The Honeymoon Killers

TCM had a spotlight on True Crime back in January, which gave me the chance to record a movie I hadn't seen before The Honeymoon Killers. Once again, I recently sat down to watch it so that I could do a review of it here.

Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco play Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez respectively, althoug we don't see Ray for a while. The movie starts off with Martha, who is a supervising nurse at a hospital in Mobile, AL. She lives with her mother who is going senile, and her friend Bunny (a young Doris Roberts). Martha is overweight, looking reminiscent of Kathy Bates' Annie Wilkes in Misery, and rather bitter about her lot in life. Worse is that when she gets the mail, she has a letter from some "lonelyhearts" organization in Los Angeles. Back in the day (in real life, the events portrayed took place in the late 1940s, but the movie looks just as much as though it could have been set in the 1960s), there were apparently places you could write to that would do matchmaking services with other similarly lonely people all over America. Bunny signed Martha up for such a service, and Martha doesn't like that.

Anyhow, one of the people who writes to Martha is Raymond, who lives up in New York City. Eventually he's willing to come down to Mobile to meet Martha and her family, but having a friend and mom living with Martha isn't exactly what Ray wants. That's because Ray is simply looking to get money out of Martha. He's been using the lonelyhearts service as a way to wheedle money out of lonely ladies, who won't report it and never mind that he uses false names. Martha responds by trying to get Ray to let her come to New York to see him, even feigning a suicide attempt.

Once in New York, Martha finds out the truth about Raymond, and frankly, she's OK with it, at least as long as she's able to share in the wealth that he's bilking out of other women. She poses as his sister, which is something that actually makes the potential victims more willing to trust the two of them. However, Martha is also insanely jealous, wanting Ray to have only her as a real lover.

The two of them bilk numerous women, until they get to Albany and con Janet Fay. Ray gets her to agree to marry him, come live with the two of them on Long Island, and even sign checks over to Ray. But when Janet starts to get suspicious, Martha and Ray figure the only way they can deal with her is to kill her. They then head off to Michigan to meet another woman, which results in two more murders, but by this time Martha's jealousy is really beginning to get the better of her.

The Honeymoon Killers is one of those ultra-low budget movies that surprisingly works because of the low budget. It was made in black and white well after mainstream Hollywood had switched exclusively to color. None of the actors were big at the time the movie was made, mostly being stage actors, although Doris Roberts especially and to a lesser extent Tony LoBianco would go on to bigger things. The dialogue isn't very good, and the acting is also surprisingly poor, although that may in part be due to the low number of takes. But in the case of The Honeymoon Killers, all of this works because it just makes the events seem even more lurid. Martha and Ray are not nice people, and the director didn't want us to sympathize with them. In the end, the director succeeds in that regard.

If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll find that there are quite a few differences between the portrayal hear and the real events, most notably Martha's past family. But regardless of whether The Honeymoon Killers is any more or less true-to-life than other Hollywood biopics and "true" stories, it's still an entertaining little movie.