Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965) is one of those films that refuses to sit neatly within a single category. Part noir, part exploitation, part art-film experiment, it mixes high-style melodrama in the manner of Sirk with Hitchcockian unease, while foreshadowing the urban paranoia of Taxi Driver. At just under two hours, it’s a smutty, disjointed, but undeniably fascinating window into 1960s New York, filmed on location in Times Square and 42nd Street back when both still throbbed with seediness. Its black-and-white photography is as moody as it is haunting, a visual diary of a city on the cusp of cultural breakdown.
Though dismissed on release and banned outright by the British Board of Film Classification (with even the Catholic Church calling for a boycott), the film has grown into a cult artefact. Today, restored in 4K and revisited in repertory cinemas, it demands attention not just as a curious thriller, but as a queer-coded time capsule.
Performances and Characters
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- CIRCA 1965: Sal Mineo holds binoculars in a scene in the movie “Who Killed Teddy Bear” circa 1965. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The ‘Who Killed Teddy Bear?’ cast is startling in its range.
Sal Mineo delivers one of his boldest roles as Lawrence Sherman, a sweet-faced waiter whose sexual confusion curdles into obsession and stalking. Mineo allows the camera to linger on his body with startling intimacy — a voyeuristic fixation that plays between tenderness and menace. His self-touching scenes, implied masturbation, and desperate vulnerability are almost unbearably raw. For an actor seeking to escape typecasting, it was a daring gamble, and his “bizarre intensity” remains mesmerising.
Juliet Prowse, in a rare dramatic outing, plays Norah Dain, the hostess stalked by Lawrence. The camera is less generous with her than with Mineo, yet there are moments where her angular beauty sharpens the film’s emotional edge.
Elaine Stritch is unforgettable as Marian Freeman, the nightclub manager and unapologetically lesbian protector of Norah. In lesser hands, this role might have been reduced to caricature, but Stritch injects it with her trademark bite and surprising vulnerability. Her “acid tongue” hides a deeply humane streak — a queer performance handled with intelligence at a time when such depictions were almost always poisonous.
Margot Bennett brings startling feral energy as Edie Sherman, Lawrence’s brain-damaged sister, a role that could have slipped into exploitation but instead feels frighteningly grounded in raw emotion.
A Queer Time Capsule
For LGBTQ audiences, Who Killed Teddy Bear? resonates in ways its original audience may not have been prepared for. Elaine Stritch’s openly predatory but deeply human Marian is one of the era’s rare lesbian portrayals, though her brutal treatment within the narrative places the film squarely in the lineage of “smear the queer” cinema.
Yet, there’s also Sal Mineo — by then already a queer cult icon — whose body the camera eroticises with unusual frankness. The sight of Mineo in jockey shorts (reportedly the first time a man wore them on screen in American cinema) is more than just scandal: it’s cinema pushing up against censorship, queerness refusing to stay hidden.
The film’s refusal to settle into a clear genre or moral stance makes it, paradoxically, more queer. Its “smut-tastic” mix of voyeurism, incest, pornography, and lesbianism anticipates the frankness of the late ’60s and suggests a film made with queer eyes, or at least alert to a gay urban audience that was beginning to seek itself on screen.
Conclusion
Who Killed Teddy Bear? is messy, dark, and often incoherent — but also remarkable. As both an exploitation thriller and an unintentional queer artefact, it captures a seedy New York that no longer exists while charting the shifting boundaries of what could be shown, implied, or desired on screen. For LGBTQ viewers, it offers both caution and fascination: a film that punished its queerness, yet couldn’t resist showing it in all its uneasy allure.
Writers
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