down the assembly line OK, which they almost always do. Since Dennis' root problem is that he is subject to a rich fantasy life, this lack of something upon which to occupy his mind has him drifting into the exciting world of make-believe and out of dull reality in short order.

He gets involved with a pretty high school student, Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld), and tells her that he is an undercover CIA agent. Sue Ann seems to be a gullible thrill-seeking teen at first, impressed with Dennis's exciting stories of secret missions, maybe wanting to believe it, maybe actually believing it. Dennis has plans to sabotage the chemical plant where he works because it is dumping toxic chemicals into the river next to it. In his mind, some vandalism for the sake of his fantasy life and the environment is within the limits of acceptable behavior. But Sue Ann has a darker agenda, one that soon has Dennis unwillingly mixed up in murder. Complications ensue.

The 60s is not my favorite decade for film because so much of it is of two minds - You either have entries that are trying to push the envelope as it existed at the time such as "Midnight Cowboy" and "Bonnie and Clyde" or lighter fare such as Oliver or Mary Poppins. Sometimes you have both tendencies in the same film! But this one just clicks and rings true. Perkins was great as the doomed misfit, with a role that for sure is trying to capitalize - eight years later - on his role in Psycho, except here he's not a psycho as much as he is a gullible patsy. Then there is Beverly Garland as Sue Ann's hard drinking tough talking hypocritical mother just a year before she becomes the stepmother to My Three Sons - for sure this was a departure from her usual doe-eyed roles.

Note the brief scene at the end with Ken Kercheval, who played JR Ewing rival Cliff Barnes on Dallas some ten years later.

I'd recommend this one as it seems unfairly forgotten.

Eight years after "Psycho", Anthony Perkins, who seemed to quickly lose his way in ill-suited romantic dramas of the mid-'60s, finally gets a role here well-tailored to his wild-eyed personality, that of an introvert with simmering disorders forced by circumstance into playing "normal". A former teen arsonist in Massachusettes is released from the institution as a young man and is given a job at the lumber mill; he's perpetually wrapped up in CIA fantasies and conspiracy theories, and is thrilled when he meets up with a 17-year-old beauty from the local high school who is happy to play along with his games. Adapted from Stephen Geller's book "She Let Him Continue", this is a peculiar, well-made and written cult movie which works itself under your skin. Perkins lets himself relax a bit on-camera and gives one of his most notable performances, and Tuesday Weld (despite being a few years too old for her role) rarely strikes a false note as his new girlfriend with a somewhat sordid past herself (one that mirrors her mother's, whom she hates). The concluding events aren't really satisfying (with echoes of "Psycho" besides), and the circular plot-device posed at the tag doesn't work at all, but the performances really drive this thing, making it an engrossing and memorable sleeper. **1/2 from ****

Legendary critic Pauline Kael staunchly championed "Pretty Poison" which she clearly loved but her accolades did little in preventing this small, funny but decidedly evil movie from vanishing into obscurity.

The pairing of Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins was inspired. Being actors who Hollywood never quite understood how to use, they are perfectly cast as social renegades. Both are in their prime; young, attractive, funny and fiercely intelligent. They are a joy to watch. Four years later they would be brought together for the wonderful "Play It As It Lays", but by then both tapped into a world weary disillusionment far from the playfulness of "Pretty Poison". They were an odd team, playing off each other to dazzling effect.

How those two movies have been relegated to almost total obscurity remains a sad testament to the industry. Should the rare opportunity to watch "Pretty Poison" arises, don't miss it.

Pretty Poison's an odd film that doesn't fully live up to its potential, but it certainly wasn't bad. Its set-up sounds great, with an unstable man meeting and falling for an even less stable young woman after he tells her he's a secret agent. Things get more outlandish and dangerous as the film goes on, but the progression never feels super satisfying or well-plotted. It definitely has a start and end point, quite clearly, but meanders a great deal between beginning and end. Something feels weirdly loose about it all, and I think the approach did the story a disservice.

But at least Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld are both pretty good in the lead roles, and the whole thing gets more entertaining if you try to imagine it all as taking place between Psycho and Psycho II (a wacky misadventure for Norman Bates, because sometimes it's hard to see Perkins as anyone else but his most iconic character).

The sleeper of 1968, this little-scene film is frightening with Tuesday Weld giving her best performance as a self-centered tinderbox of passion and greed. Anthony Perkins is his usual affable set of nervous tics and equally as good. What happened to this director? What happened to this film? The script has you guessing from beginning to end and it's a great payoff eventually.

A definite 9 out of 10 (the music is strictly bad tv score) in a great location in New England that hopefully will come out on DVD eventually. If you've never appreciated Ms. Weld before, this is the one you should try to track down. Strange story, wonderful cinematography, and sensitive lead performances make this one special.

An attractive, mildly perverse and playful tale about a former mental patient and pathological liar (Anthony Perkins) who seduces a high-school cheerleader (Tuesday Weld) under the guise of being a secret agent, but then ends up in more of a pickle than he bargained for. Stephen Geller's novel "She Let Him Continue" was adapted by veteran Hollywood penner Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Papillon, The Parallax View) into a clever little screenplay, but it is Noel Black's fun, spirited direction which gives Pretty Poison its distinction. He finds humour and parables around every corner and in the bleakest of situations, something which provides the understructure for Anthony Perkins' wonderful Dennis Pitt - a true invention of a character. And despite its entertaining, seditious nature, the film demonstrates a not unsubstantial understanding of the human psyche as well. A sexy Tuesday Weld just about pulls off her role as a high schooler, despite being too old for the part. And Beverly Garland is spunky as her mother. The score is by Johnny Mandel (M*A*S*H).

It mixes elements of Gun Crazy with Lolita and Night of the Hunter and may have influenced Terrence Malick's Badlands and Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade. With this I want to say, Pretty Poison is a very American and good and memorable movie.

It has the best performance of Anthony Perkins I have ever seen. And I have seen Hitchcock's Psycho. He plays a character who, like Billy Liar, lives in a kind of a fantasy world (he is not a teenager however, but well past 30) – a potential Lee Harvey Oswald, I guess. His confused state of mind is exploited by a premature, smart and amoral girl, played by Tuesday Weld who is also terrific. The world this confused character had constructed for himself and which gave him some kind of self confidence and cockiness crumbles fast and leaves him a helpless, quivering bundle.

There are some quirky details which lift the story from the ruts of formulaic story telling. The lower middle class girl drives a snazzy powder blue Triumph convertible sports car, the couple make excursions into the wilderness, the Perkins character has a nightmarish night out in hiding, with hooting owls, red lizards and headlights piercing the forest. It all has a slightly surrealistic quality which reflect the character's state of mind and gives the movie a dream like quality. The dialog is also good – the best scene for me was Perkin's phone call to the local sheriff in order to report a murder. Check it out.

In the final scene the girl meets a new boyfriend. I bet this is young Joe Pesci, but he is not in the credits. - Thanks to the IMDb message board I know now that I would have lost the bet. Still, it's a pleasant and exciting discovery.

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.

The film starts with Perkins being released from an insane asylum or some sort of confinement (as the plot is rather muddled, it is not clear who he is and what his past is). With Perkins playing a character much like Norman Bates, this could almost be seen as a sequel to "Psycho," except that some hack named Noel Black directed this instead of Hitchcock. The plot is nonsensical and the main characters don't resemble real people. There is no flow to the proceedings. It just rambles along aimlessly and bizarrely, unsure of whether it's a drama, a thriller, or a black comedy. The only thing the film has going for it is the mercifully short running time.

I just finished watching Pretty Poison, and it is a great movie worthy of recognition. I don't know why or how this movie has been somewhat obscured, I guess it wasn't so popular back in those days and it ruined it for other generations.

I'm glad I found this on the movie channel, great performances by Anthony Perkins, really impressive and not exaggerated, which is what a lot of times makes people see as good acting, but this is not the case here, a deep performance is what Mr. Perkins gives us, really laid back and neutral, Kind of the characters he played through his career (Josef K on Welles adaptation of Kafka's "The Process", and his Classic Norman Bates on Psycho) and a great Tuesday Weld as the strange and evolving character Sue Ann Stepanek.

It is so sad that movies like this get lost. A great Screenplay (Best Screenplay Award given by the New York Film Critics Circle Awards) and great acting should make a successful movie, I don't know what happened here.

[8.5/10]

I remember well this movie, that I saw in 1969 in my country. From then, not another exhibit, not in TV or VHS. Fortunately, there is a DVD edition --sadly, no subtitles in any language-- for to appreciate this very curious movie. Perkins plays a role as usual in him --our favorite psycho...--, and Tuesday Weld, that brilliant actress, is sensational, as usual in her. A couple very good. Not least, John Randolph, saw in Seconds, by John Frankenheimer, a very good an rare actor. The remarkable in this film is how the fantasies Perkins accepts at last that "out there" --like says John Randolph-- one can not live or survive in fantasies. So, when he discovers the truth about Tuesday Weld, he accepts his fate.

Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) gets released from a mental institution. He has a tendency to tell fantastical lies. He is taken with teen Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) and pretends to be a CIA agent. She is wildly eager to believe him. He gets fired and engineers a mission to sabotage the factory. She joins him on his mission, kills a security guard, and steals his gun. Her mother threatens Dennis over Sue Ann.

Perkins is never forceful but always has that creepy off-centered presence. Sue Ann's quick acceptance of his lies is a little odd. There is an interesting switch in the power dynamics as her strange naivety turns into disturbed manipulative Lolita. It would be great to have more sexuality in the manipulations. This is plenty dark but I want the tone to be even darker. This is a fascinating little movie.

Pretty Poison is interesting to watch just for the cast. Beverly Garland, Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. How did anyone get all of these people together? Doesn't Anthony Perkins seem strange outside of Psycho?

Anyway, Pretty Poison isn't a bad film it just suffers from a 'made-for-TV-feel' at times. The acting isn't bad but it seems kind of soapy or lurid whenever Sue Anne's mother comes onto the screen. She almost seems like a mother from a daytime soap.

The dialogue in the film is not deep. It almost could have been written by a bunch of high schoolers. I think the interesting thing here is watching Tuesday Weld's character responding to Anthony Perkins fantasies of the CIA and undercover work. Does she let on that she believes him to use him later? Or does she really believe his wild stories in the beginning?

This is the part that keeps a person interested in the story and it's up to you to decide. Nothing earth shattering here but I've seen much worse.

This film is one of my all time favorite films. I've never really understood why Noel Black wasn't given the green light for almost anything he wanted to do after this. I suppose this film must have been ahead of it's time. It's well structured, and the performances are great. Weld is captivating. Perkins plays the whole thing perfectly. The film also has a real sense of place about it. This isn't just any old town in America, it's a very specific town. The relationship between these two characters is perfectly drawn. I was very impressed by the interplay of naive and knowing. What a great ending. Why Noel Black wasn't given more support is a mystery to me.

"Pretty Poison" is a very interesting, offbeat, darkly comic thriller and a film that remains somewhat under-valued 50 years after its release. Anthony Perkins stars in the kind of role that fit him like a glove: Dennis Pitt, a young man just released from a mental institution. Starting a job at a chemical plant in a small Massachusetts town, he becomes utterly entranced with Sue Ann Stepanek (the memorable Tuesday Weld), a sexy blonde high-schooler and majorette. Given that Dennis is prone to a rich fantasy life, he feeds her a bunch of bull about the spy work that he's doing. She seems to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker, but as things progress, she takes the reigns, making him realize that underneath her wholesome beauty is a psycho that's about to emerge. Then he's just meekly plodding along in her wake.

A good candidate for cult status, "Pretty Poison" marked the filmmaking debut for young Noel Black, who worked mostly in TV and made only a handful of features. He gives the fast-moving, twisty plot very surefooted direction, and gets excellent performances out of his two stars. "Pretty Poison" also has a great feel for small-town America, and the kind of madness that could be boiling beneath the surface. What's appreciated about the tale (scripted by the busy Lorenzo Semple, Jr., based on the novel "She Let Him Continue" by Stephen Geller) is the fact that it's not so predictable. You're fascinated by this character played by the lovely Ms. Weld, and wonder what else she and the filmmakers will do with her.

Perkins may be too old for his role by at least a decade or so, but, much as he did in "Psycho", he does have the ability to earn some sympathy. By the end of the picture, you realize that for all his mental issues, he's not unintelligent. He may have been played for a sap, but he knows it, and he has some advice to pass on to his case worker Azenauer (top character actor John Randolph).

In addition to the great Randolph, other supporting players help to add gravitas: 1950s B movie queen Beverly Garland as Sue Ann's disapproving mother, Dick O'Neill as Dennis' cranky boss, and Clarice Blackburn as the helpful Mrs. Bronson. Ken Kercheval of future 'Dallas' fame has a bit at the end of the story.

But Ms. Weld, despite being a little too old for her role as well, is this pictures' main draw, revealing this not-so-innocent teens' true personality with a vengeance.

All in all, "Pretty Poison" is a striking little film that sinks its hooks into you and doesn't let go for 90 straight minutes.

Eight out of 10.

Poor Anthony Perkins. He played one psycho and then another within a few years of each other and the guy got typecast for the rest of his career. I must say that Pretty Poison's Dennis Pitt is to Psycho's Norman Bates what a firecracker is to the big bang.

Orphan Pitt is fresh out of jail after spending some time inside for burning down his aunt's house when he was a kid. Unfortunately for him (and her) she was inside the house when it went up. It was only an accident but his weird personality is what really damns him.

He fancies himself as a bit of a Billy Liar. His life is boring and uneventful out of jail so he concocts elaborate fantasies to keep himself going and to make people interested in him. With the exception of his concerned parole officer, it works mostly for people who come and go.

That is until he meets pretty high school senior Sue Ann Stepanek and goes a bit too far with his fibbing. This time he says he's in the CIA and his mission is to stop a local factory from polluting a river. It's a noble plan but once he involves Sue Ann she becomes homicidal and takes too much pleasure in offing a security guard.

Obviously freaked out by the turn of events Pitt is unsure what to do, especially since Sue Ann has just declared her undying love for him. Any sensible guy would head for the hills but Dennis is just a bit too naive. You'll definitely feel sorry for the guy. He even gets roped into helping the increasingly mad Sue Ann carry out even more dirty deeds.

It's obvious that the film isn't headed for a happy ending and it's not even an easy watch getting there. Perkins is brilliant as Dennis Pitt and you'll be on his side the whole time and really feeling for him and his huge innocent eyes and nervous twitches and ticks that become more and more obvious. His only real crime is falling for the wrong girl. Once again, it's his weird personality that ends up damning him.

If you're a guy the lesson is don't fall in love with wrong girl no matter how pretty she is. It's the pretty ones that end up being the most poisonous. Trust me, The Gator knows. If you're a girl the lesson is don't be a bitch. Pretty much all guys are innocent until a woman comes along and screws them up. Prove me wrong kiddies. Prove me wrong.

That as of this writing, there are only twelve comments on this little masterpiece while Travolta's lasest wise guy role brings down hundreds says something about our board. I know it is hard to find in the USA, but it played on Encore last month, admittedly at nine in the morning, but I suppose too many were watching the umpteenth rerun of The Transporter on HBO.

Perkins and Weld have amazing chemistry. The former never seems to age, while the latter never looked so young and beautiful. There is a little of Gun Crazy in the pairing at first, but the teenage Weld quickly shows her true colors. How my heart goes out to the young man fresh from an institution, trying so hard to be something, posing as a CIA operative or the like. They never warned him before they let him go about the spiders that inhabit those parts. The film moves quickly to its inexorable conclusion.

Seeing the setting made me want to go back to upstate New York, near the Massachusetts border where I lived. That town cannot have changed much today, though the river, perhaps the Housatonic, flows cleaner. I can't rate this film high enough.