With his free love, free drugs, and environmentalism (he
schemes to expose toxic dumping at the chemical company where he works), Dennis
is a sort of countercultural stand in— a more unhinged Benjamin Braddock. However,
it’s hard to place where we viewers are supposed to stand on Dennis. Are we
supposed to find his whacky spy fantasies charming? It’s tough to watch an
older man ply a high-school girl with drugs and fantasies and find it anything
less than distasteful, but Pretty Poison
performs a clever turn of the tables when Dennis’s lies lead Sue Ann to perform
an unexpected act that puts her in the driver’s seat and reveals some serious
twists in her own psyche.
Pretty Poison is a
noir at heart with Perkins ultimately playing the dupe and Weld playing the
femme fatale, but it is subtle humor that fuels the picture—no surprise
considering that one of the era’s funniest writers, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., of
TV’s Batman, adapted Stephen Gellar’s
novel She Let Him Continue for the
screen. Production values are strictly small-screen and Noel Black’s direction
is often a bit flat, though it does take off whenever something starts blowing
up on screen to underscore Dennis’s horniness or mental unspooling, and Semple’s
smart script and the effortlessly magnetic presences of Perkins and Weld make Pretty Poison an effective minor cult
classic.
Pretty Poison
comes to blu-ray from Twilight Time, and the picture is heavy with grain and a touch
soft but totally clean. Extras include a text-only scene that appeared in the
script but not in the film and a three-minute commentary from Black about the
scene. It is available to purchase from Twilight Time here.
