From the 1960s: No Way to Treat a Lady

1968 Black Comedy Drama
From Paramount Pictures
Directed by Jack Smight

Starring
Rod Steiger
Lee Remick
George Segal
Eileen Heckart
Murray Hamilton
Martine Bartlett
Ruth White
Michael Dunn
Barbara Baxley
Doris Roberts
Irene Dailey

The film opens with no credits as a priest (Steiger) walks down the streets of Manhattan happily chatting with any number of passersby on his way to a killing... one that he is going to commit.

He knocks on the tenement apartment door of upper middle-aged Mrs. Malloy (Bartlett), dressed in her house coat, and fills her with every platitude that comes to his strange mind while they sip wine.  He maneuvers himself behind her as she sits on her sofa and begins playfully tickling her.  The more she laughs and fusses, the more he tickles her until that tickling results in his strangling her.  He lets out a great growl as he feels the job being completed.  He then sits in her painted rocker, closes his eyes and allows the euphoria to wash over him.

Then come the credits as we digest what we have just seen.  There is no doubt this is no way to treat a lady and no doubt we are going to see more.

He then puts her corpse on a toilet seat and with her lipstick paints big red lips on her forehead.  Fait accompli.

We then meet Morris Brummel (Segal), a Jewish detective with an annoying, overbearing mother (Heckert) who berates him for being a low-paid cop (Jews are not cops, she squeals) and reminds him that her treasured, older son is a rich doctor.  If she is a shrew, he is a nebbish. They irritate the hell out of one another.  One wonders why they live together but we'll let that pass.

Steiger plays Christopher Gill, a wealthy theater-owner and perhaps a producer, and we next see him in his luxury apartment being served by his right-hand woman (Dailey).  She hands him the morning paper which he pours through salivating to find the reportage of his crime.  When he finds a small paragraph on a back page, he is so annoyed he calls the paper's editorial offices to complain.

Our dauntless detective is assigned the case and he interviews Mrs. Malloy's neighbor, Kate, who has seen the priest.  She can offer very little in terms of aid in identifying the killer but we quickly  ascertain she has more to offer.  She greets Morris in her flimsy negligee and has just awakened with her false eyelashes on.  She seems to indicate she's had vast experience in the dating department.

Personally I had a problem with a woman of her capabilities falling for a mama's boy with limited capabilities.  Some of the comedy, in this case awkward, deals with Kate trying to get Morris to do the deed.

Next Gill appears as a German plumber who arrives at the apartment of Frau Himmel (White) who is apprehensive about letting him in to fix the pipes she didn't know needed fixing.  He manages to mention that he's from Frankfort and her tone changes because she, too, is from there.  Before long she is painted with big red lips on her forehead.  Our detective is more intrigued now because he realizes he's dealing with a serial killer.

Newspaper coverage reveals Brummel is on the case and Gill begins calling him, still using the voice and mannerisms from the current strangulation.  Gill taunts Brummel and they begin what becomes a clever, often witty cat and mouse game.

My favorite apartment visit is when Gill becomes a flamboyant gay wigmaker who visits Belle Popple (Baxley) with the story that she has won a wig due to a drawing.  Of course she recalls none of it but is enchanted with the word free.  The events he had planned for her are spoiled when her irritable sister (Roberts) arrives unexpectedly.  She and our prissy wigmaker get into a verbal snit and as he beats a hasty retreat, she calls him a homo and in his best lisp says that doesn't make me a bad person.  While this is my favorite line of the movie, there are others.

He quickly kills someone else (not seen) in his wigmaker drag and then calls Brummel.  All those listening in at the station and those attempting to trace the call are amused at the voice they hear.  He goes into a W.C. Fields impression... funny in itself but more of an audition when one realizes Steiger will play Fields in a biopic some eight years later.

For comedy relief little person Michael Dunn arrives at Brummel's desk to confess to the crimes.  The detective knows better and while Dunn was good, I found the scene silly and distracting.

For his next killing Gill's dressed as a cop and later as a crying woman in a bar.  For the latter one, another woman comforts her and invites her to her home across the street from the bar where she meets her end, of course.  Perhaps I'm mistaken, but wasn't this other woman a female impersonator?  If so, why, considering nothing about it is addressed?  Or hey, perhaps I was looking for something that wasn't there.  Our enterprising detective almost catches him.

Finally and unsurprisingly Gill focuses on Kate.  Brummel had begun putting the heat on Gill and he retaliates by targeting Kate.  Stupidly she lets him into her apartment but she is a young woman, strong, canny, and takes him on.  He doesn't succeed at his task.

Brummel follows him outside Kate's apartment to Gill's theater, not sure at first if he is the killer, although it soon becomes apparent.  The film has fallen apart somewhat by this point.  The big, darkened theater is an ominous playground for the finale.  However, each man shoots the other and as Steiger is down and pulls himself across the floor, he manages to get up and give a speech armed with all the dramatic renderings that Lee Strasberg probably taught him at the Actors Studio.  Why, I cried out, why do this silly stuff?

I've never cared for Steiger and have usually managed to avoid most of his films but I can't imagine this isn't the best work he's done.  He himself considered it a dream role.  He was originally offered the role of the detective but he knew it didn't hold a candle to playing Christopher Gill, strangler-extraordinaire.  His various masquerades with their glaring effrontery are nothing short of mesmerizing.

Still, Segal has as much screen time as Steiger.  The film goes from a killing to Segal and his mother to another killing to Segal and Remick and back again.  Both Segal and Remick do well in their roles, although hers doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but both fall way short of what Steiger brings.

As the harridan mother, Heckert nails it but I was pleased when she rather faded from the story.  The various women Steiger visits, Bartlett, Nelson, White, are all shining examples of what good character actresses can bring to a film.

Stifling mother love is not only explored with the Segal-Heckert relationship but Steiger's character is fixated on his late mother, a noted stage actress with big red lips.  Neither mother is much explored but we're all good guessers, aren't we?

John Gay adapted the screenplay from a novel by William Goldman.  Some of Goldman's other novels are Soldier in the Rain, Marathon Man and Magic.  He also wrote screenplays including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Harper, All the President's Men, Misery and The Princess Bride.  Gay's credentials aren't as prestigious as he worked a lot in episodic television.

In nine years of writing this blog, I have never mentioned the name Jack Smight.  He was also mainly in television but did direct such films as Harper, Midway and Airport 75.  

I've always liked this flick, flawed though it may occasionally be but certainly not enough to consider it a guilty pleasure.  For a film about a dark and serious subject, there is much humor but then that's what black comedy is.

Here's part of my favorite scene:

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A guilty pleasure