The jaunty ad line for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1967)—“They’re young … they’re in love … and they kill people”—fits The Honeymoon Killers quite well, except that it willfully disposes of all the giddy humor, style, and romance that elevated Bonnie and Clyde’s exploits to the status of modern myth. Shot in black-and-white in a visual style that emulates a documentary aesthetic, The Honeymoon Killers depicts crime and violence as a moral vacuum that draws in the narcissistic and the pathetic without ever moralizing or preaching. The fact that it is often quite funny is surprisingly in line with the film’s overall tone, as fact all too often trumps fiction in the weirdness department.

Tony Lo Bianco plays Ray Fernandez, an itinerant con man whose specialty is finding women through lonely hearts club listings, marrying them, and them fleecing them for everything they have. His would-be next victim is Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler), a 200-pound and extremely miserable nurse who turns out to be more morally misguided than he is. With constantly narrowed eyes and a plump face that somehow constricts into a skeletal mask of menace, Shirley embodies Beck as a deeply damaged woman who is so desperate for love that she is willing to do anything—anything—to keep Ray. Ray’s love for Shirley is just as bizarre, as it seems to be based on the fact that she not only matches his moral vacuity, but trumps it. He’s attracted to her malevolence, maybe because he senses it’s all for him.

Shirley joins Ray’s con game, although she turns out to be as much of a hindrance as help because her borderline-insane jealousy constantly threatens to undermine their charade as brother and sister. Throughout the film, they work their way through a series of spinsters and widows, each of which has her own sad nuances. Doris Acker (Ann Harris) is a lonely schoolteacher; Myrtle Young (Marilyn Chris) is pregnant and just wants a man to help her take care of her soon-to-be-born child; and Janet Fay (Mary Jane Higby) is an annoying widow who chirps about how “cuuute” everything is and insists on taking her cheap-art Jesus prints with her everywhere. The only thing these and the other women have in common is that they’re desperate and they have money; the latter is what Ray and Shirley want, the former is what they exploit in order to get it.

Some of these women emerge from Ray and Shirley’s ruse with only their money lost. Many others wind up dead, and it is the film’s violence that is one of its most striking qualities. At times, the violence is brutally depicted without flinching, as when Shirley takes a hammer to Janet Fay’s head and then she and Ray work together to strangle her with panty hose. At other times, it is left off-screen, as when Shirley takes a young child down to the cellar to kill her, and we hear the sounds of the murder while watching an extreme close-up of the mother’s eyes. The violence is never balletic, or poetic, or any of the other words used to describe the new depictions of violence flooding movie screens in the late 1960s. It is relentless and cruel and ugly, much like the film’s protagonists.

Yet, despite their villainy, Ray and Shirley remain strangely sympathetic characters, even when they’re at their worst. Perhaps it is because we sense just how pathetic they are that we are willing to understand—if not agree with or forgive—the atrocities they commit. At times, their behavior is so disgusting, as when Ray wants to make love with Shirley immediately after murdering a woman, that it’s hard to imagine looking at them in another scene, yet we do. Perhaps after so much romanticizing of crime in the movies, we’ve come to expect a sense of attachment to even the most morally repulsive criminals. It’s hardwired into our experience.

That doesn’t mean that first- (and only) time writer/director Leonard Kastle doesn’t do everything in his power to keep us from romanticizing the eponymous killers. His casting of Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler is dead-on, particularly if you’ve seen pictures of the real-life Ray and Martha. Lo Bianco has just the right amount of drippy-sleazy charm that you believe he could convince so many women to marry him, but he still retains an aura of repulsiveness. As noted earlier, Stoler channels real fury in Martha, particularly when she’s at her most jealous. She radiates off the screen because we believe she’s a woman capable of anything, which is, of course, the most frightening thing of all.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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