WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR?

Never before have I seen such sleaze except the time time when a friend emerged from a darkroom on holiday with wet knees and cum dribbling down his shirt.

Last night I rewatched Who Killed Teddy Bear? This sixties sleazefest stars gay star of yesteryear Sal Mineo. He starred alongside James Dean and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without A Cause and also was in Giant with James Dean.

The film starts with some way out dancing in a tiny nightclub that looks similar to the set Aaron Spelling used for La Mirage in Dynasty except about half the size and no shoulderpads present. Norah played by dancer Juliet Prowse is the dj of this dingy back bar. Marion the dyke is the manager who has her eye on Norah and rules the club with a gravel voice and mute bouncers. Norah is getting dirty phone calls with a guy who we see is always rubbing his body and wearing miniscule briefs.

Sal Mineo appears as the bus boy Lawrence who has a mentally ill sister who fell down the stairs when younger and dropped her teddy bear so now has the mental age of a young child although she's grown up. Norah gets more and more harrassed by these phone calls and a vice cop with a penchant for porn is assigned to find out who's upsetting poor Norah with possibly the worst haircut ever seen on film. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find out who has been a peeping tom on Norah and in fact is revealed fairly early on. Dykey Marion tries to seduce Norah but she ends up dead. Why is it that the one who discovers the truth first always dies? The same happened to the best friend in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle! Anyway Lawrence gets a bit creepy and follows Norah to the swimming pool but has a major work out first of all so the film also has a five minute sequence of Sal Mineo wearing the tightest of trunks sweating it out so we can see what religion he isn't. It's a glorious view to be fair and completely appropriate as the viewer definitely feels that they're peeping toms themselves, it's that seedy.

Anyway, the truth is discovered and a crap chase ensues with hallucinations and snow being involved rather than the actual chase through Times Square. It's really odd to see Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse wander about the streets of New York when it was very dangerous and Times Square was still full of sex shops and dancing girl clubs. It shows how much the area has cleaned up although I think I may have preferred to have given New York a bash in the 60s aswell - especially if Sal Mineo was working out in dirty gyms!

A sidebar to all of this is Sal Mineo himself - as an out gay actor, he suffered from the curse of Rebel Without A Cause as he was murdered. James Dean died in a car crash and in 1976 whilst walking home in West Hollywood, Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in an attempted mugging. Four years later, Natalie Wood from Rebel Without A Cause would be found drowned. Sal Mineo's murder was a great mystery as originally it was thought he died because of a hate crime against him being gay but it turns out he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I visited LA in 2000 and on a tour, the guide showed us various places and one of them was the area where Sal Mineo was murdered. Gruesome? Yes. I felt dirrrty but not half as dirrrty as when I watched Who Killed Teddy Bear? last night - a triumph and I urge as many people as possible to watch this oft forgotten Grand Guignol classic!