Madness For Two In Movies X 13

            As Valentine’s Day approaches a million lists of the “most romantic films” appear online. Don’t be conned. An Affair To Remember stinks. And many medical professionals agree that love is a psychological disorder anyway. Why do you think it’s called “love sick”? I prefer to revisit films of couples in movies who suffer “folie a deux” or “madness for two.”  This I understand. Here is my baker’s dozen favorite deranged duos.

            Bart & Annie (Gun Crazy) “Two people dead, just so we can live without working!” complains gun-nut Bart (John Dall), who meets his match when he falls for a sexy carnival sharp-shooter Annie (Peggy Cummins) in this film noir gem. Superbly directed (on a dime budget) by Joseph H. Lewis, this just gets better every time you see it. Annie goads Bart to rob banks, unfazed by the trail of bodies they leave behind them. “Bart, I’ve been kicked around all my life, and from now on, I’m gonna start kicking back!” she states in this amazing film. Cummins is so feral, sexy and scary it’s a tragedy she was not given the roles to show off her monumental talent in later films.

            Frank & Cora (The Postman Always Rings Twice). The minute that tube of lipstick rolls across the floor of a diner to the feet of drifter Frank (John Garfield) and he looks up to see Cora (Lana Turner), a vision in white, he’s sunk. She eventually gets him to help bump off her kindly husband (Cecil Kellaway), and they face the deadly and ironic consequences in this sensational adaptation of James M. Cain’s sardonic novel. The remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange is tolerable thanks to Lange’s fathomless sensuality.

            Walter & Phyllis  (Double Indemnity). Fred MacMurray was originally averse to play such a louse as insurance representative Walter Neff, who gets seduced by the blonde vixen Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to bump off her husband and score on the insurance in this peerless Billy Wilder thriller. Even Stanwyck was nervous playing such a malevolent ma’am but Wilder said to her, “Are you a mouse or an actress?” With a screenplay by Raymond Chandler (who battled Wilder during the screenplay process but came up with solutions that original book author James M. Cain wished he had used in his novel). 

            Ray & Martha (The Honeymoon Killers) Shirley Stoler is beyond brilliant as nasty nurse Martha Beck who answers a lonely-hearts ad and hooks up with sleazy Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) who is adept at fleecing women out of cash. Martha gets her hooks into Ray and convinces him to marry the “marks” for their inheritance. Unfortunately, Martha keeps getting unreasonably jealous and killing off the women. Leonard Kastle’s unforgettable dark-humored film has finally attained the fame it always deserved. And Stoler and Lo Bianco are just incredible.

Clyde & Bonnie (Bonnie And Clyde) “Some day they’ll go down together, they’ll bury them side by side. To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief, but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde,” wrote the real Bonnie Parker in her poem “The Trail’s End,” romanticizing her role as part of the notorious bank-robbing team that roamed the country in the 1930s. In Arthur Penn’s wildly influential film, Warren Beatty plays Clyde Barrow, who hooks up with restless Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) during the depression. She is immediately smitten and joins up with his criminal enterprises robbing gas stations and banks. They became folk legends until their violent end when they were gunned down by a police posse in Louisiana in 1934- which was graphically filmed by Penn and (thankfully) ushered in a wave of on-screen film violence. The movie was originally ignored but thanks to critical re-evaluation it eventually became a box office phenomenon. 

Mickey & Mallory (Natural Born Killers). Oliver Stone’s electric Kool-Aid acid test was a real blast of kinetic energy. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are fabulous as the cold-blooded killer couple Mickey & Mallory, whose murderous exploits causes fan clubs and imitators. The whole cult-killer satire is way over the top, but it’s made with wild psychedelic editing, great music and even flashes of the giant rabbits from Night Of The Lepus thrown in. Many critics groused about the graphic violence but the movie was a big box office hit.

Juliet & Pauline (Heavenly Creatures) In the 1950s in Christchurch, New Zealand, the trial of two teenage girls (Kate Winslet & Melanie Lynskey) accused of committing an inexplicably savage murder rocked the country. Director Peter Jackson takes on this bizarre story with sardonic glee focusing less on the murder and instead on the girls’ “unwholesome” love for one another and the secret fantasy world that fueled their madness. The dialogue is lifted from the actual diary of one of the girls. The movie is like a macabre dance- it sweeps and spins and glides across the screen.

James & Catherine (Crash). James (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) are sexually unsatisfied and in a rut. Then James is involved in a car accident that kills the male passenger. But when he sees the driver’s (Holly Hunter) breast when she removes the seat belt it awakens in him a whole erotic world involving auto crashes. He meets a fellow freak (Elias Koteas) who introduces him to other sick enthusiasts. Eventually James and Catherine are purposely smashing their cars and making love amid the wreckage in David Cronenberg’s icely perverse and bleakly erotic adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel of twisted metal and aroused flesh. 

Brandon & Phillip (Rope). Way before the movie 1917, Alfred Hitchcock conceived a movie to be made up of (what appeared to be) one continuous take. Vaguely based on real-life thrill killers Leopold & Loeb, John Dall and Farley Granger play two sophisticated boyfriends who murder a male friend to prove some crackpot intellectual exercise and then have the audacity to throw a dinner party with the body concealed in a trunk in the middle of the room. They specifically invite their old teacher (Jimmy Stewart), who bristles at their arrogant, Nietzschean philosophy. Everyone complains the movie is theatrical and talky, but I violently disagree. Just the shifts in light from the window of their penthouse is sheer magic to me.

Sweeney & Nellie (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street). In Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s diabolical and brilliant 1979 musical, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) returns to London in 1846 with revenge on his mind. He takes his old tonsorial parlor back from landlady Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), waiting to dispatch his enemies with his trusty straight razor. But Mrs. Lovett comes up with the enterprising idea of using the bodies for her meat pie business which becomes a runaway smash. Depp sings with a David Bowie-like affectation, but is fine, and Helena Bonham Carter attacks the role with fiendish relish. Anyone who ever saw the musical miss the choruses (not to mention George Hearn and Angela Lansbury), but there’s a lot of bloodthirsty fun to be had in this film adaptation also.

Luke & Jon (The Living End) A fiercely romantic, blackly comic and exhilarating film directed by Gregg Araki about a young writer- Jon (Craig Gilmore) who in one day finds out he is HIV+, picks up a trigger-happy, frighteningly cute, likewise-infected drifter- Luke (Mike Dytri) and ends up on the run with him from the law. “You’ll never have anybody who cares about you as I do,” says Luke, while holding a gun to Jon’s head. Now, that’s romantic! The movie may have been called a gay Thelma & Louise, but it’s more Godardian in spirit. Very funny at times, but also angry, defiant and sexy too. 

Dennis & Sue Ann (Pretty Poison). Anthony Perkins is quirky perfection as Dennis Pitt, recently released from a mental institution with a new job at a chemical plant, who meets up with pretty, dangerous teen- Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld). He tells her all kinds of crackpot stories about being a secret agent and she jumps right in and goes along with his paranoid fantasies, secretly using him as a tool to murderously get rid of her controlling mom (Beverly Garland). This unforgettable indie by director Noel Black was criminally ignored by audiences at the time, despite raves from critics like Pauline Kael. To watch Tuesday Weld in this is to be bewitched by her carnal craziness.

White Girl & Cyclona (Freeway 2: Confessions Of A Trick Baby). A warped modern version of Hansel & Gretel with Natasha Lyonne as White Girl, a bulimic bad girl, who escapes from a juvenile prison with a 16-year-old lesbian killer Cyclona (Maria Celedonio) and heads to Mexico for safe haven with Sister Gomez (Vincent Gallo!), who is really a child pornographer and cannibal. Director Matthew Bright is such an unheralded, subversively political director. His early film Freeway, starring Reese Witherspoon, is a deranged masterpiece. 

The toxic relationships in these films can be summed up the same way Robert Mitchum deals with the excuses his conniving girlfriend (Jane Greer) hands him in the great film noir Out Of The Past: “Baby, I don’t care…”