The Honeymoon Killers (Roxanne, Cinerama Releasing, filmed 1968, cop[yrighted 1969, released 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 1) I watched an interesting if somewhat frustrating film on Turner Classic Movies: The Honeymoon Killers, made in 1968, released in 1970, and produced, directed and written by Leonard Kastle, whose only film it was. Though someone else, Warren Steibel, is credited as producer (Steibel’s friend Leon Levy put up the money), Kastle functioned as producer as well as writer. He didn’t start out as the director: he hired a young man, a recent graduate of the New York University Film School named Martin Scorsese, who’d already has his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, accepted by the Chicago Film Festival in 1967. But Scorsese only lasted one week, apparently because Kastle was upset that Scorsese was shooting the film entirely in master shots and not adding close-ups. Kastle’s first replacement director, Donald Volkman, lasted two weeks before Kastle fired him and took over the directorial reins himself. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Kastle intended The Honeymoon Killers as an answer movie to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn. Apparently Kastle didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde because it was in vivid color and depicted two real-life outlaws, Clyde Barrow (Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), as glamorous, attractive people. Though the contrast between the glamor Beatty and Dunaway projected in the parts and the evil things they did was a major part of that film’s commercial success – 1960’s audiences loved the irony – Kastle decided to make his own movie about a real-life criminal couple but to shoot it in black-and-white and make it as grungy and unglamorous as possible. The real-life criminal couple he chose were Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler). Beck was a heavy-set nurse working in Mobile, Alabama whose roommate Bunny (Doris Roberts) enrolled her in a lonely-hearts club (the 1940’s equivalent of Internet dating) in 1947. Fernandez, a con artist based in New York City who made his living by romancing lonely women and stealing their money, answered her ad. At least in the movie, Fernandez originally intended Martha to be just another swindling victim, but after he absconded with her savings and went back to New York, she called him and said that if he didn’t return to her, she would kill herself. He did, and the two began a torrid affair.

Beck became Fernandez’s partner in crime and soon they began trolling the country looking for other victims, with Martha posing as Fernandez’s brother and sitting in the back seat of their car. When one of their victims threatened to report them to the police, Martha put her on a bus and gave her some pills, allegedly to make her sleep but really to kill her. In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, she loses consciousness on the bus but no one notices her until the bus arrives at its destination. When the driver and the crew of the bus company notice that she hasn’t got off with the other passengers, they inspect her and soon realize she’s dead. Among the victims we see are Doris Acker (Ann Harris) and Janet Fay (Mary Jane Higby), a 60-something widow who attracts Ray and Martha’s attention with a photo she sent them from 20 years earlier. (So “catfishing” was already a “thing” even in the late 1940’s!) In the movie, the two get caught when Martha rats them out to the police (in real life, the cops were investigating the disappearance of Delphine Downing, played in the film by Kip McArdle, and arrested Fernandez and Beck when they returned to the Downing home after an evening at the movies), and there’s a closing scene showing Martha in prison reading a letter from Ray assuring her that she’s the only woman he ever loved. Then there’s a final credit announcing that the real-life Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951. The use of the actual date is something of a surprise since the visual “look” of the film, particularly the cars and the record albums in one scene, is that of the late 1960’s, and I assumed that Kastle had deliberately updated the story rather than try to do a period piece on a tiny budget. (The scene with the records features the iconic cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, released in 1965.)

Warren Steibel, who came to the project after having produced the PBS talk show Firing Line hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., was quoted as saying, “We wanted to do an honest movie about murders. These are not charming people. They are sleazy people – but fascinating. You won't come out of the theatre feeling sorry for the killers like in some movies. It is not romanticized.” Unfortunately, if that was his and Kastle’s intent, they overdid it big-time by making Fernandez’s and Beck’s victims relentlessly obnoxious and unsympathetic, too. Until the scenes with Delphine Downing and her five-year-old daughter Rainelle (Mary Breen), we don’t meet any would-be victims we actually like and want to see survive, and I was disappointed that Kastle didn’t rejigger his script to allow those two to live. It also doesn’t help that the total budget was $150,000 and that this didn’t allow them to do much in the way of special effects. For the scene in which Martha attacks Janet Fay with a hammer, according to a participant quoted on the film’s Wikipedia page, “condoms containing glycerine and red dye were affixed to the head of the victim with plaster of Paris. The hammer, a balsa-wood prop, had a pin at the end. When the pin pricked the condoms, the blood began to flow.” Even so, Shirley Stoler pulled her punches so much her attacks on Mary Jane Higby (she hits her with the hammer twice) looked more like love-taps than lethal assaults. Ironically, François Truffaut, who’d been one of the directors originally considered for Bonnie and Clyde (producer Beatty offered it to both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before they turned it down and he hired Penn), called The Honeymoon Killers his all-time favorite American film. But one gets the impression that there’s a much more interesting movie in the Ray Fernandez/Martha Beck murder story than the one we got here (the Wikipedia page on the real killers lists no fewer than three subsequent feature films and two TV-series episodes on the case). The film I was most reminded of was Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which ironically he was shooting while the real Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were killing people. I’ve written about Monsieur Verdoux before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/monsieur-verdoux-charles-chaplin.html, and though it’s a film with its own set of problems, including a mordant script by Chaplin himself that makes his psycho who murders women for their money almost lovable, it’s a damned sight better than The Honeymoon Killers.