Pretty Poison - film review

I find reading other blogs very enjoyable, and above all I like discovering new stuff - unfamiliar books, films, and trivia in particular - from them. I'd never heard of the 1968 film Pretty Poison, until I read an enthusiastic review on one of my favourite sites, John Norris's Pretty Sinister Books. I suggest reading John's review after watching the film, if you can, because his analysis covers the later part of the film as well as the set-up.

That set-up is fascinating. Anthony Perkins plays Dennis Pitt, a youthful arsonist just released from the institution where he has been a patient for some years,since killing an aunt in a fire he started. Dennis becomes entranced by Sue Anne, a stunning girl who turns out to be only 17, and appears to be the picture of innocence. Dennis is a fantasist, and he tells Sue Anne that he is an agent for the CIA. She appears to fall under his spell...

I love stories about fantasists -examples that spring to mind include several of Ruth Rendell's finest novels, and that wonderful novel and film Billy Liar - and this is why I created Guy, the protagonist of The Arsenic Labyrinth. What is especially interesting about Pretty Poison is the dynamic of the relationship between Dennis and Sue Anne. It doesn't develop in the way you might expect.

Sue Anne is played by Tuesday Weld. I've always rather assumed that she was really someone who was famous for being famous (and for being, for a short time, the wife of Dudley Moore) and I didn't realise what a charismatic performer she is. She is terrific in Pretty Poison, and although the film falters slightly towards the end, overall it's quirky and highly entertaining. Unsuccessful on its original release, it's become something of a cult classic, and I'm not surprised.

Keith Waterhouse

I’m sorry that Keith Waterhouse has died. He was a notable journalist, and achieved success as a playwright, television writer and film screenplay writer. But for me, his finest work was Billy Liar, a novel I read when I was about the same age as Billy, and which I thought was absolutely wonderful. I thought I’d never read anything that seemed to have so much wit combined with poignancy. The book was filmed with Julie Christie, as well as Tom Courtenay, and as I was a great Julie Christie fan, that served to cement in my mind the idea that Billy Liar was a masterpiece.

I enjoyed Waterhouse’s other early novels, There is a Happy Land and Jubb, but after a brilliant start, Office Life rather disappointed me. So did his belated sequel to Billy Liar. Billy Liar on the Moon isn’t a bad book by any means, but somehow it lacks the zest of the early novel, and my feeling was that Waterhouse ran out of steam as a novelist after a brilliant start. In his later years at least he seemed more at home with the sprint of the regular newspaper column than with the marathon effort of a novel.

My mum loved his memoir, City Lights, especially because it turned out that he’d attended a school in Yorkshire where she’d taught. Whether she actually taught him, she couldn’t recall, but if she did, it might explain his fanatical enthusiasm for accurate punctuation. She wrote to him some years ago, but no answer came.

Keith Waterhouse didn’t get into crime writing, and I don’t’ know whether he was a big fan of the genre. But he did revive for television in the 80s Charters and Caldecott, those cricket-loving characters who first appeared in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The pair were, as I recall, frustrated in their efforts to watch a Test Match at Old Trafford by a complete wash-out. Just like me, earlier this week, when the 20Twenty match in Manchester was abandoned without a ball bowled.