The Honeymoon Killers

Reporting on the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy, 1970, Dan Georgakas proclaimed: 

The Pesaro films tended to fall into two easy categories, the typical avant film stressing technique and the hard-core political film stressing ideology. The inclusion of THE HONEYMOON KILLERS in mid-festival seemed someone’s idea of a joke, but debate on the film brought out the two tendencies of the festival quite sharply. The avant people read their private fantasies into the grade-B thriller about a fat woman named Martha and a gigilo (sic) who murder several women in the course of trying to fleece them of their life savings. Marguerite Duras thought THE HONEYMOON KILLERS was ‘one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever seen.’ A Romanian said that as the murders mounted, the obese Martha became more and more desirable to him. An Italian Leftist stated that Martha was the expression of the proletariat, her lover, the lumpen, and the women they murder, the ruling class. After more exchanges of this sort, the director of the film blew everyone’s mind by saying they were all fools, explaining that his only ideological motive was to tell the story accurately and the main reason the film had been produced was to make money.¹ 

This lengthy preamble is cited here to show the reactions to The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970) at the time, serving as both a sociopolitical time capsule and a witty riposte by a journalist and a filmmaker to the highfalutin interpretations of the film. Tom Milne’s contemporary review had some positive things to say, but his hesitancy in ascribing too much depth to proceedings echoes Georgakas’ despatch from the Pesaro frontlines: 

One is so accustomed to films in which the ugly ducklings turn out to be gorgeous swans through the simple expedient of removing their glasses or climbing into a svelte evening gown, that it is all too easy to over-praise The Honeymoon Killers simply because the heroine really is a 200-pounder, the hero toying with his collection of wigs really does look like a sadly ageing gigolo, and the whole film has that look of bleak, shabby authenticity which seems to be exclusive to black-and-white location photography. Subtract these undeniable advantages, and one begins to worry about some cheap psychology […] and a certain schematism in the way the script deals with the relationships between Ray and his victims.² 

Milne’s review noted that The Honeymoon Killers was based on the “Lonelyheart Murders” committed by Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) and Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco). The dramatisation of their life and crimes is a tale of twisted co-dependency, of lovers living on the fringes of society (the countryside, the open road) and within communities (city apartments, suburban homes). Nick Pinkerton explains that director Leonard Kastle based his screenplay on the couple’s murderous spree between 1947 and 1949, with their victims enticed by the type of lonely-hearts ads that united the two killers.³ It was an American film “…completely off in the margins,” as François Truffaut noted admiringly,⁴ and it still stands apart from other films of its type to this day. As Milne’s review suggests, the two leads from The Honeymoon Killers do not have a conventional movie star look, which is also mentioned by Pinkerton when comparing the couple to the film star partners in crime of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967): “In contrast to Penn’s romantic, impossibly good-looking doomed bandits, Kastle wanted to make the lovers-on-the-lam of The Honeymoon Killers as earthbound and unglamorous as their real-life counterparts.”⁵ 

The Honeymoon Killers arrived at a major juncture in cinematic history, emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of suitably “earthbound and unglamorous” movies. This was a period of rapidly changing times and evolving tastes – politically and socially – of audiences and filmmakers, and movies featuring couples in crime formed a significant part of the landscape in this new era of American cinema. In 1974, film scholar Marsha Kinder identified three works that she termed “outlaw couple” films: Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974), and Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974), noting that: “…these films look back […] to movies like You Only Live Once ([Fritz Lang,] 1937), They Live by Night ([Nicholas Ray,] 1949), Breathless ([Jean-Luc Godard,] 1959), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and The Honeymoon Killers (1969), which deal with the way ordinary people confront frustration and impotence.”.⁶ 

Kinder saw this trend as generational recycling of cultural anxieties, showing how the then-present looked to the past to examine then-current events: “Badlands and Thieves [Like Us] explore the present by considering its connection with earlier periods when people felt similarly powerless – most notably, during the thirties depression and the dormant fifties.”⁷ Despite these newer films tapping into then contemporary concerns, Kinder viewed this cycle of “outlaw couple” films as determinedly nostalgic: 

Despite the range of individuality and experimentation in Badlands, [The] Sugarland [Express], and Thieves [Like Us,], these movies begin to form a definable genre that is highly self-reflexive and nostalgic (sic). They allude to ‘real history,’ to past films, and to past films about ‘real history.’ The pattern is hopelessly circular: the past portends the present, and the present repeats the past; films reflect cultural norms, and cultural norms are shaped by films.⁸ 

While there is a realism in the approach of Badlands, The Sugarland Express, Thieves Like Us, and Bonnie and Clyde, most notably in the latter with its unflinching violence, those films have a somewhat romantic patina. In contrast, The Honeymoon Killers offers mainly decadence, emptiness, and squalor, with no love of time, place, or character. In Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, for instance, we are attracted to the picturesque landscapes of the past and seduced by the movie star leads. In contrast, we are plunged into the monochrome world of The Honeymoon Killers, almost as if we are eavesdropping on people’s lives or viewing them via the lens of an unseen film documentarian, the image and sound feeling rough and ready, which Gary Giddins compares to the approach of Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Salesman (1969) and Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).⁹ 

The look employed by the filmmakers adds to the grimy, dead-end reality of their situation rather than conjuring the romantic pastures surrounding Bonnie and Clyde, despite the poverty of that earlier pair. Helen DeMichiel expands upon this point: 

The film has a bare light bulb look. THE HONEYMOON KILERS (sic) denies any studied filmic elegance, which would work against its decidedly unsentimental stance. The characters emerge from a background environment which seems like a tired and musty, ‘classic,’ fifties motel room-like atmosphere. It connotes a general U.S. transience, and it always has an integral relation to the character’s psychological make-up. The action moves through doorways into kitchens with chipped formica (sic) tables, living rooms with plastic couches, and bedrooms smelling of stale sachets.¹⁰

Kastle’s film also exists outside the ‘lovers-on-the-run’ genre, as Giddins explains: “The Honeymoon Killers is frequently placed in a lineage of films about criminal couples, from the romanticized They Live by Night (1948) to the overwrought Natural Born Killers ([Oliver Stone,] 1994). But it has closer ties to films about a particular finicky breed of serial killers who prey upon lonely women.” Giddins cites Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin, 1947) and Landru (Bluebeard, Claude Chabrol, 1963) as antecedents to The Honeymoon Killers in this regard.¹¹ Kenneth Turan traces the lineage of The Honeymoon Killers to early Hollywood history and another genre: for him, the film “…comes out of the past in more ways than one […] hark[ing] back to several decades earlier, to the golden age of the B-picture and the moody fatalism of film noir.”¹² 

Historically, then, The Honeymoon Killers spans several decades of the 20th century: it is based on true crimes committed by a killer couple in the 1940s and ends on their shared fate in the early 1950s, and was produced at the end of the 1960s and released at the start of the 1970s, when the era of peace and love was over, shockingly symbolised in Hollywood itself by the murders of Sharon Tate and others at the hands of some members of the Manson Family. While films featuring “criminal couples” are nothing new in cinema, the way Beck and Fernandez were depicted in The Honeymoon Killers is. The world in which they move, the freedom their money should buy, fails to satiate them. As Pinkerton observes: 

The black-and-white images by DP Oliver Wood have the feel of tabloid newsprint, and the film almost looks as though it would smudge to the touch. Like the peripatetic, insatiable Fernandez and Beck, The Honeymoon Killers finds little to admire in the prosperous postwar American scene.¹³

The Honeymoon Killers is a film about a lawless couple that is more crime scene reportage than swooning romance. There is love at the heart of the film, but the relationship is curdled; the couple are shown to be prisoners of a delusion as much as the women they con. These are people looking for a perfect relationship and happy life, who are desperately seeking love, trapped in unfulfilling lives and places. The stark, almost matter-of-fact depiction of the violence also shatters this fantasy, making it all the more shocking.

Looking beyond the mid-1970s “outlaw couple” period covered by Kinder, the criminal coupling of carnage and carnality continued in Hollywood movies. Whatever the merits of films like Natural Born Killers or Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019), though, their narratives stack the deck in favour of their leading duos by making most of the people with whom they interact – and the world around them – comfortably objectionable to audiences. If organisations like law enforcement and the media – and the world they inhabit – are unambiguously portrayed as corrupt, audiences can watch the human symbols of those institutions be killed by the glamourous criminal couple without feeling guilty about the grim fates of those people that cross paths with them. 

The duos of Natural Born Killers and Queen & Slim are shown to have no choice but to strike back – with love conquering all – rather than being depicted as reprehensible because of their behaviour. Not so in The Honeymoon Killers, where Beck and Fernandez – and the audience – are not let off the hook. The film does not offer easy answers to why the couple act the way they do or use them as surrogates to make big statements about society or to elevate a social issue. The killers are simply shown as what they are. Kim Newman sums up this approach to character, calling The Honeymoon Killers: “A rare film in which genuine romantic love does not excuse the central couple’s amoral behaviour […] it deglamorises thrill-killing for petty profit after decades of movies that have made outlawry glamorous.”¹⁴ 

The Honeymoon Killers (1969 United States 107 mins)

Prod Co: Roxanne Prod: Paul Asselin, Warren Steibel Dir: Leonard Kastle Scr: Leonard Kastle Phot: Oliver Wood Ed: Richard Brophy, Stan Warnow Mus: Selections from Gustav Mahler

Cast: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby, Doris Roberts, Kip McArdle 

Endnotes