Anthony Perkins may have been typecast as a result of the success of Psycho, but it’s only because playing disturbed persons seemed to come so naturally to him. I don’t know what the man was like in real life—maybe he was as sweet and kind as Boris Karloff or Peter Cushing. But you can’t deny Perkins brings an edgy energy to every one of his roles.
Such is the case with 1968’s Pretty Poison. Here, he plays a man recently released from a mental hospital. It will be a fair ways into the picture before it is revealed what he did to be confined there and, even then, the full extent of the story is only gradually disclosed.
The one thing that is established immediately is his tendency to tell falsehoods. It is hard to tell if he is a compulsive liar or if he is genuinely delusional. Maybe he is a bit of both. It is a fine line he will walk throughout the picture.
Once free, we see flash frames of disparate elements he will eventually weave into larger false narratives. Admittedly, even some of those individual elements are bizarre.
I thought he was employed at a timber mill, yet his job has him doing quality control, monitoring small brown bottles as they go down a conveyor belt. What exactly is being bottled? Whatever it is, Perkins has decided it will play an important role in the narrative being pieced together in his mind. Thick, red, liquid waste of some sort is being discharged by his employer into the adjacent lake, and he will obsess over that as well.
A disparate piece in the puzzle will be Tuesday Weld, playing a high school student he first observes in a color guard practice. I have always found that high school activity, with its fake rifles, to be deeply bizarre. And what is a “color guard”, anyway? Is to protect a color or is it to offer protection from a color? If it is the former, I’m guessing the color is white, because I’ve only seen Caucasians do this shit.
Perkins eventually draws Weld into his world of fantasy, as he has apparently convinced her he is a covert CIA agent investigating the mysterious output of his employer. That may seem unbelievable, but there is far more to Weld’s character than her pretty, blonde façade reveals. Even the questions she first asks him about his CIA work are not what I would have expected, and those early hints of something off is what will drive the picture.
Even before it is revealed she is the more dangerous of the two, everything about her scanned as a tad creepy to me. She’s all too happy to take pills from a strange man she only recently met after he appears to take one of them. She also has a telling comment about sex, saying, “When grown-ups do it, it’s kind of dirty. That’s cause there’s nobody to punish them.”
Perkins and Weld are both fascinating to watch in this. Perkins doesn’t even have to say anything to be unnerving, as he seems to travel exclusively by running from one place to another as if his life depended on it.
I am so surprised I had never heard of Pretty Poison before, and this is a movie that deserves to be better known. It packs a punch today, so I can’t imagine what audiences thought of it on its original release in 1968.
Dir: Noel Black
Starring Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld
Watched on Twilight Time blu-ray