Hollywood got very nervous about movie violence in 1968 as a result of the terrible events of that year.
In 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde” was condemned in some quarters for glamorizing violence, so when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both killed in the spring of 1968 — and riots erupted in cities all over the country — the studios backed away from pictures that explored gun violence, in particular.
Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film, “Targets,” was picked up by Paramount Pictures for distribution in the summer of 1968 and then had most of its bookings cancelled because the film studied a mild-mannered young man who kills his family and then starts shooting at cars on a Los Angeles freeway.
In the early fall of 1968, 20th Century Fox had a similar case of nerves about the low-budget thriller, “Pretty Poison,” based on Stephen Geller’s novel “She Let Him Continue” about a relationship between a high school cheerleader and a seemingly harmless drifter that ends in a murderous crime spree.
Fox dumped the Tuesday Weld-Anthony Perkins vehicle into drive-ins and B-level theaters, but a group of New York film critics wrote enthusiastically about the movie (despite the absence of any press screenings), shamed the studio into giving the movie a re-release, and in the following months it became an art-house and college film society favorite.
The picture remains an unsettling mix of comedy and drama with what are probably the best film performances of Weld and Perkins, two quirky talents who never got the attention they deserved but have sizeable cult followings.
Writer Lorenzo Semple won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best screenplay, and would go on to such key 1970s films as “The Parallax View,” but director Noel Black faded into obscurity.
Weld went on to a distinguished but rather peculiar career. She won a lot of attention for playing Joan Didion’s zonked-out anti-heroine in the 1972 movie version of “Play It As It Lays” and then earned her one and only Oscar nomination for playing Diane Keaton’s world-weary sister in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” in 1977.
The actress spent much of the 1980s and ’90s steadily employed in above average made for TV movies including an excellent one in 1980 with the godawful title “Mother and Daughter: The Loving War.” A TV movie romantic comedy that she did with Ellen Burstyn and Patrick Cassidy in 1986 — “Something in Common” — is also worth looking for.
Weld said in one interview she preferred working in television because it was quicker and easier than working on theatrical films.
The movies that Weld (or her people) turned down in the early years of her career — “Lolita,” “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” among them — would have put her on a very different Hollywood track.
Weld hasn’t made a movie since she did a terrific job opposite Kris Kristofferson in Ethan Hawke’s little-seen debut film, “Chelsea Walls” nine years ago. The two performers were perfectly cast as aging bohemians hanging on in the famous hotel on 23rd St. in Manhattan.
One of the most poignant pleasures of “Pretty Poison” is seeing this brilliant and quirky actress in one of her rare starring movie roles.
