Who Killed Teddy Bear (Phillips Productions, Magna Corporation, 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 21) Turner Classic Movies blessedly returned Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showcase to its normal Saturday night schedule with a quite unusual and bizarre movie: Who Killed Teddy Bear (the original poster art has a question mark at the end of the title but the actual film credits don’t). It was made in 1965 (a bit late in the day for film noir) by two independent production companies, Phillips Productions and Magna Corporation, with Joseph Cates as director, Arnold Drake and Leon Totakyan as writers, and Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse, both of whom had fallen short of their potentials in Hollywood’s big leagues and now were at the stage of having to take whatever they could get, as the stars. The personnel behind the camera had unusual career trajectories. Cates was basically a TV producer and director who was apparently involved in the original concept of The Honeymooners and reportedly suggested Art Carney as Jackie Gleason’s second lead. He broke into feature films with Girl of the Night (1960), which starred Anne Francis as a prostitute exploited by her madam (Kay Medford), which seems like a film I’d like to see – especially since Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors, was the male lead. Arnold Drake was mostly a comic-book writer, who worked at DC until 1962, when he jumped ship to the renascent Marvel company because they were developing superhero characters with more depth and complexity than the ones at DC. And like Cates, Leon Tokatyan was mostly a TV talent who’d never worked on a feature film before until this one. The cinematography was by Joseph Brun, who had worked with director Cates before on Girl of the Night and had also shot Odds Against Tomorrow and, of all unlikely credits, Flipper. The music score was by Charles Callelo but the songs danced to at the discothèque where the central characters work were co-written by Bob Gaudio, original member of The Four Seasons who wrote most of their big hits, and Al Kasha. I’d seen this film once before with my husband Charles on a low-quality bootleg VHS from a company in Canada and hadn’t been particularly impressed by it, but this time around it seemed quite good, especially for the low-budget exploitation genre. It was certainly considerably better than Satan in High Heels (1962), which Charles and I watched on YouTube after the original soundtrack album by guitarist Mundell Lowe turned up on a Lowe compilation and in the Charlie Parker Records box (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/satan-in-high-heels-vega-productions.html).

The plot centers around a disco run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch, a major Broadway star who never got the breaks in film she deserved) where Nora Dain (Juliet Prowse), a girl from Rochester who like so many before (and since) came to the Big Apple seeking stardom, works as a D.J. (She’s not very good by modern standards; though the club has two turntables she abruptly cuts from one record to the next and doesn’t cross-fade them the way a modern D.J. in a dance club is expected to.) Also employed at the club as a general assistant and hanger-on is Lawrence “Larry” Sherman (Sal Mineo). Nora lives in an apartment she’s subletting from another young woman who’s actually on the road with a touring company of a Broadway show, and she’s constantly being interrupted and awakened at night by obscene phone calls. The calls are from a man who speaks in a whispery voice and tells her in breathy tones exactly what he’d like to do to her body. Naturally she’s creeped out by the calls and reports them to the New York Police Department, where the case is taken by a lieutenant named James Madden (a boy named Jan Murray, who was usually a stand-up comedian on TV). We know from the get-go that Larry Sherman is Nora’s mystery phone stalker – after all, he knows her name and has her home phone number – but it takes half the movie before that’s revealed for sure. We also see that Lt. Madden has an extensive collection of literature about perverse sexuality, including complete versions of such famous bits of erotica as Fanny Hill and Naked Lunch as well as non-fiction works by Krafft-Ebing and more recent and less cachet-ridden pornographers. (These scenes were targeted by the Legion of Decency, the censorship arm of the Roman Catholic Church, and in order to get the Legion to lift its “C” rating, which made it literally a sin for a Catholic to see this film, the filmmakers cut about three minutes from them.) As Lt. Madden continually invites Nora to stay with him, she starts to get the impression that he is her cyber-stalker until he explains that his wife was kidnapped, gang-raped, and killed three years earlier. The culprits were never caught, and this led Madden to undertake a massive research project on the sexual underground in hopes of finding his wife’s killers. (At this point we’re wishing the NYPD would create the Special Victims Unit – or, as it’s called in real life, the Sex Crimes Unit – already.) We also learn that Larry Sherman lives in a run-down apartment with his – whatever the correct euphemism is these days for the “R”-word? “Developmentally disabled”? “Developmentally challenged”? – younger sister Edie (Margot Bennett), who’s 19 but acts about 8.

In his introduction Eddie Muller noted that Who Killed Teddy Bear is probably the kinkiest film noir ever made, at least until the Production Code finally collapsed in 1968 and it became possible for major studios to make films like Chinatown. Just about every character in it except Nora has a sexual obsession of some sort, and there are long scenes of Larry walking the streets of Greenwich Village looking through the windows of adult bookstores, examining their merchandise without actually buying anything, and at one point going into a porn theatre showing something called Call Girl 77 only to walk out again after a few minutes because whatever the movie is offering isn’t sufficient to tame his obsessions. There’s also a quirky scene in which Carlo (Daniel J. Travanti 16 years before he became a TV star playing a cop on Hill Street Blues), who works at a bouncer at the disco, confronts and ejects a heavy-set customer (Rex Everhart) who’s obnoxiously hitting on Nora. Unfortunately, the person he ejected is carrying a switchblade and … we never see the violence go down but the next time we see Carlo he’s got a stab wound in his neck, and the police have taken him into custody and are grilling him as if he were the assailant. Also there’s a scene in which Lt. Madden and his daughter Pam (Diane Moore) take Nora to the local children’s zoo (where the tickets are just 10 cents each – once again, isn’t inflation a bitch!), where they run into Larry and Edie and have a rather quirky and unsettling interaction with them. The climax starts when Marian offers to spend the night with Nora in her apartment, only to make a Lesbian pass at her, which Nora, being the good girl to end all good girls (at least by the standards of this kinky context), righteously rejects and throws her out. Marian is accosted on her way home by an unrecognizable assailant who may or may not be Larry (though it probably isn’t since him she would have recognized) and killed. For some reason the police decide that her killer must be a Trans person, so in a scene that has aspects of “the usual suspects” about it they interrogate at least two men, one of whom, Adler (Tom Aldredge), collects women’s stockings while the other, Frank (Bruce Glover), picks up women’s hats and handbags.

Ultimately Larry makes his long-awaited move on Nora and the police give chase in a scene director Cates filmed clandestinely on the streets of New York, where the traffic was real. At one point Larry leaps over an outdoor rail to escape the cops, and apparently Sal Mineo had to do that for real to avoid the oncoming traffic that threatened to do him in. Ultimately the cops shoot him down in the street and leave him to die. Who Killed Teddy Bear, whose title comes from an incident in a pre-credits prologue in which Edie Sherman falls down a flight of stairs and tears open her teddy bear in the process (remember that she’s 19 but acts well below her age), is actually a quite good thriller. Joseph Cates turns in a well-oiled bit of suspense direction, and the script is believable even though the writers were obviously constructing it for the maximum level of sexual shock value you could get into a 1965 American movie. Eddie Muller’s intro criticized Sal Mineo’s performance as too imitative of Marlon Brando (on whom Mineo, naturally, had a crush), but for me that’s one of the strengths of this movie. Watching scrawny little Sal Mineo trying to assume the mannerisms and project the brute strength of the larger, more butch Brando is one of the delights of this film. There’s even a scene in which Larry is working out at a public gym and there’s a shot of the weight machine’s piston going up and down in an obvious phallic symbol. Though Who Killed Teddy Bear is one of those movies that seems patched together from bits and pieces of other films – the vengeance motive of the cop is straight out of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and Elaine Stritch’s Lesbian pass at Our Heroine seems to come from Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Walk on the Wild Side three years earlier – overall Who Killed Teddy Bear is a quite remarkable movie and an especially good example of the exploitation genre that almost never produced anything of lasting worth and value; this time it did!