You know the plot—the one in which a tough, smart, cynical man is duped, and perhaps undone, by a beautiful, deceitful, grasping woman—it’s a staple of black-and-white films of the 1940s, pictures that came to be classified as film noir. Mary Astor feigned helplessness to manipulate detective Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner got, respectively, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944) and John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), to assist them in doing away with their husbands. Jane Greer wheedled Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947), and Yvonne De Carlo was bad news for Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross (1949). And what about evil psychologist Helen Walker and her destruction of Tyrone Power in the great Nightmare Alley (1947)? In most of these cases, and countless others, the men—dazzled by beauty, sexual availability, and ego-bolstering tests of courage—are no matches for a femme fatale’s machinations, and they are oblivious to their own susceptibility. In 1968, a little movie named Pretty Poison took this decades-old formula and gave it a bracing spin. The film’s male character isn’t a typically hard-edged realist, but, rather, an emotionally immature arsonist with an overripe imagination. And in place of the expectedly glamorous, experienced woman, there’s a 17-year-old, honor-roll vixen whose ruthlessness is concealed beneath all-American, girl-next-door perfection. Pretty Poison is every bit as eye-opening and disquieting as its classic predecessors, but it ups the ante with comic overtones. Not a flat-out comedy, it’s nonetheless a startlingly funny, offbeat mix of smiles and chills. Made in color (and, therefore, not truly noir), Pretty Poison is played straight, and its twisted story emerges from the most commonplace surroundings.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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